Kid Icarus aka Hikari Shinwa: Palutena no Kagami Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System First Released December 19, 1986
Designed by Toru Osawa Directed by Satoru Okada Developed by Nintendo
Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
This grim reaper is just so not cool. Sure, this is much better than being Dracula’s flunky, but nowhere near as righteous as teaming up with a pair of time traveling teenagers who are in the afterlife because they were murdered by evil robotic clones of themselves sent from the future by a gym teacher angry that the future is boring.
I’ve been a little too lovey-dovey with Nintendo this month, so how about a game that doesn’t get a YES!? Actually, Kid Icarus is a heartbreaker. The game is no good on its own, but it could have been an excellent first step. There’s something here that’s highly compelling that just doesn’t overcome some terrible design choices and really sloppy play control. I don’t really like the original Metroid either, but it’s in the same boat as Kid Icarus in that both games laid a foundation for something much, much better. But Metroid did get more chances to build upon the first game, and already fun games like Super Mario Bros. and Legend of Zelda got to grow out the base formula with the sequels that improved upon the core game design and especially the play control mechanics. Within just a few sequels, Nintendo had literally perfect jumping physics for Mario, combat mechanics for Zelda, and level design for Metroid. And then there’s Kid Icarus. The franchise that didn’t catch the bouquet so it gave up and became a nun. It’s not fair, really. It had just as much potential as any of their other tentpole IPs.
If you play Kid Icarus, have a second controller ready. In the American/Europe builds, pressing A+B on the second controller haggles with the shopkeepers, who may lower their prices or dramatically increase them. In the FDS version, you have to just blow into the microphone to trigger it. I’m pretty sure no FDS games actually require you to actually speak words to make the mic work. It’s like how I beat the mic games in WarioWare Touched by scratching the microphone. Also, you don’t want to ever max-out your money because you will not get enough credit for collecting money, thus failing to impress the Gods, thus not allowing you to get all four arrow strength upgrades, thus gating you out of the best ending.
Kid Icarus is among the jankiest Nintendo-developed games ever made. It’s sloppy in so many aspects that it’s tough to know where to begin. Play control is the obvious one. I should have saved “skid to my doom my darling” for this game because my most common method of dying was slipping off platforms. But, that could have been a non-factor if the levels were designed for these physics, and they clearly aren’t. Kid Icarus is riddled with things like slip-slide ice platforms, ultra-slow moving platforms, and single-block platforms. Each presents a problem on its own just based on how rough the platforming physics are, before you even take into account that you often have to perform combative maneuvers while navigating all this crap.
Son of a bitch! See, those evil mouths fly around in erratic patterns that make them hard to shoot, and then you have this spongy snowman thing that shoots projectiles at you. It seems like you can duck those projectiles, but if you duck on certain platforms, you almost instantly fall through them. That’s what I found out here, and I burned through a valuable feather.
And then there’s the ultra-jarring tonal shifts. Despite only having thirteen levels, Kid Icarus features a whopping four different styles of level design. The most famous of these is the vertical levels, which represent six of the thirteen stages, and they’re fairly notorious because, as you climb, you also create a bottomless pit, logic be damned. If a platform that had been right at the bottom of the screen is barely scrolled off it, you die if you fall where it had just been. The punishment for falling should be having to make all the jumps again and the risk of losing more health from enemies or hazards. Kid Icarus has too stiff a punishment for failure to stick the landing, and that’s especially true with the rough controls and sloppy coding. Like, look at this:
I’m not ON the platform in this picture. I’m IN the platform. I didn’t do anything special to get there except somehow short the jump without shorting it. It does matter too. Many times, while firing my bow without moving the direction pad at all, I fell off platforms. It’s so inelegant in basically every way movement in a 2D game can be. When there’s nothing under you to catch you, that’s a big problem. especially since the game leans extra-heavily into nail-biting platforming segments. MAYBE if you had the accuracy of Super Mario 1’s controls, this could have worked. But Kid Icarus instead is too floaty and has too unpredictable of momentum. So when the level design is like this:
Kid Icarus is kind of fantastic, at least in terms of the big picture. Navigating the stages, which includes a wrap-around playfield, is exhilarating. The levels look great too, so the game really shines brightly as a thoughtful, original action-adventure with solid combat and a memorable cast of baddies that are satisfying to shoot. BUT, when the level design is like this:
These are moving platforms.
These are moving platforms.
Kid Icarus becomes an unbearable slog and the platforming is NEVER exciting because it controls so poorly and the physics are so inconsistent that it never feels like YOU’RE failing. It feels like the game is screwing you, and it often is. And mind you, this is just one of FOUR play-styles in this game. There’s three more. Three of the thirteen levels are traditional side-scrollers. I guess I must be weird, but I think these levels are much, much stronger than the vertical levels.
The test chambers sadly don’t have you shooting portals. Rather you have to just stay alive until the game says “okay, you’re good” and gives you one of three really fun upgrades. One puts a shield around you, one adds a flame to your arrow that spins around it, and the other gives you additional range. They’re awesome, but the catches are ridiculous. The flame requires you to have two full bars of health, the added range three bars, and the shield four bars. The other catch really sucks: you can’t use these items in the dungeons.
Oh, they’re often still not good. Well, let me clarify: they’re haphazardly designed. For example, level 2 – 2 starts out with not one, not two, NOT three, but four goddamn doors before you encounter a single enemy. You’re supposed to use two of the doors to build up XP in order to get the arrow upgrade. This is where I learned that saving money makes no sense because the Gods get pissy if you’re stingy. But there’s nothing else like this section in the entire game. It’s total amateur hour game design.
Like this here. Kid Icarus utilizes low ceilings to cut off Pit’s ability to jump over enemies, and that COULD have been used to greater effect if they hadn’t put the most basic enemy as the “risk” side of the “risk/reward” scenario. Or if they had given you a way to logic-out which path is the best path to take.
The problem with the side-scrolling levels is they contain none of the exhilarating boldness of the vertical levels. For all the problems that those stages have, it feels like they come from a place of inspiration and there was careful consideration for enemy placement and how it relates to the jumps. I really don’t get that vibe from the side-scrolling stages at all. They certainly make fewer mistakes, nonsensical room placement aside. That’s why I think they’re stronger overall, but they also feel like they’re going through the motions. Hell, large stretches of the stages (like the aforementioned nonsense doors) feel like placeholders that got left in the final design. Don’t rule out that’s what really happened. If you don’t already know, you’ll soon find out why.
Yeah, yeah, I used a guide. The treasure rooms (pictured here) have a sequence to them where you can win every time. What I didn’t know is that the Gods frown upon breaking pots in the treasure rooms. So I didn’t get the final arrow upgrade and thus I didn’t get the best ending.
And then there’s the grand finale of Kid Icarus, where all the janky but memorable platforming action is dumped in favor of one of the worst shmups I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve been playing a whole lot of shmups in 2025. Hoo boy, what a dumpster fire Kid Icarus is at the end. In it, you have to shoot bland targets like falling tiles and an enemy that splits into three over and over and over until you reach a certain benchmark for “doing things.” After the game is satisfied you’re not on cruise control, it’ll let you fight Medusa, which has a safe zone so big that you could build a nursery in it. The level getting there is what drives a stake through Kid Icarus’ heart because suddenly the act of moving is hard. The controls are heavy and unresponsive for the finale, and even if that wasn’t the case, the last level would be a disaster anyway because this style of game is not at all compatible with all the gameplay that came before it. It’s one of the worst final levels and final bosses in any Nintendo game.
How did Kid Icarus turn out so janky when games like Mario, Zelda, and even Metroid, at the very least, control well? Actually, Metroid is kind of to blame, but really it was just bad corporate decisions. Metroid was considered a very high prospect game, so Nintendo devoted all their resources to it while one guy, the debuting Toru Osawa (who went on to direct games like Mario Clash and Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time) had to spec out Kid Icarus all by his lonesome. He had to design the world, the enemies, and most of the levels. He only got a full working team to help him once Metroid was mostly done, and then the team he got were exhausted from doing the already dead-serious space adventure so they usurped his concept of a dead-serious mythological adventure by inserting “humorous” things like the credit card and the Eggplant Wizard.
Kid Icarus was the first game released in North America with the revolutionary MMC1 chip that allowed the NES to do bigger, more detailed games. In screenshots, it looks amazing. But you actually have to play it.
But the thing is, while the staff liberally plied Kid Icarus with humor and stuff like the haggling with the shopkeepers, what nobody bothered to do was refine the actual gameplay. Then the release date was set for the end of 1986, well ahead of when the game could reasonably be completed, so everyone just hung around Nintendo HQ in the freezing cold (apparently the building wasn’t heated) to finish the game. They BARELY finished in time, and in fact, Kid Icarus was only sent to manufacturing three days before it was set to release. Consequently, it wasn’t subject to the same type of play testing and polishing that other games from this era got. Kid Icarus is Nintendo’s E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, and it speaks volumes to how talented they really were even back then that the final product is as good as it is. But what we got is a fraction of its potential. Nobody did the responsible thing and delayed it.
Yet another example of jank are these things. Touching them even once costs you the power items you won in the test chambers, which you either have to win back in another test chamber or buy back on the black market. MAYBE this could have worked if you could fight back and reclaim the item before they vanish off the screen. That would add proper risk/reward balance. Well, you can’t because they’re indestructible. What an overall terrible game. Well, except one aspect………
“Cathy, you left out one gameplay type.” I know, but I saved it for last for a reason. Because the one thing Kid Icarus unambiguously does well, it does it so well that I almost want to cry that it’s not the whole game. It’s the dungeons, which are kind of like side-view versions of Zelda’s dungeons. I mean much more than Adventures of Link’s dungeons. They’re designed like legitimate mazes, where you might think you’re plotting the right course only to find out the room you’re making your way to has no means to continue on the path you’re trying to take. Well, at least two out of three of them are like that. Because I enjoyed these levels so much, I put away the guide and it took me quite a while to beat levels 1 – 4 and 2 – 4. Then in the third dungeon (3 – 4), I found the boss so quickly that it took me a moment to process it. I literally couldn’t believe it was placed where it was, which was next to a shop.
The hammers you collect in the levels via the harps or treasure rooms can be used to smash these statues in the dungeons, which free the Centurions that were turned to stone by Medusa. You want to do this because they’ll help you fight the (relatively spongy) bosses. Too bad they have absolutely no survival instinct.
But the dungeon levels worked for me. Oh, did they ever. And that’s why it’s such a punch to the gut that there’s only three of them. I can’t help but wonder if Kid Icarus would have been better off being based entirely around this specific style. Instead of nine total vertical and side-scrolling stages and the lame-ass shmup finale, I would have preferred a game that had eight to ten dungeons. Had they gone that route, I honestly think Kid Icarus might be remembered as highly as Metroid or Zelda. I think the combat-focused maze explorer done in this style and with these themes, separate from Nintendo’s other flagship IPs, makes Kid Icarus stand tall in a crowded field. The problem is, in order to play these three amazing dungeons, you have to play nine mediocre-at-best levels that are really nothing like the dungeons.
There’s no happy ending here, because Kid Icarus is one of the few early Nintendo franchises that they never put a good faith effort into building upon that initial foundation. There’s a Game Boy sequel that I might take a look at soon (Update: the review is up) that apparently has most of the same problems, and then there’s the 3DS game which basically is nothing like the original game, changing the genre and gameplay. These days, Pit is more famous for his role in Smash Bros. than he is as the star of his own franchise. This despite the fact that Kid Icarus was big enough decades ago that it contributed a main character to the unwatchable animated series/Nintendo infomercial Captain N: The Game Master, and then was still memorable enough in the present era that it was one of the games featured in 2024’s Nintendo World Championships: NES Edition. Granted, Kid Icarus had the challenge that took me the most attempts to get an “S” rating and that outcome was largely the result of the sloppiness of the whole thing. But, nearly forty years later and Nintendo actually said “yeah, we better put Kid Icarus in this thing.” But the one thing they’ve never done is redeemed that original base concept.
Okay, so the boss graphics aren’t strong. That’s supposed to be Cerberus in the corner, but instead it looks like two dinosaurs humping. After having unforgettable sprites for the Eggplant Wizard, grim reaper, and even the basic enemies, having this thing look like someone sneezed while filling it in is such a let down.
What Nintendo should do is take all the space age technology they’ve since invented and do a true sequel to Kid Icarus. Not a third person shooter either, but a REAL sequel that builds much more heavily around the best part of the game: those dungeons. If you want, go ahead and make a few vertical levels as well. I’m fine with that because they would certainly have to apply everything that’s been learned in the fields of level design and play control. They could keep the humor or dump it like Osawa wanted. That doesn’t matter because gameplay is king. Kid Icarus is a bad video game, but not ALL bad. It just never got the redemption that Nintendo’s own game design evolution would have given it. Those amazing dungeons still feel fresh in 2025 because, really, there aren’t a lot of Nintendo-made games where their exploration feels like Kid Icarus’s three dungeons. It might not be a game worth playing in the 2020s, but the idea of Kid Icarus is an idea worth saving. Verdict: NO!
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames! Platform: Game Boy Advance First Released March 21, 2003 Directed by Hirofumi Matsuoka Developed by Nintendo Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription Listing at Mario Wiki
Behold: the one and only time I won the third stage of the nose picking game. My skills have eroded badly.
When I started Indie Gamer Chick, if you had asked me what my all-time favorite video game was, this would have been my answer. WarioWare Inc.: Mega Microgame$! for the Game Boy Advance. Not the best video game I’d ever played. That still hasn’t changed. In 2011, I would have answered with Portal, Tetris, or Shadow of the Colossus. In 2025, I’d narrow it down and say Shadow of the Colossus is the greatest achievement in game design of all-time. But that’s the BEST video game, and I think it’s okay to name one game the best and another your personal favorite. I’m talking about the game that, for whatever reason, I personally had the best time with.
I had to reach a score of 80 on Crygor’s stage (my highest of any of the levels BY FAR this entire play session) to get this, the last mini-game I needed for a full set. It just would not spit it out.
WarioWare wouldn’t even have that title today. If I was stuck on a desert island and given the option to only have WarioWare or Super Mario Odyssey, well, I’d probably say “f*ck that” and swim for it. Assuming that wasn’t an option, I’d take Mario Odyssey. Which, by the way, I take a lot of comfort from. Today is my 36th birthday (at least it was when I was typing this review, but I didn’t hit publish until after midnight the next day), and I think it would be tragic if I’d already had the best time I will ever have playing a video game when I was 14. The fact that it took fifteen years for that to be taken over by a different game is fine, because that means it could change again. Gaming probably hasn’t “peaked” for me at 36. That puts a smile on my face.
Goddamn this game is full of nightmare fuel. That’s not even the scariest potato in the game.
Now granted, people have ALWAYS been baffled by how I could love WarioWare as much as I do. And by that I mean the first game and not the franchise. For the most part, I don’t even like the WarioWare franchise. That’s the thing that really bugs everyone. I only really loved the first one. A few years ago, I enjoyed WarioWare: Get it Together just fine, but even though I spent over a week playing it when it came out, I can’t name a single micro game from it. Not one. My brain just completely bleached its existence from my head, and I didn’t even bother buying the latest game in the series. WarioWare was fun the first time, but it’s only the first one that really avoids that “trying too hard to be quirky” vibe. The others all feel like they’re trying to top this game in terms of weirdness. But, I didn’t play this because it’s weird. Oh, that got my attention, but it was the score-driven gameplay that hooked me.
As a kid, I hated this game. I fancied myself smart, but I could never properly calculate this one. Today I……… uh, well, I mean….. yeah.
The strange thing is, besides pinball, I’d never really been into high score games, but that’s all WarioWare really is. Try to complete an increasingly difficult series of bite-sized mini-games that are shot at you at an increasingly higher speed until you run out of misses. It’s such an uncomplicated game that you only use the D-Pad and one button, the A button. Everything else goes unused, and they mined this simple control scheme for 150 micro-games, though some are just the same game reskinned. There’s also tons of games that are just about mashing the A button or stopping a meter in time.
This is one of those games that, for whatever reason, was one of my weaknesses.
But, while it’s impossible to claim that all the games feel distinct, that’s not the point. It’s the random nature of “you never know what games will come in what order” and the fact that the action speeds up. Later versions of WarioWare did a much better job of tying each level’s games to a central theme, but MOST of this first game isn’t like that. Sometimes it is, like all the games in Orbulon’s stage are “intelligence-based” so they’re like IQ test type of things and have a longer time limit. The games of Jimmy the hipster are sports-themed. But, most of the mini-games could be in any character’s collection. In fact, many actually do repeat even outside the levels that feature games from every collection. But, what makes it work over future installments of WarioWare is that there’s no sense of gimmickness to it. This is gaming stripped to its purist minimalist form. In a sense, this is the closest Nintendo ever came to their old Zapper games where personality needed to carry otherwise VERY simple gameplay.
Here’s the game’s most evil potato. It’s still only the second most evil potato I’ve encountered in my life. It’s evil, but not as evil as the one that told me I should set my parents’ bed on fire.
And that’s why it succeeds. WarioWare is oozing in personality. There’s no one graphical style and seemingly anything goes, from a girl who has to suck her snot back up her nose to navigating a mosquito past bug spray to bite a baby. Actually, if not for all the Nintendo stuff, I don’t think anyone would ever guess this was a Nintendo game. Some of the graphics are hand-drawn. Some are pixelated. Some are stick figures and others are actual digital photos. It’s so completely weird and original. Like, one game looks like this:And the next might look like this:
And you have to process the change in graphics and gameplay style and react right away. But it works. The simple instructions and simple objectives make this the greatest quick-draw game ever made. Even in the days before online scores, I found myself trying to play long enough to just make it one game further than my best run on any level. It’s addictive. And it does hold up to the test of time. I don’t think any of the ones that followed would have. I didn’t even really like WarioWare Gold. I also didn’t play too many of the side-quest mini-games and I never even tried the multiplayer games in WarioWare before yesterday. I did this play session and exactly one of them was fun. It’s this one:
I was the top player. I fell off the cliff seconds later, but we don’t need to talk about that, Sasha. Oh, and show of hands: who thought the thing on the bottom half of the screen was SpongeBob SquarePants the first time they played this? (raises hand)
Chicken Race actually does use L and R so that two players can compete on a single Game Boy Advance (or Nintendo Switch in this case). Both players hold and release their respective shoulder buttons and try to get as close to the cliff as possible without falling off. I wanted to play a couple rounds and Sasha and I ended up playing it for half an hour. As a kid, I also played a ton of the paper airplane game, where you have to guide an airplane as far as you can without crashing. WarioWare offers tons of distractions, but none of them can hold a candle to the core gameplay. It’s easily Nintendo’s best arcade game since they got out of the arcade business. They should do more games like this, really. I don’t mean more WarioWare, but more simple, scoring-driven arcade style games. They’re really good at it.
My best this session was 125. As a kid, I got into the 300s a few times.
Playing WarioWare today, it’s not hard to imagine how this could have ever been my #1 favorite game ever. I played it for close to a week and the only reason I’m stopping is to write this review. Then I have to move on to other games. I never did end up breaking for 100 points on any of the levels like I did as a teenager. I’m old now and my reaction time sucks. But I accept the new reality of my increasingly decrepit state and so when I had 44 in one round and 46 the next, I felt pretty damn good about myself. WarioWare is STILL fun to challenge yourself with. Eventually the personality that eases you into the game gives way to one of the most white-knuckle tests of your muscle memory that you can get on Switch Online.
My arch nemesis with WarioWare in this play session was any game that required button mashing, of which there are far too many. This is one of them. This should count as my Metroid 1 review, by the way. No? Fine.
Playing WarioWare today reminds me of how STUPID I was as a kid. Not for choosing this as my #1 game. No, it was a good choice. WarioWare isn’t perfect. Too many button mashers. Not every game lends itself to speeding up. Some of the games don’t scale well enough to have three difficulty levels. But as a first-of-its-kind experiment, it’s fantastic. One of Nintendo’s best games ever, really. And I was stupid for not realizing that challenging my own high scores is something I would enjoy in other games. I had a snobbish streak even through my 20s. I didn’t understand the point of chasing offline high scores at all, except for this game. These days, I can sit down with Pac-Man or really any 80s arcade game and just chasing the score alone makes my play session fly by, which makes my review process easier even for bad games. WarioWare hasn’t changed, but I have. Do I like WarioWare as much as I did in my youth? I don’t know, but I know I admire it more now than I ever did before. Verdict: YES!
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3 Platform: Game Boy Advance First Released July 11, 2003 (my 14th birthday!) Directed by Hiroyuki Kimura Developed by Nintendo Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription Listing at Mario Wiki
After not having that tough a time playing Lost Levels, I got swallowed by a goddamn fish three times.
Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the most celebrated video games ever, and one of the most studied. If you have twenty minutes to spare, well, please keep reading because I work really hard on these things. BUT if you have forty minutes, after me, go read everything Cutting Room Floor has on Mario 3 because it’s fascinating. The amount of drawing-board content that made it into the final game’s code rivals the volume of deleted content you’d see in something like a modern Grand Theft Auto game. It’s also the final console-based Super Mario game to first release before I was born. More importantly for the sake of this feature, Mario 3 is a game that I tend not to like anywhere near as much as my older readers, and I swear to God, it’s not just for the sake of being contrarian. Who would actually say something that’s good isn’t just to be a prick? Well, that’s not my argument with Mario 3 anyway. I like it a lot! I just don’t love it.
In the making of this review, I 100%ed Mario Advance 4. No levels were skipped. No P-Wings were used. I didn’t use rewind to cheat and I never laid down a single save state. I also got every Advance Coin and e-Coin out of the 38 E-Reader levels. Then I replayed probably 25% of the core levels to figure out why I was just not digging them as much as my older readers. The answer involves one-of-a-kind circumstances that can never be replicated along with a dash of science! And if you’re looking at the above picture and saying “hold on, what?” and you’re a Switch online expansion pack subscriber, stop reading now, pick up your Switch, open up Mario Advance 4 and go play the E-Reader levels. It’s cool. I already got your click. It might screw up my “average read time” though so just leave the window open. Thanks.
I can’t appreciate the level of anticipation that gamers of the 1980s went through in the lead-up to Mario 3’s release. I mean, of course there were games I looked forward to as a child, but Mario 3 was arguably the last major game to come out before anything resembling a console war was happening. It’s a situation that will likely never be replicated. The Genesis didn’t really blow up until 1991, so Nintendo stood alone and Mario 3 was the single biggest title that kids wanted. For anyone my age, go back to your childhood and think of the game you wanted the most, and now imagine it was the ONLY game in town, with McDonald’s Happy Meal toys and a cartoon series and motion picture tied into the advertising campaign. Yeah, this will never happen again.
I swear there will be a game review here. Eventually. But this stuff is important to the review I’m going with, trust me.
Super Mario Bros. 3 came out in North America a whopping 477 days AFTER the Famicom release. Publicly, Nintendo blames a ROM shortage, but I think there’s more to it. Oh, I’m sure there was some ROM manufacturing hiccup, but I think they took advantage of it because they didn’t want Mario 3 to cannibalize Game Boy sales. It was their first non-NES device that was released around the time Mario 3 was originally penciled-in and they sort of needed it to do really good to prove they weren’t a flash in the pan. Maybe selling millions of copies of Mario 3 AND millions of Game Boys in 1989 would have been a flex, but who knows? Maybe it could have gone the other way. Gaming had already crashed once, and asking for Mario 3 undermined the Game Boy’s pitch. This is still firmly the “most children’s bedrooms didn’t have a TV” era, and Nintendo’s pitch to parents was “buy your child a Game Boy and get the living room TV back!” But if children in 1989 were asked “it’s either a Game Boy or Mario 3, so take your pick” I think they pick Mario 3, don’t you? Hell, the most famous Mario 3 ad doesn’t show a single f*cking second of gameplay. That’s how hyped the game was, and if Nintendo forced a competition between their own products, I think Mario 3 would have left Game Boy in a smoking crater. Why even create the possibility for that scenario if you don’t need to?
Well, clearly they didn’t need to. Assuming I’m right, sitting from my comfortable distance decades later, I kind believe they were vindicated for the choice to delay. Game Boy was a big hit and Super Mario Land is one of the biggest sellers ever. So was Super Mario Bros. 3 for that matter. The extra time allowed Nintendo to go hard on the Mario 3 advertising with a media blitz that included a Happy Meal promotion at McDonald’s and a cartoon series that was so popular that reruns were still on TV when I was a child. I thought it was completely unwatchable when I was 6 years old and I think it’s still unwatchable now that I’m about to turn 36 years old. Okay, TECHNICALLY the Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 aired after the game released, something I wish I had checked on before I watched the entire f*cking series, all twenty-six 10-minute-long shorts, for this feature. Here’s my review: Oh God, the Koopa Kids (who are all the wrong names for some reason, WTF is that about?) are a parody of Ninja Turtles. HAH, because they’re turtles! Someone got paid to make that connection. Oh God, Milli Vanilli is on the show. That sounds like I’m making a joke but I’m not. That’s really them. Oh God, Luigi’s a dog now. Is that a thing they planned for the game?
Nope, this doesn’t work for me. I need someone to take a drill to my head and get it out. I’m not kidding. It feels like The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 is digging at my skull from the inside. Get it out. GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUT! GET IT OUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUT!
Most famously of all, Mario 3 was the climax of a feature length Nintendo/Universal Studios advertisement called The Wizard, which was released in theaters two months before Mario 3’s US debut. No need to drill this one out of my head. My film buff sister and her pretentious friends (sorry, sis) watched it during a “bad movie marathon” last year and honestly they didn’t think it was bad enough to be included, because it’s not so much “bad” as it is “completely shameless, cynical, and/or soulless.” Even though I was there ruining the experience for them by pointing out that not a single one of the video game scenes in that movie makes a lick of sense. Somehow Jimmy got 50,000 points on Double Dragon in approximately thirty seconds. I tried this myself, syncing Double Dragon for the NES with the scene in the movie. In my best run, my score from the opening cinematic (seen in the movie) until the time Fred Savage says “50,000?!” was 2,050 points.
I guess that’s why Jimmy is the Wizard and I’m not.
That’s even giving me a full extra second or two since Fred Savage needed a moment to process that his brother is obviously a legitimate wizard. As in a practitioner of sorcery and/or witchcraft who clearly possesses the Time Gem, and possibly all the other Infinity Gems which he used not wipe out half of all life in the universe but instead change the scoresheet for Double Dragon so that every landed shot scores about 4,000 points, give or take. Diabolic. Hey, it’s either that or there was a cigarette burn on the screen right where the score is displayed that looked like the number 50,000. What? It could happen! The Wizard is the definitive “kids’ product made by people cashing in on a kids’ trend who aren’t interested in figuring out why the popular thing is popular.” And it’s really bad about it, too. Even Roger Ebert said he knew that the shots of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles that were purported to be of the third stage were only the first stage while Gene Siskel recognized that nobody who made this loved the games featured. It’s THAT obvious, even to a non-gamer. But ask gamers at the time if they remember that part, and they don’t. They remember this:
Even though that scene makes no sense either. Why would they be scoring points as soon as the host said “GO!” How would Jimmy even know the warp whistle is there? Why would warping boost his points? Shouldn’t he be scoring no points while he f*cks around with the warp whistle, and how did he even know how to activate it in the first place? Why would losing a life cost you points? If Jimmy lost so many points, how did he still win when Lucas is the only one on stage who never died? This thing has more plot holes in the big finale than all of Season 8 of Game of Thrones. I take back what I said about the Wizard, because it’s so much worse than simply being disinterested in what kids are into. It’s a movie made by people who think kids are stupid. Not that it matters. It more than doubled its modest $6 million budget at the box office, and that’s before you consider that normal Hollywood metrics don’t apply since the movie was not meant as a normal movie but as a feature length advertisement heavily subsidized by outside forces. Hell, even the finale I’m pretty sure was partially subsidized by the state of California for a sh*thole roadside attraction, the Cabazon Dinosaurs. I went there as a kid before it was turned into a creationist museum (I just found out it’s back to being a run of the mill tourist trap), and remember it had an intense musty smell.
Pictured above: how this review is going. But I do have a point: I want you to consider everything I talked about above. Prerelease circumstances that have never, and will never, be replicated. I think that’s part of the reason why Super Mario Bros. 3 is a huge deal to my older readers and not so much to my generation. I’ve met plenty of people who have it on their short list of “greatest video games of all-time.” I’m so sorry to my 40-something to 50-something readers, but I’ve never really understood it, because I don’t think Super Mario Bros. 3 should even be in the GOAT conversation. It’s fine. The flying racoon idea (with tail-whip attack) was inspired. Some of the levels are truly breath-taking. The enemy design especially never gets the credit it deserves. I think the roster of basic enemies is even better than Mario 2’s. Super Mario Bros. 3 is a solidly good game. Maybe even a great game. Maybe, as in I wouldn’t passionately argue against someone who wants to call it “great.” BUT, I do have a case to make against its greatness.
One of my biggest problems is that I think the Koopalings are boring bosses. They’re not that different from the Boom Booms in the fortresses (which I also think suck, they’re too easy to cheese). In fact, only this one pictured here feels different from the other six. Before fans get mad at me, I didn’t think they were particularly strong in Super Mario World either. Want to know the best appearance by the Koopa Kids? It’s EASILY Yoshi’s Safari (as seen in my Definitive Review of Nintendo light gun games), where each of them feels unique. Ironically, the game where you point a f*cking bazooka at them is the only one where they don’t feel like cannon fodder.
Mario 3’s base game only has a couple stages I’d consider to be particularly strong. Don’t read that as “she’s saying the levels suck” because I’m not. My attitude towards the base game in general is “it’s fine” and when it comes to the level design I’m going to stick with “it’s fine.” Except, you know, when it’s not. It just often feels like there’s no good incentives to explore the levels. Take level 2 – 1 for example. They built these two massive hollow structures that you literally walk over the top of. You can go inside them and collect an extra life and some coins. Except extra lives are plentiful and coins just aren’t enough of a reward. This is just bad risk/reward design and a poor use of real estate, and if this were ANY game but Super Mario Bros. 3, I think people would universally say this is nonsensical design.
As punishment for nonsensical design on the part of designers, I made Mario, their bread and butter, wear the Tanooki suit in the scorching-hot desert environment. You made me do this, Nintendo.
But that kind of head-scratching design is all over Super Mario Bros. 3. Even in levels that are fun to explore. You’ll notice that I didn’t say the structures themselves are stupid or anything because I’m not sh*ting on them. Their shapes are perfectly logical platforming game layouts. Good enemy placement on the inside. Not so much the roofs, which are, you know, the parts you have to actually walk across to get to the end of the stage, which is right there past the second structure. Hell, the second one didn’t even have a single enemy on its roof. But I think the little jumping flames inside the structures are quality enemies and a credible threat to Mario. There’s just not a good reason to go inside of them. This could have easily been fixed by creating some kind of circumstance that necessitates going through structures. A key. A switch. Anything besides a nominal reward with no risk/reward balance consideration.
The one thing about Mario 3 that I just plain do not like are the maps. I think the whole map system is TERRIBLE. Bypassing levels. Confusing pipes. The airships flying off to other parts of the map and creating busy work, especially if you went for a 100% like I did. Shouldn’t scoring a 100% in the world before you enter the castle just automatically anchor the airship so you don’t have to play fetch every single time you die on the stage?
But the thing that bothers me most about Mario 3, and this will annoy my older readers quite a bit I imagine: I think it’s too conservative. Like, the Tanooki suit can make invisible things visible, including platforms and doors. You can do a LOT with that idea, but they really didn’t. There’s only a small handful of uses for it, most of them quite subtle, and none of which made me sit up in my chair. The Hammer Bros. suit can kill enemies other suits can’t, but they never once built a stage specifically tailored to that strength. I hate to keep using the same argument, but if ANY OTHER GAME had an item like the Hammer Bros. suit and never once worked up the courage to make a level where it’s a necessity instead of a luxury item, I think the average gamer would question why they bothered. And you know they’re capable of better since they certainly did a good job building reasons to use Racoon Mario or even Frog Mario.
No complaints about the Frog Suit. It’s the one element of Super Mario Bros. 3 where the risk/reward factors are given proper balance. Okay, so the maps could have used much more clear indicators of what stages have practical usages for it.
Now, in fairness, Mario 3 does offer plenty of highlights. World 1, as in every single stage in Grass Land, is one of the most downright scientifically perfect opening sequences ever in any platform game. The absolute perfect education for everything to come. Along with Mario 1’s World 1, these stages could be the whole curriculum of game design school for how to introduce mechanics into your game. After World 1, the level design keeps up a consistent drip of uniqueness, including several one-off moments. You don’t expect that from a 1988 game. The most famous is, of course, the shoe. Hey, who doesn’t love the shoe? I mean, it would probably be lame as hell if it was just a regular roster item, but it ain’t! It just shows up in a seemingly random World 5 stage (specifically 5 – 3), gives you a short playground that takes under two minutes to beat even if you f*ck around, and then it’s taken away from you and never shows up again until it had its mystique utterly shat upon by about fifty-thousand uncreative people in Mario Maker.
It’s just so random, you know? “Hey, for this level, ride a shoe!” In fairness, if the shoe had been an option in World 7, you might as well gather the kids around and tell them that World 7 is going to a farm upstate where it’ll get to run around free and happy with all the other worlds.
That’s the thing though. For all my bitching, the bite-sized level format also kind of makes the game bullet-proof. Even when Mario 3 is outright bad, and on rare occasions it is, it’s still okay because, barring a loss of life, you’re two minutes or less away from something that’s different. Well, besides those damn airships, all of which felt interchangeable except the first one (again, perfectly balanced like everything else in World 1) and the last one (the series of speedy ones in World 8). I’m really not a fan of auto-scrolling in platforming games and I didn’t enjoy the airship concept at all. Otherwise, nobody can accuse the levels in Super Mario 3 of feeling samey. There’s clearly an effort being made to give stages individual personalities, unique game design goals, and their own one of a kind “vibe” for lack of a better term.
While World 1 might be “perfect” my favorite world, except for that busy-work-inducing map, is World 7. Something about it just worked for me.
That’s the ground Mario 3 really broke, and it’s VERY modern in that regard. A rapid-fire series of unique platforming challenges that hit one after another, with tonal whiplash that would leave you in a neck brace if it were any genre but a 2D platformer. That individualism overrides the actual gameplay content. While I might be very frustrated by how de-emphasized exploration is, I’m also picking nits with full knowledge that’s NOT the point. Mario 3 isn’t a five course meal. It’s a bag of potato chips. That’s not an insult, by the way. Who doesn’t pig out on potato chips? You can’t just stop at one! That’s the point! It’s why I don’t really think there were any truly stand-out “holy crap that level was amazing” moments in Mario 3. Instead, it just maintained a consistent tempo of quality stages, and I kept reaching into the bag to have another, and another, and another. If you want gourmet food, you want to play Super Mario World, where Nintendo applied the lessons they learned making Mario 3 to make much more logically-sound levels that have exploration highly incentivized.
Or you can play the E-Reader levels.
Yep, that’s the cape from Mario World. Yep, this is still Mario 3.
If you’re a Nintendo Switch Online expansion pack subscriber, you can play the E-Reader stages in Super Mario Advance 4, and trust me, they’re absolutely f*cking phenomenal. Well, 33 out of 38 of them, since the first five are just remakes of Mario 1’s World 1 and Level 2 – 2 because of-f*cking-course they would do that. If you want those to be fun, you have to make your own fun. I just flew around with the Mario World cape dive-bombing enemies out of spite. F*ck them.
Goomba: “Yep, this is going to hurt.”
Now don’t expect all of the E-Reader levels to offer some kind of hardcore white knuckle challenge. All of them have some kind of gimmick and several of them are just plain silly. But, they all remember to have fun. Okay, so maybe it IS a cinch to use the sticky blocks to run around a track. You just hold the B-button and forward on the D-Pad and watch the game beat itself with minimum effort, but that’s not the WHOLE stage. It’s there because that’s fun, and that should be all that matters. Even the weakest of the E-Reader stages are so damn charming in how out of f*cks they are about presenting any resistance when they could just have some toy for you to play with that they shoot the moon and becomes genius. Like at one point, a Boomerang Bros. shows up and he has a blue boomerang that, once you kill him, you get to pick up and throw at the next enemy. It happens once and never again and I LOVED IT!
I hope I didn’t just imply that some of the stages aren’t pretty tough, because THEY ARE. Most are middle of the road in terms of difficulty, but when the E-Reader levels show their teeth, they REALLY show their teeth.
Plus, nobody can accuse THESE levels of not wringing every drop of gameplay out of their real estate. The best way I can describe these stages is that they do for Super Mario Bros. 3 what the Special Zone stages in Super Mario World did for that game. This is the culmination of everything that has been learned by those who worked on these games saying “okay, let’s really show ’em what this engine can do.” As a result, the rough sloppiness of Mario 3’s level design is completely gone in these stages, replaced with fine-tuned level themes that very specifically require the players to explore. In fact, my absolute favorite levels of the core game, the ones that are mazes, are the main style of game in the E-Reader stages.
Oh it’s not just the items from Mario World that show up.
And even the gimmicky levels, like ones with timers so short that you only have 20 seconds, give players an actual reason to explore: the Advance Coins and the rarer e-Coins. I have no f*cking clue why these weren’t added to the core Mario Advance 4 game. Assuming they placed the coins in the right locations, and I have no reason to believe they wouldn’t have, it would have been transformative. I was constantly saying “what the f*ck was the point of having that entire section there?” That would have been off the table, but they didn’t do that and that’s pretty heartbreaking. When I did Mario Advance last week, I didn’t go for 100% of the post-game Yoshi Eggs. But, had they done the same kind of post-game bonus with Mario 3, I would still be playing Super Mario Advance 4 instead of writing this. I would have gone for 100% in the eighty-eight core levels just like I did with the thirty-eight E-Reader levels.
Oh, these stages are so good. They actually created space for 72 such stages. I wonder if, somewhere in the bowels of Nintendo’s archives, there’s even more of these waiting to be released.
That’s why, while I’m so happy I finally played Super Mario Bros. 3 for an IGC review, I also walk away feeling that it’s maybe the most overrated “all-time great” in terms of its actual content. It’s fine, but almost all my happiest moments came from playing the E-Reader levels. They felt more like the type of stages I would see in a Mario game from MY lifetime. I still think the core game isn’t as good as Mario 2 or Mario World. Not even close, and some of the ROM hacks I’ve played of Mario 3 annihilate it completely. So, why do older people tend to put this on such a pedestal? Is it really “you had to be there?” Well, yeah, but it’s much more complicated.
Okay, there’s SOME sloppiness. The Big Boo from Mario World returns a couple times in the E-Reader levels, but because you don’t have the ability to kick things upward in Mario 3’s engine like you can in Mario World, the fight is kind of janky.
I can’t imagine how big the leap from Super Mario Bros. 1 to Super Mario Bros. 3 must have felt for my older readers. Literally, I cannot, because there’s no comparison to anything in my gaming lifetime, especially since I just missed the jump from 2D to 3D. My gaming lifetime started in 1996, with the PS1, and really took off in 1998, when I got my Nintendo 64. If my parents had let me play Grand Theft Auto, then the jump from GTA 2 to GTA 3 would have been the Mario 1 to Mario 3 killer, but I was 10 and then 12 years old when those games came out and I wasn’t allowed to play them. My parents were afraid if I played the wrong kind of games, I’d become a cynical, foul-mouthed deviant. The results speak for themselves. Anyway, from a game design evolution point of view, I experienced a series of incremental steps forward. That’s kind of crazy when you think about how close I was to the dawn of games. I was only a decade late. Maybe a decade-and-a-half, but either way, I pretty much missed the age of big progress in game design entirely. And if you don’t think I’m so jealous of my older readers that they got to experience one gigantic leap forward after another that I want to swap their shoes with mouse traps, you’re wrong. You f*ckers were spoiled!
My favorite levels were almost always the fortresses. Anything that REQUIRED exploration and experimentation in Mario 3 was usually elite level design that holds up to the test of time.
But I also think those leaps might have made games seem better than they were. I’m not condescending my older readers, either. There’s actual science on this, and with games that make those gigantic leaps forward like Super Mario Bros. 3, it’s deeper than the simple nostalgia science of “Mario 3 is your favorite game because you played it as a child and didn’t have the burdens of adulthood weighing you down.” Oh no, it’s actually even more potent than that. Since the leap between Mario 1 and Mario 3 was so huge, it’s safe to say that Mario 3 was practically a whole new experience unlike anything you had experienced before. Agreed? Good. Well, get this: new experiences cause your brain to literally trip a sort of circuit breaker and go into a “recording” mode. And, of course, it does this with the brain’s favorite chemical: dopamine, which makes you even happier, which lights up even more neurons and gets them ready to record, which releases more dopamine, and so forth, and so forth. There’s actually a reason your brain is doing all this, too. Your brain is putting itself in a state for memories to form easier and last longer because it’s now operating under the assumption this new activity that you’re enjoying is one you will do again, so whatever you’re doing now, you’ll need to clearly remember what you did and how you did it so you can do it even better next time. Neat, huh? But consequently, anything similar that follows will lose that sense of “newness” so it won’t trigger the same reaction in your brain, and so you can NEVER replicate it. If you played Mario 3 when it was new in 1990, maybe that’s actually why nothing has felt quite as fun as it since. Your brain was literally configuring itself for almost all video games based on your experience playing Mario 3, and to assure that, it made you drunk on happiness. People my age aren’t looking down on you. We’re in the same boat with different games. For me, it was Banjo-Kazooie, Ocarina of Time, and Goldeneye.
The hammer suit in Super Mario Bros. 3 has to be one of the most overpowered items ever in a Mario game. It’s ridiculously effective, taking out too many otherwise impervious enemies like the ghosts and thwomps and dry bones. They can even kill Bowser directly. I imagine this is why it’s not until the last third of the game that you can get it “naturally.” I got my first hammer suit at the end of world six in this play session. Fun fact: if you don’t count Mario Maker games, the hammer suit is the only item in the Mario 3 to never be reissued in future Mario games. It’s the Black Lotus of Mario items.
Well, unfortunately for Super Mario Bros. 3, I had played games like Mario 3 before I played it. I even played Mario World before I played Mario 3. That’s why it felt like a step backwards. I can’t stress enough that I’m not hating on Mario 3. The base game, all by itself, is fine. I’d even give it the title of “Mario game with the best first world and best final world.” World 8 not only feels fantastic, but genuinely climatic. That’s harder to do than you would think. It’s a milestone in terms of scope and roster of characters. It shouldn’t just be studied by would-be game makers for introductory stages, but also for basic enemy design. It might be the most up-tempo 8-bit action game EVER. Needless to say, it would get a YES! even without the bonus E-Reader content. It’s kind of impossible to not like it. Also, nothing I can say is going to take away from Mario 3’s place in history. It’s in Cooperstown. Its star is on the Walk of Fame. Even among legends, it’s a big deal.
Seriously, even the flying beetles get an unforgettable bonus stage. By the way, the E-Reader content is now 22 years old. I really think Nintendo is sitting on a winning lottery ticket with bonus content for older games. The engines themselves are so flexible that Nintendo could make 33 of some of the best Mario stages ever decades after the fact. So, why quit at all? Seriously, if Nintendo announced tomorrow that they were putting out an expansion pack for Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past that added eight full-sized dungeons at a cost of $29.99, how many copies does the DLC pack sell? 500,000? A million? Two million? More? They could also use development of new content for old games as a way to train a new generation of designers on how to make “Nintendo-style” games, because that’s an art form I NEVER want to see lost, but it could happen. Big Shiggy Style, Tezuka, and the rest are aging-out. They’re not going to live forever, and neither are the people they already trained. But these older games are a proven stepping stone in learning how to make not just great video games, but timeless masterpieces. Such DLC will not eat into the profit of new games. Nobody is going to buy Link to the Past DLC in lieu of Breath of the Wild 3. They’ll buy both. It’s what Nintendo fans do, and they know that. New content for old games would ensure a brighter future for all of us. I want my nieces and nephew to have the quality of Nintendo games I have now when they’re senior citizens. Well, the best school for game design is the Nintendo catalog itself. By the way, a lot of people still think I’m a Nintendo hater. Do I really sound like one? Seriously?
Super Mario Bros. 3 is also a game where you can clearly feel the designer learning curve, and hell, I’d say it’s more obvious than even the original Super Mario Bros and probably the single roughest mainline “Super Mario” game ever made. They didn’t know exactly what they were doing yet, but they were getting better. You can even feel the progress as the game goes along with strong worlds like 5 and 7, and 8 really feeling like they’re putting it together and starting to get weird and experimental. And yet, you can also feel where they used the brakes just a little too much. So, I really hope my older readers aren’t offended when I say you probably liked Mario 3 more than “modern crap” because you were still developing as a person. But, here’s why that’s okay: because everything I dislike about Super Mario Bros. 3 is a result of the people who made it still developing as game designers. It’s Nintendo’s adolescence at its peak, where you can see that they’re going to go on to do some spectacular things, after they get done sprouting peach fuzz and popping zits. Verdict: YES!
Super Mario Advance Platform: Game Boy Advance First Released March 21, 2001 Directed by Toshiaki Suzuki Developed by Nintendo Available with a Switch Online Expansion Pack Subscription Listing on Mario Wiki
Oh, sweet Clawgrip. How did they ever do Doki Doki Panic without you?
I’ve already said everything I need to say about what masterpieces Super Mario Bros. 2 and Doki Doki Panic are. All that’s left is the game that introduced me to that world, which I first played in the wee hours of the morning following the GBA’s launch. I probably clicked-on my GBA at around one o’clock in the morning on June 11, 2001. At about 1:01 A.M. I was probably red in the face angry over how sh*tty the GBA screen was. It didn’t matter how many launch games I got, because I could only see two of them: this and ChuChu Rocket. It’s funny that I look back on 2001 with such fondness, because two of the three major launches SUCKED! My hands were too small to properly wield the Duke, and I couldn’t see the GBA’s screen. At least the Xbox issue was fixed by my father snagging an imported S-controller for me relatively quickly. Nothing could save the GBA though.
I wasn’t even into puzzle games during this era, but I liked the versus mode of ChuChu Rocket, which was the first console game I ever played with online play. Except it had seriously horrible, ruinous lag. That was fine. On Dreamcast, I played the hell out of this against CPU opponents, which is why I wanted a copy for my new portable game device. Would have been nice if I could have seen the screen. ChuChu Rocket, like Super Mario Advance, is pretty bright, but still not bright enough to overcome the GBA’s horrible original screen.
I was pissed because the game I had actually been hyped for, and the one that was the first game in my brand new Game Boy Advance, was Castlevania: Circle of the Moon. I can’t believe there’s apologists for the GBA screen, because I thought it was un-f*cking-playable. Circle of the Moon was clearly not fine-tuned for THAT screen. I’m actually certain the only explanation was the development team didn’t know the screen wouldn’t be backlit. Meanwhile, ChuChu Rocket was obsolete because I already had a version of it that I could, you know, actually see! I wanted ChuChu Rocket for car trips, but even in sunlight, I thought the screen sucked. So the only reason why the GBA’s launch wasn’t a complete letdown for me was Super Mario Advance. Even though I really enjoyed it, I had no idea what Super Mario Bros. 2 had actually accomplished. To my credit, I was still 11, about to turn 12.
If you want to be mean about it, you can steal Birdo’s bow. They should have had it get pissed and fire eggs like a machine gun if you do this.
In that original 2001 session, I remember thinking that Mario Advance was maybe the easiest video game I’d ever played up to that point. I’m pretty sure even back then I didn’t die more than a couple times, with world 5 – 1 and 7 – 2 being the only levels that got me more than once. I only remember one specific death: when the door came flying at me right before the Wart battle, I was so startled that the damn thing killed me. Otherwise, besides the odd jump to my death, I quickly got through Mario Advance, and while I enjoyed IT well enough, I enjoyed the squinting required to play it so much that my GBA went into a drawer, pretty much never to see the light of day again. I never got another new game for that model. I was excited for another installment of Pokemon, but when those came out, so did the GBA SP, and the Game Boy Player followed soon after. So really, the only game I ever played with my original GBA was this one, and while I really liked it a lot, it wasn’t exactly like it blew my mind. I think the reason it didn’t was entirely that f*cking screen.
The funny part of that story is that I had no idea that Nintendo had actually made this version of Super Mario Bros. 2 unfathomably easier than the already pretty damn easy NES original. How?
They added a third hidden mushroom in every stage, so now your max health is five.
Health refills are just sitting around pretty much everywhere.
Including inside boss chambers.
And you get health refills for every thrown object (be it an item or enemy) that results in a kill combo of two or more. The POW blocks are the exception to this.
Just the act of throwing the new giant Shy-Guy, even if you throw it at nothing, gives you a heart every throw, meaning every single appearance by them is basically a full life refill.
There’s significantly more enemies, which sounds like it should make the game harder, but instead, they’re there specifically to be combo victims. That means even more opportunities for health refills.
They’ve significantly increased the amount of weapons you can pluck from the ground.
And they added more weapons tailored towards mass destruction of the enemies.
They also added many more extra lives in the stages.
They made it so you can bet all your coins on a single spin of the slot machines, paying off tons of lives if you win.
A kill combo five gives you an extra life.
Plus you get an additional extra life for every enemy after five.
There’s just no way I can spin these decisions in a way that makes logical sense. This goes beyond simply nerfing Super Mario 2. This is like full-on baby proofing of a game to a level never before done, unless you count emulator stuff like save states and rewinding. If you manage to Game Over playing Super Mario Advance, you should seriously consider another hobby because this gaming thing just isn’t going to work out for you.
The Birdos especially get it bad, as there’s usually additional weapons in their chambers AND life refills.
Everything I disliked about Super Mario Advance as a soon-to-be 12 year old is still 100% accurate. I’ll tell you this: if you have a REALLY young child, you might want to consider this as the game to break them into platform games, or even gaming in general. I mean, it’s colorful, has a wide variety of levels and enemies, tons of stuff to do, memorable characters, satisfying bosses, controls like a dream, and it’s basically the most easy video game this side of playing Pong against someone with a broken paddle. If you’re a challenge seeker, there’s nothing here for you. Okay, so the whole “games an experience instead of a challenge” is my driving force, and was my driving force even back when I was 12. But there’s SOME limit to that. Games need to push-back. Mario Advance is the game that not only doesn’t push back, but it practically switches sides and pushes with you against itself.
It wouldn’t be until years after it launched that Mario Advance grew on me. I’d just finished Mario Galaxy and realized I’d never REALLY played Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3. After that, apparently I still had to work Mario out of my system because I played Mario Advance 1 again. Back then I DID NOT replay games once I finished them. That just wasn’t something I ever did. But my Mario Advance experience had been tainted by Darko Nintendočić, so I popped it in my Game Boy Player. It was almost like it was divinely inspired, because I remember thinking “how did I never notice this game is f*cking brilliant?” I hadn’t aced the game the first go around and didn’t expect to this time, either. But I did. Every Advance Coin. Every Yoshi Egg. Okay, the Advance Coins weren’t THAT hard to find and neither are the Yoshi eggs. Why it matters is nabbing a 100% completion means playing EVERY level.
In a sense, the Yoshi egg hunt could be considered the game’s “hard mode” since the eggs replace two of the mushrooms. This would be swell, except they’re almost always hidden close by where the mushrooms they replaced were originally found. Plus you have to unlock the egg hunt by beating the game. Thankfully, you don’t need to nab every Advance Coin to do this, something I forgot. I wish I had just warped really quick to the end, but I didn’t. I beat the game with Mario, and realized quickly I didn’t want to get every egg again. I think I’ve overdosed on Mario 1 & 2 and need to move on.
In my first replay of Mario Advance, I enjoyed experiencing all twenty levels so much that I was crushed when I found out getting a 100% completion didn’t unlock more content. I was blown away by how all twenty of them feel completely unique from each-other, and how playing them with each character also changes the, for lack of a better term, personality of each level. I came to realize that they really went all-out on the layouts and enemy design and fine tuning the controls for the characters. Mind you, it wouldn’t be until decades later, when I played Doki Doki Panic, that I realized how truly fine-tuned it actually is. I think that actually speaks volumes about how good Super Mario Bros. 2 is that so many people who love it are completely unaware that the version they’re playing isn’t even the game at its most idealized.
I swear to God, the first time I played the NES version of Super Mario Bros. 2, I had no clue there was no Robo-Birdo. When I got to the end of World 3 and another Mouser was waiting for me, my heart sank. I really thought the game was going to alternate between Mouser and Tryclyde until the Wart battle. This is such a fantastic boss battle that I think it sucks they didn’t replace the second Mouser with a second new boss. Maybe for the next remake, Nintendo? I’m kidding. Please don’t remake this again. Make a brand new game with this type of gameplay.
I first played Super Mario Advance as a soon-to-be 12 year old. Now I’m a soon-to-be 36 year old, and like so many things in life, my opinion on Mario Advance has changed dramatically over the years. Of the four versions of Mario 2 (not counting BS Super Mario USA, a modified version of the Super Mario 2 found in Super Mario All-Stars that made for the Satellaview, which isn’t even the full game), Mario Advance I’d put third, with only the version found in Super Mario All-Stars behind it. It’s still an amazing experience. Veterans of Mario 2 or even Doki Doki Panic can enjoy playing “spot the difference.” with the subtle changes made to level layouts or enjoy one of the easiest collect-a-thons ever made. I did one single full playthrough for this review and I got 99 out of 100 coins.
Son of a bitch. Forgot one f*cking coin in World 3 – 1 and somehow never noticed. Yes, I went back and got it. You can collect the coins in the Yoshi Challenge. Unfortunately, by the time I unlocked that, I was too burned out on Super Mario 2 to go get all the eggs.
But, I do question why they took such extreme measures towards lowering the difficulty. It’s almost unprecedented in the history of gaming. The irony is Doki Doki Panic became one of the biggest games in the entire history of the medium because the original Super Mario Bros. 2 was too hard, yet they subtracted from its difficulty in Super Mario Bros. 2 USA. But that version still does little things that prevent you from going on complete cruise control, like having you be committed to a single character every stage. Pick someone not as suitable for a level? Tough sh*t, and in retrospect, I’m fine with that. But then they removed even that from the Super Mario All-Stars version, which allows you to swap every life. (shrug) That’s why, as much as I love Super Mario Bros. 2 and even Mario Advance, I really hope they don’t remake it again, because what’s left to nerf at this point? Have it literally rain hearts? Have enemies surrender on sight? When you pull Birdo’s bow off, the brain spurts out of a hole? Get to Wart’s chamber only to find him dead with an empty can of V8 laying next to him? Verdict: YES!
It’s my little blog’s anniversary! Thank you everyone for fourteen incredible years! I love you all! For keeps!
All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. Platform: Famicom Disk System Released December 20, 1986 Developed by Nintendo Published by Fuji Television Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Mario Wiki
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic Platform: Famicom Disk System Released July 10, 1987 Directed by Kensuke Tanabe Developed by Nintendo Published by Fuji Television Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Mario Wiki
The 1up trick: masochists edition.
Between 1986 and 1987, Fuji Television and the Nippon Broadcasting System partnered with Nintendo for two games, one of which is fairly inconsequential, and the other is, well, consequential. Before there was Doki Doki Panic, there was All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. It’s based on a popular radio program called All Night Nippon that dates back to 1967 and still runs to this day. It’s a cultural institution in Japan on the level of, say, Saturday Night Live here in the United States. Hell, BIGGER than SNL, actually. So big that people lined up for days to snag one of the limited 1,000 copies that would be sold of this on December 20, 1986. Two-thousand copies were won by people who sent postcards to the station, while a pair of gaming magazines each gave away twenty copies, bringing the grand total to 3,040 total copies and making it a cherished collector’s item today that fetches $1,000 or more a copy on the open market. For a ROM hack. Hmph.
The Toads are replaced with the hosts, who were arguably among the biggest celebrities in Japan at the time.
Okay, so it’s not just a Super Mario Bros. 1 with the Goombas, Piranha Plants, and Toads replaced by the hosts of All Night Nippon. Three stages from the coin-op Vs. Super Mario Bros. and three stages from Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels were substituted for six other levels in the standard Super Mario 1 roster of thirty-two stages. Hell, level 8 – 4 is level 8 – 4 from Lost Levels. Additionally, the graphics are mostly taken from the original Japanese Super Mario Bros. 2, with some small alterations to add a bit of a radio theme to a few bushes. There’s really only one reason to seek out this build of Super Mario and that’s the ability to play as Luigi, with all his quirks from Super Mario Bros. 2, in a game that’s mostly made out of Super Mario 1 stages. It makes for a genuinely fun novelty. For about twenty minutes, but hell, how much more Super Mario 1 can you possibly want? All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros. Verdict: YES!
You can hit that question mark from a standing flat jump off the ground. Alright, go have fun cheesing (most) of the original game with Luigi’s jump. Not that it matters. The odds of this thing ever getting a re-release are probably lower than even something like Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker.
Okay, okay. Nobody came here to read about an obscure version of Super Mario 1 so let’s get to Doki Doki Panic. When the original version of Super Mario Bros. 2 was sent to America, a guy named Howard Phillips (aka the guy from Nintendo Power magazine’s Howard & Nester), who was basically the best gamer on Nintendo of America’s staff, is credited with convincing NOA that it was too similar to the original game and too hard for American audiences and they should just ask for something else.
By this point, Nintendo of America knew Super Mario 3 was coming, but they didn’t want to waste at least a year waiting for it. Nintendo was arguably the hottest property in America and they knew they would need a lot more Mario to keep the NES’ momentum going. Instead of making a new game from the ground-up, they decided to take a game that was developed as part of a promotional event held by Fuji Television that was kind of like a World’s Fair or a carnival, replace the theme of masks with Mario-themed stuff, and swap out the Arabian-themed main characters created for the event with Mario, Luigi, Toad, and the Princess. If you want to know more, the Video Game Historian has you covered. I want to talk about the gameplay.
Despite looking like the character that evolved into Mario, Papa is actually the character that became Toad. By the way, due to the flashiness of exploding bombs and the speed at which the water is animated, I had to take full precautions playing Doki Doki Panic. I don’t advise this game for people who are photosensitive.
Doki Doki Panic might look exactly like Super Mario Bros. 2, but in terms of gameplay, this might actually still be the best build of it. Lately, I’ve been on a “games as a challenge” versus “games as an experience” kick. Lucky me that Doki Doki Panic and Super Mario Bros. 2, two versions of one game, exemplifies the difference between those two mindsets. I’ll be reviewing Super Mario Advance next (it’s up, click here), which is almost certainly the better EXPERIENCE. They added a lot of content, including a new boss and new stuff to find, plus it looks fantastic. But it’s also not exactly the most challenging game. In fact, you might look at the ability of Luigi and Princess Peach and shake your head, because they’re so clearly overpowered that they nullify entire segments of the game. Well, actually THEY don’t, but what you can do with them in Super Mario Bros. 2 does. Doki Doki Panic was NEVER meant to have B-running and jumping. The addition of that alone fundamentally changes the entire game experience for literally all four characters.
Besides B-running, the biggest missing element from Super Mario 2 is Clawgrip the Crab. Instead, you fight a third Mouser at the end of World 5. Since the Clawgrip fight is fantastic and the Mouser fight is the same one you’ve already done twice, only spongier, this was the right call. Nintendo would later change Super Mario Advance’s boss order, adding a new Robo-Birdo fight to the end of world three, but instead of doing a new boss for the end of world six, not only did they dump the second Tryclyde fight but they replaced him with Mouser. Sigh.
Now, I already love Super Mario Bros. 2. It’s my favorite 2D Mario game (well, unless you count ROM hacks) and it’s clearly a milestone in level design. Seriously, the twenty stages found in this game, each offering unique platforming challenges, are some of the most well designed Nintendo ever did in 8-bits. But, I also acknowledge it’s a very problematic game thanks to the ability to circumvent so much of that elegant level design by just B-running to higher platforms. Well, you can’t do that sh*t in Doki Doki Panic, and it’s transformative. Now, you have to make use of the FULL level layouts. Almost every single platform matters for at least one character. A door is well above your head? Better start stacking blocks or hitching a ride on an enemy. Want to make it across that waterfall? You’ll need every log or fish to do it, especially if you’re using Imajin (Mario) or Papa (Toad).
Peach’s floating trick obviously covers a lot less ground, and if you have it activated, any enemy who touches you will damage you. You have to let go of the jump button to be able to stand on enemies. Smart.
Yes, Lina (Princess Peach) and Mama (Luigi) can still use their abilities to bypass SOME relatively small sections (and the Luigi proxy’s jump somehow feels floatier but that might be just an illusion because of the sprite’s animation), but you’ll still need to actually use most of the terrain most of the time. Playing Doki Doki Panic is revealing of what a truly generational masterpiece Super Mario Bros. 2 is. You really do have to play this version of the game to appreciate how fine-tuned the levels are. Platforms that made no sense in Super Mario 2 are essential to finishing Doki Doki Panic, and thus the challenge is significantly increased. Mario 2’s difficulty scaling feels pretty wonky. Doki Doki scales much more naturally. By the way, if it sounds like the game’s pace is significantly slower, while it might be technically true, it never really feels like it. Weird, right? But it’s true because you’re having to pay closer attention. Slower movement doesn’t matter because Doki Doki has a faster happenings-tempo.
Like these things here? I didn’t get a picture of it, but there’s a moment during this sequence where you have a small space to build up a duck-jump that you have to do WHILE moving and WHILE dodging an enemy. It has no stakes at all in Mario 2 if you hold the B button down. Here, only the Luigi character can skip the ducking part.
Okay, so you can’t completely recreate the experience with a US copy just by avoiding running. There’s other small changes. Like, you know how satisfying it is to throw an enemy and have their dead body take out the next four or five enemies? That doesn’t work in Doki Doki Panic. While items like the vegetables can still take out multiple baddies, thrown enemies only kill the first enemy they make contact with. That doesn’t make that big a difference. There’s no sections built around the combo technique, probably because it was never meant to be a thing. You also don’t shrink when you’re down to your final hit and some of the enemy attack patterns are slightly modified. But, yeah, you’ll get 95% of the Doki Doki experience just by stopping yourself from using B-running. Give it a try!
Right up until the final two levels, you still feel the difference and might find your finger reaching for that B-button only to say “oh right!” I just beat Doki Doki Panic four times today and I was still doing it right up until the bitter end.
Also, similar to how you have to beat Lost Levels eight times to see everything, you have to beat Doki Doki Panic once with all four characters to unlock the “true ending.” While I would never have enjoyed putting that much work into the version of Super Mario Bros. 2 Japan got, I had no problem doing that with their quirky little FDS game that eventually became the whole world’s Super Mario Bros. 2. I have to assume someone at Nintendo, around the time Doki Doki Panic finished development, said “why the f*ck did we waste this on Fuji Television?” And it would have been a good question, because up to that point, I don’t think Nintendo had ever made a better game. I might enjoy the experience of playing Super Mario Advance more, but Doki Doki Panic is still the best all-encompassing package this specific game ever got. The version that offers both an experience and a challenge.
For all the credit Super Mario 1 gets, Doki Doki Panic feels like it takes the platforming genre in an even bolder direction. You can remove the timer and make a possibly slower exploration-based adventure that still retains all the tricky jumping and satisfying combat fans want out of the genre. Doki Doki Panic represented a leap in design logic that left gaming better for everyone. Will it ever get a re-release? I’d hope that Nintendo and Fuji Television could work something out. It’s been almost forty years and it’s the most important re-spriting in gaming history. Sure, we celebrate Super Mario Bros. 2 today, but that doesn’t mean we celebrate Doki Doki Panic at the same time. Instead, it’s been relegated to the status of being an answer to a trivia question. A historic footnote and nothing more, and I think that’s tragic. Really, you can play any version of this game and have a lot of fun, but you can only play one version that still does that while putting up a fight, and that’s Doki Doki Panic. Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic Verdict: YES!
Don’t worry, Wart. The rest of them won’t show up again, either.
Super Mario Bros. 2 aka The Lost Levels Platform: Famicom Disk System, SNES FDS Original First Released June 3, 1986 Super Mario All-Stars Released July 14, 1993 Directed by Shigeru Miyamoto & Takashi Tezuka Developed by Nintendo Both Available with Switch Online Subscription (Standard)
Listings on Mario Wiki: Famicom Disk System – Super Mario All-Stars
Super Mario Bros. 2 (1986 – Famicom Disk)
Super Mario All-Stars (1993 – SNES)
Super Mario All-Stars (1993 – SNES)
Does the “bounce off the turtle shell for easy 1ups” trick seen above count as cheating? If the answer is “no” then I just beat the infamous Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels twice in one day without cheating. Sort of. I also didn’t warp, but one time in each version, I would have warped if I hadn’t rewound the game. Since a full tour of all the levels requires you not to warp, and since I had no intention to replay these once I was done, I used rewind to take me back to the start of the branching path. But that’s it. If I died or lost my power-up, I didn’t undo it. Now, at the start of this process, I didn’t intend to play the original FDS version as anything more than a sampling. In the original Famicom Disk Version, if you want to see four out of the five bonus worlds, you have to beat the game an absolutely ridiculous EIGHT TIMES. On Super Mario All-Stars, they’re lumped-in with the ninth world that you get for not warping. Besides, I was certain I would be miserable playing Lost Levels. I wasn’t, and thus:
Oh I didn’t beat the game eight times. I’m not that insane. Also, my FDS session came after I’d already beat the game with Mario on Super Mario All-Stars. One thing became really clear when I played the game with Luigi: the overwhelming majority of Lost Levels’ challenge is based around Mario, and only Mario. The only real difference in movement physics between Super Mario 1 and Super Mario 2 is that this game introduced the concept of Mario springing off enemies. It’s not as dramatic as it would eventually become, but Mario 2 is clearly the prototype for that gameplay concept. If that’s not the tough stuff, the sheer amount of long jumps and single-block platforms is.
Oh I died here. Damn turtle needed to be a little higher.
But all those jumping challenges were designed with Mario in mind. Platforms or long jumps that you need a running jump for with Mario can typically be handled by Luigi with a lot less effort. Luigi jumps a lot higher and a lot further, so unless there’s a low ceiling, he nerfs most of the tough jumps from the Mario side of the adventure. Luigi’s biggest drawback is how far he slides before coming to a stop when you use the B-run. Most of my deaths with Mario were from shorting jumps. Most of my deaths with Luigi were from some form of sliding, mostly off the edge of platforms. But, I had a much easier time adjusting to Luigi’s quirks than Mario’s shortcomings.
♫ Fly through the stage, Cathy! Zoom, zoom, zoom! Forgot for a second it’s not the thing to do! Lost another life sliding! Boo hoo hoo! This ain’t the red plumber! It’s a different hue! Luigi’s traction doesn’t stop like glue and I skid to my doom my darling!
One other thing became clear while playing this: I was wrong about Super Mario Bros. 2 or Lost Levels or Super Mario for Super Players or whatever else you want to call it. I always dismissed it as a glorified ROM hack, no different than any of the hundreds of fan-made ones of the original Super Mario Bros. I wasn’t entirely wrong, but I wasn’t entirely right, either. Yes, it’s just a mod of the original game with some changes to background graphics and a new whammy: the poison mushroom. I think the poison mushroom is a flop that only works the first time IF you don’t already know it’s coming. Once you adjust to it, it’s not that hard to just not pick it up even if you spring one from a question mark block. More problematic are the red piranha plants. Normally, the plants become shy if you stand next to the pipe, but the red ones require you to be ON the pipe to trigger their bashfulness.
They also added wind, but I didn’t think it was that big a deal. I didn’t lose more lives than average because of it. It’s not unpredictable. It’s just another fixture. Part of the level design. Hell, if anything, I welcomed it when it showed up because it broke up the monotony of playing more of the same with Super Mario Bros. I wish it had more gimmicks like that. It was certainly better than the green springs. They launch you so high into the sky that you can’t even see where you are. Well, except you can use the scrolling to aim. There’s two stages built entirely around them that both feel nearly identical. Launch off the spring, clear a massive gap, land on the next spring, or maybe it’s a small platform. They weren’t very hard, and I honestly didn’t remember losing a single life on either version. Actually I did lose one but it’s because I got greedy and tried to make it further than I realistically could.
This is the one I died on.
For all the hoopla of how hard Lost Levels was supposed to be, thanks to the 1-up trick (which is literally possible right at the start of level 1 – 1), I never came that close to a game over. The stages are hard but not insurmountable. I only timed-out once on one of the castle mazes. I only dropped ten lives or more in a single stage twice, and never when playing as Luigi. Hell, I was acing levels even late in the game. It’s tough and there’s a lot of trial and error, but once you get a feel for the design logic, it’s not that bad. Like, if a jump seems TOO impossible, chances are there’s invisible blocks around to provide some kind of assist or boost. That’s the part I was wrong about. It might be a glorified ROM hack, but there is a predictable method to the madness. Once I approached Lost Levels as a challenge of my gaming skills instead of as a gaming experience, it’s kind of an exciting game.
Really, just the act of taking your time should reduce the difficulty by 50%. I think a lot of the moaning is probably based on how quickly players are able to run through Super Mario 1. It’s one of the most speed-run games in history. But for Lost Levels, I noticed the more I paced myself, the fewer attempts I needed to beat a stage.
Where the game still feels kind of janky is in the difficulty scaling. One thing that the original Super Mario Bros. got right was the progression of the challenge. Well, that’s out the door here. Lost Levels has a difficulty curve that resembles a heart monitor. One of the levels I dropped more than ten lives on was 4 – 3, which it turns out is actually a cut & paste from the coin-op version of the original game, Vs. Super Mario Bros. Okay, that’s kind of funny, especially since I’m pretty sure that was the stage I died the most on. But then I breezed through worlds five and six and even got my first fire flower in a few worlds, which I still had to use against world six’s Bowser. Now, some of that can be chalked up to adapting to the types of challenges in the game. But certainly not all of it can be.
By the way, I was STUNNED by how easy World 9 was, though it seems that was meant as a kind of reward and a winking nod to the minus world from the original game by the development team. The color scheme for world 9 is especially weird on the Famicom Disk. It’s worth mentioning that the FDS version has an additional twist for world 9: you only get one life. Don’t worry though, because it’s not THAT tough as long as you remember to jump on the ceiling during the home stretch of 9 – 4.
But, to the shock of my friends, I had fun on Saturday playing this. Lost Levels became one of those games that I thought I’d knock out in a morning and instead I played it for the better part of a day and never really got bored. Okay, the whole “beat the game eight times to get the final four hidden worlds” thing is ridiculous, but future re-releases dumped that. I think Nintendo made a big mistake not bringing this out in America in the 80s. They really underestimated gamers. There’s people who beat games blindfolded, and they vetoed making millions off this because there’s a poison mushroom near the start of the first stage? Really? Oh, I’m totally fine with our version of Super Mario Bros. 2 getting the “#2” label, but if Nintendo was worried about alienating the fan base by releasing such a hard game, don’t call this Mario 2. Call it “More Super Mario Bros.” or something like that.
Skid to my doom……
….. my darling!
Lost Levels is actually very modern in many ways. I know I’ve said a lot of games feel like DLC packs, but in the case of Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, it REALLY feels like a prototype for modern DLC. It wouldn’t be hard to make this even more modern. Replace the lives system with a death counter and maybe a clock for speed runners and Lost Levels could pass for a 2025 design. So, yeah, I was wrong about Lost Levels, kind of. I really don’t think it’s for EVERYONE. If you’re not specifically seeking a challenge for your platforming skills, don’t bother. Nothing new it offers over Super Mario Bros. is worth the suffering you’ll experience, and that’s before I even consider that most of the elegance of the original game is lost. But if you want an often clever platforming challenge that maintains the purity of Super Mario 1, then I’d say Lost Levels is worth dying for again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again…………. Verdict: YES!
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe Platform: Game Boy Color Released May 10, 1999 Directed by Toshiaki Suzuki Developed by Nintendo NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Mario Wiki
Yes, this is as cool as it looks.
Want to play the best-selling classic version of a Mario game that isn’t currently on Switch Online? Well, here it is. Even though fourteen years had passed and everyone and their dog had probably already played Super Mario Bros. to death, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe sold a whopping five million copies on the Game Boy Color. Yeesh. One of those copies was purchased by my father with the intent to give it to his favorite daughter for her tenth birthday. But then Angela didn’t show up until 2010 so he gave it to me instead. And I…… never played it. Well, let me clarify: I threw it on for like fifteen minutes, but I had Pokemon to catch, and besides, there was an NES in our house. In fact, my pops had that NES longer than he’d had my mother. If I were to play Super Mario Bros. (and eventually I did), I’d rather play it on the NES than on this cramped-ass screen. Look how much is cut off:
Super Mario Bros. (1985 – NES)
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe (1999 – Game Boy Color)
But the truth is I never would have played it anyway. I was not into old games and that’s all there was to it. There were some exceptions of course like Castlevania or Wizards & Warriors (and the latter was because I was killing time waiting for a new console releasing THAT NIGHT, the Dreamcast) but at that age? I was downright hostile towards any game released before I got into gaming, and I’m ashamed to admit that I remained that way well into my twenties. Today I’m just a couple weeks away from turning 36 years old and, according to Feedspot, I have the second best retro gaming website/blog in the world (UpdateFebruary 2026: I’ve somehow fallen to #23 despite the fact that my page views have gone up even more since this review. Shrug). Go figure, right? The only comfort I take from looking back on my attitude is that I clearly wasn’t some kind of exceptional brat, because the kids in my life now are the same way I was. Sometimes I catch them in the right mood and they’re eager to help Aunt Cathy with a review that I need a co-op partner or versus opponent for, but for the most part with the older games, even the good ones, they’d rather be playing anything else. That doesn’t make them brats. No, they’re snobs, and I was one of them.
The swimming stages are why I couldn’t excuse Super Adventure Island. Unless you want to count Jungle Hunt, this is the first platformer with swimming stages, and if ANY game with swimming stages could get away with at least one basic straight line map where you swim right until you reach a goal, it’s Super Mario Bros. But there’s not a single straight line swimming level in the entire game. Even Super Mario’s most basic swimming stages have suction holes and hard surfaces to swim around, plus one of the great unsung basic enemy designs in gaming history: the Blooper squids. They have the perfect attack pattern to create an element of danger for the swimming mechanics. Level 2 – 2 all by itself makes Super Adventure Island’s two swimming stages look cynical and lazy, because, you know, they are.
Okay, so I’m still not the biggest fan of Super Mario Bros. even though I’m embarrassed, even ashamed, of my past attitude towards retro gaming. But, if 10 year old me had ever bothered to finish a full cycle of levels for Super Mario Deluxe, I think I would have enjoyed a lot of the bonus content. The main game? Not so much. Oh, I’m not going to argue that it’s a bad game. It’s not. It saved video games from the Crash of ’83 for a reason. It’s fantastic. But this is NOT the way to play it unless you’re playing it in the 2000s on a Game Boy Color. The screen is too cramped, and even though some elements were slightly modified to account for that, it’s still the same game as it was in 1985, only formatted for the Game Boy Color’s smaller dimensions. It matters a lot, actually.
Like this, which you get a LOT less warning on.
I won’t argue that every stage suffers from the smaller screen. Hell, a few are even enhanced by it. The bridges with the flying Cheep-Cheeps, for example. The cramped screen adds to the tension. But those benefits are significantly outweighed by the cost to the elegant platforming and enemy attack patterns. For example, the Hammer Bros. jumping moves are ruined by the smaller screen. The dungeon levels especially suffer badly from having less space to measure your jumps. You can scroll the screen up and down, but it’s not just an up or down problem. Super Mario reignited gaming because of how precise the levels are made. The jumps. The enemy placement. So much of that is lost when it takes longer to scroll those elements into existence.
Level 8 – 3 is one of the few stages that benefits from the smaller playfield. That’s mostly because it doesn’t have platforming. It’s oriented like an avoider, which inherently lends itself to the more compact screen.
If this doesn’t sound worthy of the “Deluxe” stamp, it’s really not. That comes from all the extra content, but even that isn’t perfect. Going into this review, I intended to play EVERYTHING in Deluxe, including the Lost Levels, aka Super Mario Bros. 2: The Original Japanese Version. If you score 300,000 points in the main mode, you unlock it. In Deluxe, it’s called “Super Mario Bros. For Super Players” but it’s Lost Levels. Except, it’s not ALL of Lost Levels. It only has the first eight worlds. Fans will note that both the Japanese game and the version contained in Super Mario All-Stars has thirteen worlds. Well, like the original Super Mario Bros. 2, they have to be unlocked, right? Nope. There’s no way to play the missing five worlds in Deluxe. Since I really don’t want to play through these stages twice in order to see them all, I decided to opt out after a couple stages and, instead, I’ll review this version of them very soon:
Thank God that Mario Deluxe has more than just that. There’s two stand-out modes that make this worth a look. The first is “challenge mode” which presents players with three specific extra challenges for the thirty-two main levels of the original game. I’ve always enjoyed collecting mechanics, and challenge mode is what convinced me this could be worth re-releasing or adding to the Switch Online service. The first task in each stage is to find five red coins. These could be hidden in blocks, or at the tail-end of a 10-coin block. Some are moderately well hidden but I never struggled all that much to snag all five. However, most of the red coins were satisfying enough to snag.
Some coins you have to look for. Others are just placed wherever they have room. Not every level really lends itself to the challenge mode’s style.
The second challenge is to score a target amount of points, and the target isn’t just some token number. They fine-tuned the score to be challenging enough that I couldn’t just breeze through it. Even when I realized that I needed to try to always get all six fireworks at the end of levels, I still found myself coming short a lot. More than once, I finished exactly one coin’s point value short of reaching the goal. Weirdly, I never got frustrated when this happened. It was fun enough that I wanted to keep trying to get it.
Finally, challenge mode features a hidden Yoshi egg somewhere in each stage. Now these are the real tricky ones to find because they’re always in invisible blocks. In theory, they could be anywhere. In practice, there’s a clear logic to where they’re hidden, so it doesn’t feel like they just stuck the things in arbitrary locations. Even armed with that awareness, it often took me a couple minutes at least to find the egg, and I was ALWAYS happy when I did. This is a great mode that’s worth a look.
Okay, that Yoshi egg is really bad looking. It just sticks out like a sore thumb. By the way, there’s a versus mode that I couldn’t test.
The final gameplay option was easily the highlight of my play session with Deluxe: You VS. Boo, which unlocks at 100,000 points. Unlike the previous challenges, these aren’t modified versions of Super Mario’s existing levels. This mode features eight all-new levels, and with those new levels comes several new gameplay mechanics. The idea is you’re racing a Boo to the flagpole. The Boo can pass through solid objects, but it doesn’t hurt you to touch it. Along the way, you’ll encounter Face Blocks that activate or deactivate blocks that can create roadblocks OR become valuable platforms. As you race, Boo has the ability to activate the blocks in a way that screws you. There’s also numbered blocks that work like the face blocks, only they’re triggered automatically after counting down. And yes, if your timing and Boo’s timing are in sync, you can absolutely screw yourself because Boo hit the switch before you completed your jump.
There’s also a new kind of spring block and spiked blocks that become solid blocks. What makes this REALLY work is that all eight of these levels feature exceptionally fantastic level design. Seriously, these are some of the strongest levels in the entire Mario catalog. What I hate is how little weight is given to the racing scores themselves. As far as I could tell, the game doesn’t keep track of your time, at least in a way the player can see it. You have to use the countdown timer and keep track of it yourself. Well, except for the fact that, if you rematch the Boo on the same course, his next time will change relative to how well you did the last race. If you do well enough, he’ll even change colors. The one you want to unlock is the black Boo since that indicates the fastest times.
So yes, Nintendo probably should include Super Mario Bros. Deluxe in the Switch Online lineup. There’s some content here that’s worth a look. I can’t stress enough how much I enjoyed the Boo racing, but the collect-a-thon had its charms, too. I’d even say this content by itself earned the “deluxe” title. BUT, if I had to choose between uploading this cramped-screen Game Boy Color version OR creating a whole new version of Super Mario Deluxe that uses the full dimensions. I’d rather have the new remake. Super Mario Bros. just plain isn’t made for this aspect ratio. I guess the Boo race feels optimized for it. I mean, kinda, but I’m pretty sure it would be better in full-screen as well. What I’m even more frustrated with is that in 1999, 10 year old me brushed-off Mario Deluxe as just an old game. If only I had actually played it, who knows? Maybe I’d have the #1 ranked site. Verdict: YES!
Hey, let’s get my fortune read!
I’m pretty sure that’s a weather report, not a fortune.
Milon’s Secret Castle aka Meikyuu Kumikyoku: Miron no Daibouken Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy NES Version Released November 13, 1986
Game Boy Version Released March 26, 1993 Developed by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE
The lightning bolt to the left of me damaged me before the game handed me back control of the character. Things like this happened CONSTANTLY throughout both my play sessions with the NES version of the game. If it wasn’t outside the castle, I would exit a shop in one of the stages and literally, as soon as the character spawned, I would hear the DONG of getting life slapped by an enemy that I literally could not have avoided. You would think this should, by itself, assure a NO! verdict. But it’s a lot more complicated than that.
At times, Milon’s Secret Castle is one of those abstract treasure hunt games that you need a guide for, unless you want to spend the next week jumping around while trying to figure out what item does what thing. Let me assure you this isn’t as bad as, say, Vs. The Goonies where stuff is hidden in completely arbitrary locations and must be collected by performing completely arbitrary button inputs that nobody should have ever been able to suss out. Seriously, when I read a guide to a game like Goonies, I assume one of two things happened. Either the developers leaked the locations of the hidden stuff or someone out there wasted their once-in-a-generation brain on video games instead of quantum physics and set humanity back a century in the process. Thinking about that sh*t leaves me unable to sleep sometimes. “Well, we’ll never figure out how to make a warp drive in my lifetime, but at least we have a full walk-through for Tower of Druaga.” And then comes the crying.
Out of the many, many hints, maybe one or two actually helped. This is not one of them.
While Milon isn’t as extreme as those games, I also can’t imagine being able to play it without a guide. The idea is you’re supposed to hop around a series of rooms while shooting every hard surface with bubbles. Some of the walls and floors might be hiding money under them. There’s also hidden shops, hidden honeycombs (which increase your health by a single meter), and occasionally the Hudson bee, which grants you a shield. But, there are no key items hidden in the blocks. Until the end of the third world, all those have to be purchased in stores. Enemies don’t drop currency, so there’s only two ways to get cash. One is to find it in the rooms. The catch there is once you’ve collected a money tile, it never comes back. There’s a single room on the game’s third world (well, third floor) where, for whatever reason, some (but not all) of the money tiles respawn. It’s this room:
NES
Game Boy
When I played the NES game, I was certain this was some kind of glitch that wasn’t deliberate. But, that room gets a refill on the Game Boy version too. So, if you do want to grind, that’s eventually an option at around the halfway mark of the game. The other method is to enter the bonus rooms. There’s one hidden within each of the seven “normal” rooms in the game that you have to find by Mario-bonking blocks instead of shooting them. Find the right block and it reveals a music box. Touch the music box to enter the bonus room. In them, you have to collect music notes that fly up onto the screen. Notes are worth one point, sharps (they look like hash marks) are worth two, while flat notes (they look a lowercase b), subtract a point. You get $1 for every four points you get, unless you get 50, at which point the payout doubles. I never did this once on the NES even when I tried to cheat it. On the Game Boy, I did it twice without the need for emulation tomfoolery. That’s because on the NES version, the movement physics change in the bonus rooms, becoming slow to respond to your inputs, something that doesn’t happen on the Game Boy.
NES
Game Boy
I kind of wish that Milon ditched the bonus rooms and the ability to grind the stone room, because early in the game, the hunt for money was actually pretty damn fun, as were my searches for the doors to the shops. The titular castle serves as the overworld. The doors aren’t numbered, nor are you prevented from returning to any level. When I attempted to play without a guide, I found myself enjoying shooting all the various walls, smiling with delight when I finally found a buck or two I missed the first time. There’s a nice little “puff” effect when you find a destructible tile, which also carries over to the Game Boy version.
It also does the “tease stuff that you can’t reach now but will be able to eventually” trope a couple times, though never as successfully as, say, a Zelda game.
Technically you’re locked into every room and have to locate a key before being allowed out. This mechanic wasn’t as successful as the other treasure hunting aspects. I don’t remember ever struggling to find a key. What could have made it work is having the key and the exit move around every time you reenter a stage, but actually, once you have a room’s key, you never need to find it again. However, you do need to reactivate the hidden doors. This is one of many areas where the Game Boy version falters. Making the invisible doors visible was never an issue on the NES. If anything, it felt like it was too easy. On the Game Boy, the collision box on the hidden doors must be pretty damn small because I could shoot the correct tile and sometimes it didn’t appear. Which actually is in line with all the other problems the Game Boy port has with doors. More on that later.
NES
Game Boy
What’s most remarkable is that, despite the repetitive enemy and boss design, each room in Milon’s Secret Castle feels distinct. It’s not just the color schemes, either. It’s the general architecture of the rooms. The layouts. No new room feels even a little close to being like any previous one until a pair of twin rooms near the end of the game. Given the time frame and the limitations of the NES/Famicom in 1986, that’s an amazing achievement that I wasn’t expecting going into this review. It certainly helps with the exploration, as well. Unless you use a strategy guide, you’ll no-doubt miss things and have to backtrack, but you should be able to know which room is which. Plus, it just makes for a better game because it’s hard to get bored when every room feels like a new experience.
So, what’s the problem? You mean besides the fact that both games are riddled with technical problems? Because that’s not a nothingburger. On the NES, you can.. and will.. be damaged by enemies when the game is caught in an animation of you entering and exiting a castle door. You are NOT invincible when the game mechanics take over. It’s certain to happen at least a couple times in a typical session and I even ate a GAME OVER from it at one point. On the Game Boy, it happens a lot less. In fact, I only had this happen once, but the delay between the act of being damaged and registering the damage was jaw-dropping. Still, it seems like the Game Boy should be the stronger version of the two. It had an extra seven years to fix all the problems, right? Well……….
SPLIT DECISION: GAME BOY VERSION
The Game Boy version of Milon’s Secret Castle is a direct port of the NES game, but it does have some advantages. Money is easier to come by, some items are cheaper (the thing that doubles the damage of your bubbles especially), bosses can only shoot one projectile at a time (this might be a negative if you want more challenging boss battles), bosses can be shot anywhere (ditto), and the castle doors aren’t as spread out, making memorizing the layout a cinch. BUT, activating the castle doors is borderline broken on the Game Boy. I had to press UP multiple times more than once to actually get myself to go through a door. Sometimes it took me so long that I triggered the lightning storm and had to move out the way to dodge the bolts flying at me several times in a row before it finally let me in. I just went back and checked it to see what the hell happened, and I take it you have to be dead center on a door. I honestly wonder if it’s a single pixel wide. See this door?
In the following screenshots, pressing UP could not, did not, and would not open the f*cking door.
And I actually think the gates are worse. Here’s the gate:
In the following screenshots, pressing UP could not, did not, and would not open the f*cking gate.
That wasn’t a rare occurrence. It was like that from the start of the game until the finish and it’s so far beyond irrational that I wanted to pull my hair out. By the way, that wasn’t the deal breaker, nor was the cramped screen. The deal breaker was the Game Boy version of Milon’s Secret Castle suffers from slowdown constantly, even when there’s hardly anything on screen. By 1993, I feel a developer of the caliber of Hudson Soft should have been able to do better than this. Maybe for 1993, it was cool to have a close approximation of a 1986 NES game in portable form, but it’s not 1993 anymore and there’s no reason to play this today. It’s certainly not a good version of Milon’s Secret Castle. It feels like the whole game could crash at any moment. The “improvements” aren’t so much “improvements” as they’re the easy mode of the NES game, but their gains are negated many times over by the problematic mechanics. Game Boy Verdict: NO! But this review is not over.
SPLIT DECISION: NES VERSION
This thing looks like the cartoon villain of a breath mint commercial. Or a wet wipes commercial. By the way, Milon has a timing issue with bosses. Some are practically fought back-to-back, and it feels jarring when that happens. I look at boss fights as a game’s metronome. They set a tempo. Milon’s metronome needs its batteries changed.
I made a good faith effort of beating Milon without a guide, and I did figure out a lot of it on my own. Like I figured out that, once you have the right item, there’s hidden doors in the overworld that you smash through with the right item. But, that came after a part I got stuck on. There’s pushable blocks in the rooms, only they don’t push right away. You have to walk up against them for longer than you would expect to activate the move, and I needed the guide to tell me that. I also needed the guide to explain the items before I bought them. Maybe the instruction books had this information, but I absolutely did need an assist playing Milon.
The climax was confusing as all hell. Maybe if I had spent a week trying to work this game out, I could have solved it on my own without a strategy guide. But it’s not so good that I want to put that kind of time investment into it.
With that said, I have zero objections to using strategy guides, and StrategyWiki has a highly detailed one for this game. Very nice. Plus, Milon isn’t so abstract that I needed it from start to finish. Actually, the climax of the game kind of threw me off. Because the fourth and final floor I finished in maybe two minutes, if that. I really wondered if I’d gotten the “correct” ending because it seemed too easy after everything that came before it. Well, it turns out that the ending is based on blind RNG luck. There’s only one door to enter on the fourth floor, and it brings you to a room that’s one color, and at the top of that room is a boss. Only, there’s a 75% chance it won’t actually be the final boss. It turns out there’s four rooms that are mostly identical except what color they are. You enter them by going left and right in the starting room, but I didn’t get a chance to do that because, on my first AND second times beating the game, the yellow room was the correct room.
It’s a dumb way to end the game. Stop and think about it: since there’s no way to logic-out which is the correct color room, ANYONE is just going to systematically clear out each room before moving onto the next. All this “twist” does is randomly decide how many times you have to do that before it counts. In the one and only time I beat the Game Boy version, it was the third room, and it was boring after the first room. So, Milon’s Secret Castle doesn’t stick the landing on a satisfying ending, but what led up to it wasn’t a bad game, actually. Okay, so there’s a lot of head-shaking dumb choices. One of the items is the feather. What does that do? See this elevator:
I didn’t get the best screenshots. I guess I didn’t realize how engrossed in the gameplay I was. That probably says more about how much I enjoyed Milon than the review does.
The feather allows you to stand on it. Otherwise, you clip through it. There’s a hidden shop at the top of the elevator shaft that contains the upgrade to your weapon. By the way, that is literally the only elevator in the entire game. But, like, getting the weapon upgrade makes it worth it, right? Well, sure. Except, you know, you don’t actually need to be on the elevator to enter the shop. A well placed jump from either side works just as well. Unlike the overworld, you don’t have to hold “up” to enter a door in the rooms. It’s automatically done when your sprite hits the right spot on the door. They needed to come up with something better for the feather, which is a relatively expensive item. Maybe make it spawn the door itself?
The green thing in this pic is the boxing glove, which cuts your sprite size in half. But, entering a shop in the level undoes its effect. There’s tons of trap doors in Milon’s Secret Castle that were clearly placed where they were to prevent players from soft locking.
Milon has even more problems that would be deal breakers in most games. The combat is just not that good, in my opinion. Hell I’d even go so far as to say that element is well below-average. Your bubbles can be aimed high or low, but they never feel like they pack a punch. Enemies can be cheap, but even when they’re not, they don’t have memorable design or complex attack patterns except a single fireball that’s indestructible unless you possess a specific item, and even after you do it takes sixteen hits to kill and doesn’t pay off. It feels like something that was meant to be important, only the important part was left on the drawing board. Worst of all is that the bosses are not fun. Okay, maybe the first is, but since they’re all kind of samey, that wears off since they all have, more or less, the same attack patterns. The controls are a little stiff, especially the jumping before you get the power-ups that fix it. This is a fairly early NES game, and the developmental learning curve is plainly visible.
This maze is a one-off type of level that was the only “stage” I felt was no good.
But Milon’s Secret Castle never feels like a game that you would play for combat anyway. For all badly designed mechanics, the exploration and startlingly well-done level design make it all work. Seriously, this is a 1986 NES game. Having every level feel unique didn’t happen all that much back then. Even Super Mario Bros. didn’t pull THAT off. But, because such care was taken to make each room feel different, Milon aged better as a fantasy experience than most games. A lot better, in fact. Hudson didn’t come out of Adventure Island: The Definitive Review looking amazing, and a lot of their early NES games were rougher than sandpaper. Milon’s is just as rough as any other game from this stage of the NES’ existence. But Milon’s Secret Castle makes it clear: someone at Hudson Soft knew what they were doing. NES Verdict: YES!
“I didn’t know that was a Zelda game!” One of the kids. I laughed.
I’m not trying to single out Konami. I mean, not maliciously, at least. But, they have an extensive library that’s mostly collecting dust. 99% of their catalog has no presence in modern gaming. So I’m going to keep doing these features until they start doing more compilations, and BETTER compilations. One franchise they own after their acquisition of Hudson Soft is Adventure Island. While they published a Japanese exclusive PS2/GameCube game and a WiiWare title (not included in this feature) along with several releases for Nintendo’s Virtual Console service, they haven’t really done a lot with it since. It’s been over a decade since the franchise’s last release, unless you count New Adventure Island’s appearance in the TurboGrafx-16 Mini. That doesn’t really work for me. So, like I did with Konami Shoot ’em Ups and McDonald’s video games, let’s make a pretend set!
2026 will mark the 40th birthday of the series, so I want you to pretend that I’m reviewing a compilation called Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection. I think it would retail for between $29.99 to $39.99. Assuming the collection has all the expected emulation bells and whistles and earns my mandatory $10 in bonus value, the eleven games have to create $20 to $30 in total value to combine with the emulator and match the expected retail price range. I’m adding a bonus review of a ROM hack of Adventure Island that I think would be a great example of a bonus feature for such a collection that isn’t so far out of bounds that there’s no chance something like it would be included. Here’s the lineup:
Imagine what their kids will look like.
Adventure Island (NES)
Adventure Island (MSX)
Takahashi Meijin no Bug-tte Honey (Famicom)
Adventure Island II (NES)
Super Adventure Island (SNES)
Adventure Island (Game Boy)
New Adventure Island (TurboGrafx-16)
Adventure Island 3 (NES)
Adventure Island II (Game Boy)
Adventure Island IV (Famicom)
Super Adventure Island II (SNES)
Adventure Island Abridged (NES ROM Hack)
WONDER BOY vs. ADVENTURE ISLAND
Adventure Island is always on the left. Wonder Boy for arcades is always in the center. Wonder Boy for the Sega Master System is always on the right.
Adventure Island (1986 NES)
Wonder Boy (1984 Arcade)
Wonder Boy (1987 Sega Master System)
Before I get started, I suppose I should mention Wonder Boy, even though it really only matters for the first game in the franchise. What happened? Well, it’s really not THAT complicated. Sega already owned the rights to Wonder Boy by the time Hudson took a license. How is that possible? Well, because the gameplay was owned by Wonder Boy’s original developer, Westone. But, Westone could technically still license the formula, level design, and basically everything but the name and character sprites. It was wise of them to do so, as Adventure Island for the NES/Famicom is far and away the most successful version of Wonder Boy and the only member of either franchise verified to have sold a million copies.
Adventure Island (1986 NES)
Wonder Boy (1984 Arcade)
Wonder Boy (1987 Sega Master System)
Since I love to do food for thought bonkers conspiracy theories, here’s one for you: I wonder if Hudson took the license to keep their options open with the Mickey Mouse license they already had. If development on their own in-house Mickey Mouse title for the Famicom wasn’t coming along well, they could just parachute him into the Wonder Boy framework they now co-owned. Is it THAT hard to imagine putting a Mickey Mouse sprite into these settings? Anyway, Hudson removed the Wonder Boy characters and replaced them with a guy named Takahashi Meijin. Who is that? He basically became a spokesman for Hudson Soft and was famous for being able to mash buttons crazy fast. He was VERY popular in the 80s and early 90s in Japan, getting his own anime (which is basically based on Adventure Island), manga, and video game franchises. Adventure Island? That’s HIS franchise. For western releases, the character was given the more American sounding name “Master Higgins” but really, it’s Takahashi.
1st Boss – Adventure Island (1986 NES)
1st Boss – Wonder Boy (1984 Arcade)
1st Boss – Wonder Boy (1987 Sega Master System)
Thus, the great Wonder Boy/Adventure Island split was now set to happen. Despite the typical hand wave of the two games being identical, they’re actually not the same exact game. Wonder Boy doesn’t have the fireball upgrade for the axe. That’s a BIG deal. As challenging as Adventure Island is, the fireballs and their ability to remove the stones and large boulders actually makes it significantly less challenging than the coin-op. Well, provided you can hang onto it. There’s idiosyncrasies to the controls, too. I think Adventure Island has easier jumping, while I found the skateboard controlled better on the coin-op. In my full no-cheating playthrough of Adventure Island, I never managed to finish a stage while still riding the board even once. Wonder Boy has no bonus stages at all and is missing many of the invisible eggs from Adventure Island.
The Sega Master System version of Wonder Boy has to be one of the most overrated ports in gaming history. Of the three “major” versions of Wonder Boy, it controls the worst, EASILY. If you’re curious why I could match the NES and Arcade pics but not the SMS ones, it’s because there were no matches in the corresponding stages on SMS. In fact, level 1 – 4 has an extended stretch where there’s no enemies or anything. That’s what the picture above is. While the graphics are very impressive for the time frame and it adds warp zones and “bonus” worlds, seriously, who cares? Gameplay is king, and the gameplay of Wonder Boy SMS is not up to snuff. In 2025, that’s all that should matter. I’m already working on Wonder Boy Anniversary Collection: The Definitive Review but I’m spacing myself out since playing different versions of the same RPG over and over is exhausting.
Finally, the (terrible) Sega Master System port of Wonder Boy has a 9th world followed by a hidden 10th world if you collect all 36 dolls (aka the pots from the NES version). Besides the hidden eggs and bonus stages, there’s no hidden content on the NES game. I’ll be reviewing Wonder Boy Anniversary Collection in the near future, but I wanted to make it clear that Adventure Island, despite its status as a full re-spriting of Wonder Boy, has its own individual gameplay merits and detriments that are worthy of consideration.
GAME REVIEWS
For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!
YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.
NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.
VALUE DISCLAIMER: The value I award any game in any collection, real or imaginary, should NOT be compared to the values I award games in other features. All value is relative to the games in the collection only, not to all games I’ve ever played or reviewed in other collections.
IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER
Hudson’s Adventure Island aka Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima Reworking of Wonder Boy by Westone Bit Entertainment Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released September 12, 1986 Developed by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Wonder Boy – Strategy
Seconds after this was taken, Master Higgins attempted to jump Springfield Gorge on his skateboard. Wait, wrong Definitive Review.
I’ve previously never liked Adventure Island. I’d also previously never really treated it like a raw video game challenge. Usually, I only try to ace a game if I have fun with the experience. Castlevania is a game I wanted to beat without losing a life. Same with Contra. A reason why is that those games offer set-pieces, unique settings, different bosses at the end of each stage, and a sense of grandeur. Adventure Island offers 32 levels, but you’ve seen every type of enemy, including the bosses (more or less) by the end of the first world and every setting once you reach level 4 – 2. It also has a big learning curve to the movement physics, especially the jumping. There’s two specific heights to your jumps, the highest of which requires you to either be holding B or jumping after already having jumped. Plus you have to factor-in momentum when you land. It’s safe to say that sliding into enemies is going to cause a lot of your deaths, maybe even more than death by pits. That’s why I was certain I’d be miserable reviewing this. I wasn’t.
The above screenshot had me literally scream with excitement and joy, but on a second or two delay. I didn’t get a good shot of it, but Master Higgins’ sprite passed right through that frog that’s left of the rock in that first pic, since were both mid-air at the time. This was after my practice sessions, during one of my runs where I disabled rewind. When it happened, I had to take a moment to process “no, I’m not in the death sprite.” Then came the hooting and hollering. It was exhilarating! I’ve never been so happy to have a collision detection f*ck-up. It wasn’t a one-off, either, as I had plenty of moments like that playing Adventure Island. That’s because this time I went in with a different attitude than I normally have playing games like this. Instead of looking for a gaming experience, I treated it like a gaming test. A challenge. Could I beat it, straight-up, no cheating? Actually, my challenge was “could I beat it, no cheating, without needing a continue?” That challenge I failed, and then failed again and again in subsequent attempts. But, in my best run, I only needed one continue to see the ending.
In order to continue, you have to collect Hudson’s logo, this bee, at the end of level 1 – 1. I never managed to come close to beating the game without it. While I reached the point that I could beat Abridged (the ROM hack that I review as a bonus at the end of this feature) without dying, my best run in normal Adventure Island saw me make it to 7 – 1 before eating a Game Over. By the way, even with the bee you need to do a code to continue. You have to hold a direction, apparently any direction, and press start. Why not just let people continue?
After beating the game with cheating, I knew I had two weaknesses. Well, really three if you count the climax of level 8 – 3, which is the only part of the level design I feel crossed the line into outright bullsh*t. It’s a series of spread-out dropping platforms with trollishly-placed bats. I needed to rewind and do it about three dozen times on my first playthrough just to finish it once. I never reached the point where I could do it twice in a row, either. You need pitch-perfect timing, alternating between holding B to run and pushing B to throw your weapon or else the bats will kill you. It’s harder than it sounds because of how the momentum of movement works. If this is part of the Sega Master System build, with THAT version’s physics? I honestly don’t know how I’ll be able to do it. Anyway, in my real playthrough? I needed four attempts but I got it. No problem (wipes sweat).
This is the only screenshot I got of the segment. I knew I could finish this without cheating. I’d practiced up and got the timing down. Still, it’s the hardest segment in the game, BY FAR, and when the time came, I wasn’t confident, and for good reason, as I dropped three lives on it. I had no lives to spare going into the final stage, but I did it! This is legitimately one of my proudest gaming accomplishments.
The reason why I wasn’t so confident is because the other challenge I’d practiced-up on didn’t go so well. Adventure Island has my old arch nemesis: ice levels. Actually, it wasn’t so much the levels themselves but rather one tactic they kept going to again and again: having you make a long jump that culminates with some form of a wall WITH an icicle hanging above the wall. These require very precise jumping because, if you hit the ground with any momentum, death is all but certain. So, how did I do? Well, in the first instance of this booby trap in level 4 – 3, I died twice in a row. Awesome, Cathy.
Level 4 – 3
Level 4 – 3
Later, the same trope got me again. So, I lost three total lives to that, but that wasn’t the bane of my existence. Before I explain what is, let me first state that the thing I was most wrong about with Wonder Boy/Adventure Island is the hunger system. It actually works really well to “keep you honest” by forcing you to constantly grab items. You CANNOT go into cruise control playing Adventure Island, but the hunger system also creates tons of risk/reward situations throughout the game. Even though I practiced up, I didn’t exactly memorize the locations of the food or what levels went stretches where the food drops become stingy. Sometimes, even low on health, it’s tempting to pass up a higher risk food item, or maybe one that you’d have to turn around to get. It’s REALLY well done and one of the best health mechanics in an 80s game, arcade, home, or otherwise.
Level 7 – 1 was the end of my initial set of lives. What got me? The same thing that got me the most: the damn eggplant.
What especially makes the food work is the eggplant, which replaces the Grim Reaper from Wonder Boy. It’s worth noting that the eggplant goes away a lot faster than the Grim Reaper does, but I think Adventure Island’s eggplant drains health quicker. When you have it, you have to sprint and collect food fast, because you will run out of health in just a few seconds once the eggplant is activated. If I can get the damn eggplant locations memorized, I probably could do a no-continues run through the game. I had an uncanny knack for getting them when my health was already trickling away. Later in the game, they created multiple situations (sometimes twice in one level) where the eggplant is all but unavoidable. Maybe. I learned to jump over the bad one in 8 – 1.
I went full pony on this one (I screamed until I was a little hoarse). This is NOT a life I should have lost. This was just stupidity.
For the most part, I did pretty damn good. More importantly, I had a ton of fun. I didn’t when I was practicing. While I still firmly believe that you need to include all emulator features with EVERY game (at least when it’s possible), this is certainly a game that doesn’t benefit from taking a full game tour just for the sake of it. Levels are too samey for that, and so are the bosses. Only the last one feels like it’s not just adding hit points, and really, it’s only because of the angle it throws fireballs. Otherwise, the bosses are arguably the weak link in the game. They’re not even as strong an end-of-level boss as Bowser is in the original Super Mario Bros. Bowser changes up tactics more than these eight bosses do.
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So, if you just want to veg out and use an emulator to play a game from start to finish, consider this game a NO! because it’s just too limited. It can’t get away with the same thing, say, a Castlevania game can. The sights and sounds just aren’t that interesting. Once you’ve seen all the enemies, the game has nothing left to offer. Adventure Island’s sole value is as a well-developed, clockable, white-knuckle platforming challenge. What makes it work is how damn “pure” it is for a lack of a better term. There’s no twists or turns and no unexpected GOTCHA! moments. Well, except the eggplants but the placement of them always feels fine-tuned. Most notable of all: the game scales damn near perfectly. It’s a remarkable achievement given how few enemies, settings, items, and environmental hazards they had to rearrange. Even late in the game, Adventure Island will throw at you a new arrangement of the same enemies or hazards that’s ever so slightly tougher than the previous similar arrangement. I’m going to assume they didn’t just luck-out with it and this is a game made with full awareness of the why of gaming difficulty. As an experience, Adventure Island runs out of steam in 15 to 20 minutes, if that. As a test of your raw platforming skills? Adventure Island is actually immune to aging and, arguably, the perfect platformer. Verdict: YES! **FLIP** – $5 in value added to Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection
Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima aka Adventure Island aka Wonder Boy, apparently. Platform: MSX Released in 1986 Developed by Hudson Soft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Listing at Generation-MSX
Death by rock is only acceptable when paired with “roll.” And cocaine.
Do you know why I died in the above picture? Because I had been on a skateboard and crashed into the rock, but that took away all my momentum, and then I couldn’t move myself off the rock and went from nearly full health to no health. Here’s the only other screenshot I got of it from a second before.
I assure you I *am* stuck on that rock. It literally juggled me to death even though I was trying to move off it and holding the direction pad the entire time.
It’s indicative of a larger problem with the MSX build of Adventure Island. The whole “momentum physics” of the coin-op Wonder Boy is taken to an extreme here. Like, if you jump on a spring and you don’t already have full momentum, there’s a very good chance you’ll land on the spring’s sprite. Directly in front of it at the most. Whatever. Don’t expect this to be a port of the NES game. Instead of having thirty-two levels, there’s.. ahem.. eight. Total. Takes maybe ten minutes to finish, even if you die. Fifteen minutes tops, and every second of that is awful. Sorry MSX fans. You know I love you and I love MSX, but this is a TERRIBLE port.
As if the game itself wanted the suffering to end as quickly as possible, the last level starts you with the MSX equivalent of the fairy to give you a free pass through the first third of the stage.
Despite the classic Adventure Island hero sprite, this is clearly more Wonder Boy. Hell, I looked for the ROM for a solid two or three minutes before my father asked “is it called Wonder Boy?” It was. Even the music is adapted from the coin-op instead of the NES game. But, it feels more like an Atari attempt at either. While the game has eggs, you automatically start every life with a weapon anyway. Only it looks more like a boomerang you’re throwing. All enemies, including the frogs, die in one hit and they’ve never been less of a threat. Except the wolves, which no longer have a warning flower. The game tries to squeeze a lot of challenge into a tiny package, but once I realized I had to hold B to jump even when it SEEMED like I didn’t need it, I was fine. Until the bosses at least.
No joke, that really is the last boss. It looks like a smug version of He-Man. Granted, there’s only two bosses, but the first one doesn’t look THAT dorky.
The bosses throw quick-moving fireballs that bounce across the screen. Because the act of turning around takes more time in this version than any other, the bosses are actually pretty dang hard to beat. That’s probably a good thing since Wonder Boy/Adventure Island/Takahashi would be completely toothless without them. The MSX has a lot of amazing games. Hell, the MSX library out-earned the NES library in Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review. But, the only value of Adventure Island on MSX would have for the Adventure Island set is as curio. They should still include it as a bonus, but I somehow doubt anyone would play it for more than a minute or two. It’s pretty dang bad. Short, broken, and miserable. Hell, if this had come out in 1989 I’d think it might be my long-lost twin. Verdict: NO!
Takahashi Meijin no Bug-tte Honey Platform: Famicom Released June 5, 1987 Developed by Hudson Soft Never Released Outside of Japan NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED Wikis: Wonder Boy – Strategy
The two screenshots below are from the same game, taken just about 10 seconds apart.
If you’re saying “what the f*ck?!” hey, I’m right there with you! Okay, so first off, THIS IS the second game in the Adventure Island franchise. It’s actually based on an anime that was loosely based on Adventure Island called Bug-tte Honey or “Honey Bee in Toycomland.” While you might consider it a spin-off, it has four worlds, three of which you play as Takahashi, aka Master Higgins. The object of the game is to collect the eight characters that make up the password of each stage. It’s not a password in the “input characters and return to the stage you were on” sense. It’s a macguffin that finishes the stage. To get the letters or numbers that form the passwords, you have to collect them from the brick breaker stages. Each stage’s overworld has ten hidden eggs, as in “they’re invisible until you shoot the spot they’re located.” It’s pretty much identical in that sense to another Hudson Soft game that was released three months before this: Mickey Mousecapade. You know how you shoot the wall with the stars in that game and it reveals life or fairies or hidden passageways? Like that, only with eggs. It looks like this:
One of the ten eggs flashes. It tells you what your progress is on the password but otherwise is only good to clear the screen of baddies. Eight of the ten eggs take you directly into a brick breaker stage, while the final one that’s indistinguishable from the “right” eggs is actually a whammy that sends you to brick breaker hell. And I do mean that literally.
You can’t break any of the bricks in hell and just have to bounce the fast-moving ball around until it escapes through the top. In the overworld, the locations of some of the eggs and the order of which eggs take you to which brick breaker stage apparently changes from game to game, which is really the only major positive thing I can say about Bug-tte Honey. The overworld is four or five screens wide and contains buildings you can enter, each of which contains a single egg that’s also hidden somewhere within. This part of the game is essentially the Sega shmup classic Fantasy Zone (which I will be giving the Definitive Review treatment sometime in the near future), only as a platformer. Well, except for the first stage. Level One ignores the platforming bits and IS Fantasy Zone, since you play as a flying fairy and can move freely around the screen.
The interiors of the buildings are about two or three screens wide, but often the egg is just right there near the door. Every single one of these, throughout the entire game, feels like a complete waste of a mechanic. They’re mostly empty and offer nothing besides the act of finding that one egg.
The physics of the platforming bits are like a slightly warped version of Wonder Boy/Adventure Island. The problem is that those physics are made for a game that’s really about just moving right, jumping over gaps, and throwing axes. This isn’t like that. You have to explore, and having sluggish controls with enemies like these? Not fun. The enemies really are very shmup-like, often spamming the screen in all directions with projectiles. They can fire so many at once that I often just had to accept taking damage and hope a heart was underneath one of the destructible fixtures. I didn’t, say, rewind the structure over and over until I got a heart. Why would you think that?
Once most enemies start shooting, they don’t stop shooting. I’d kill this guy, but you can’t attack through those dark gray stones. You know, like he can! You can try scrolling them off the screen, but they’re just as likely to return with a friend as they are to vanish. If I want to move left here, I have to accept, at minimum, a single shot of damage. The life-bar is functionally pointless because you have three hits no matter how full it is, so really, you can only survive getting pinged twice before dying.
When you find the eggs, the game becomes a sort of Arkanoid-like brick breaker, only it’s two-screens tall. There’s an upper and lower screen, sort of like Nintendo’s Pinball. If the ball falls out of the bottom screen, you lose a paddle. Lose three paddles and you lose a life and you’re sent back to the overworld. If, while transitioning from the bottom to the top screen you hit the ball with the underneath side of the top paddle, the ball becomes pink and can break through multiple blocks. There’s one type of enemy who I never figured out what exactly they do. Even though they hit my paddle plenty of times, they never killed me. This isn’t a cheating thing, either. I honestly never figured out the point to them besides they sometimes cause your ball to ricochet off in another direction. I only just now learned they remove the red from your ball. Which wears off anyway. I mean, it’s so inconsequential that I literally have no clue why they’re there. I guess because Arkanoid has enemies.
See the letter? That’s the point. Or possibly a whammy.
Now, here’s where Bug-tte Honey lost me for good. Well, besides the Arkanoid layouts being pretty bad. My ball got caught in back-and-forth cycles so many times that it just made the whole thing agony. The first time it happened, I thought I’d soft-locked the game because it went on so long that it seemed like they had nothing in place to resolve this. Eventually the ball changed direction spontaneously, but only after what felt like an eternity passed. But, what makes it even worse is there’s fake letters hidden with the real one. Each of the eight Arkanoid puzzles in every stage has one, and only one, authentic letter. The other three will instantly kill your paddle. How do you know which is the real one and which isn’t? If you don’t look up the solutions (which never change, though there is a second quest with four new passwords), you’ll have to rely on pure blind luck for the first couple rooms.
I’m going to spoil one egg location for you. In world four, this is the only hidden egg that has a special rule attached. You have to press the fire button 16 times in a single second in honor of Takahashi Meijin, who the statue is based on. I had to use the autofire function on my controller, cranked up higher than I normally have it set, and even then, it took me a while to figure out where to do it from. Actually, I spent over an hour looking for the egg before I gave up and looked it up in a guide, which explained the 16 shots a second thing, and instructed me to not stand directly on top of the statue but close to it. It didn’t work. How did I finally get it? Standing directly on top of it.
I didn’t understand the rules at first and so I did spoil the first world. I didn’t for worlds 2 – 4. Well, I did figure out the passwords for worlds two and three. World four’s was complicated because it introduced numbers to the equation and I ended up eating a ton of whammies. Anyway, I found this whole premise to be pretty dumb in general. I’m of the opinion you’re either in the mood for a brick breaker or you’re in the mood for anything else. It’s typically not compatible with other genres because it’s a genre that goes at its own pace.
The bombs blow-up entire rows, provided they aren’t interrupted by an unbreakable block. Oh, and the correct letters can be in either screen, so 32 brick breaker rooms is really 64.
“Last Mother F*ck’n Brick Syndrome” is in full effect here, and it murders the flow of the game. Even though there’s a couple Arkanoid-like boosts, including an unlimited ray gun (though it does take a couple seconds to charge between shots) and an item that allows you to knock the live ball back up in the air before it hits the paddle. But, most of the puzzles incorporate indestructible blocks that the gun can’t shoot through. You can’t leave a stage until all the bricks on the top section of the Arkanoid levels are cleared. If the item is falling in one direction and the ball another, you’re screwed! Enjoy replaying the stage. Is it at least an enjoyable brick breaker? Watch this and try to guess how I would answer:
And the paddle doesn’t seem to have the kind of segmented English you would expect. Hell, a few times the ball got caught in a vertical up and down volley, which makes no sense. The paddle should be divided into an even number of segments, with the first half knocking the ball to the left side and the second half the right side. Apparently, they didn’t program it like that. Finally, there’s three boss fights. They take maybe ten seconds each and are easy. So, while I admire that they did a highly experimental type of game, I really thought Takahashi Meijin no Bug-tte Honey was a horrible game. It wasn’t hard to figure out why this never was reworked for Americans. It’s too bad Hudson never tried the same thing as the overworld’s Easter Egg hunt, only with unique Mario Party-like mini-games. The egg hunt aspect I actually could see working with a variety of games, but not when every single egg sends you to a poor man’s Arkanoid after you just finished the platforming equivalent of a bullet hell. Verdict: NO!
Adventure Island II aka Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima II Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released February, 1991 Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE Wikis: Wonder Boy – Strategy
Well, Adventure Island II is just about the most perfect NES platformer from a mechanical point of view. It’s got the same basic jumping physics and momentum physics as the original game, only refined to the point that nobody would call it “unresponsive.” Besides a couple rare collision moments that made me raise an eyebrow, AI2 is clearly in an elite class. I mean seriously, as far as play control goes, it belongs with Super Mario Bros. 2 and 3. That’s why it pains me to say that Adventure Island II is f*cking boring. It’s one of the most joyless games I’ve ever played. It’s just so toothless and lazily designed that it almost feels like the team was hoping to apply the mechanics to any game but a sequel to Adventure Island. Like, in the first world there’s two completely flat straight-line levels that don’t even have a pit to jump over. Just walk right and throw a hammer sometimes. As if whoever is playing this has NEVER PLAYED A GAME BEFORE. It feels genuinely condescending. This is a sequel for f*ck’s sake!
Even the dreaded swimming stages control like butter, with or without the plesiosaur.
Now, I don’t really play video games specifically to be challenged. I’m an experience seeker. I play video games like this to become immersed in a fantasy experience. I’m a non-athlete and a coward. I’m pretty sure if I fired a machine gun there would be a me-shaped hole in the nearest wall behind me. But hand me a game controller and I’m a renegade combatant taking down an alien invasion, or the latest in lineage of vampire slayers, or, um, Fred Flintstone. Okay, so that last one sounds silly, but as long as the game is done well enough, I could believe it. But, I never got immersed in this game. Adventure Island II’s dev team went to all the trouble of creating pitch-perfect controlling mechanics and then dragged their feet to take them out for a spin.
The level immediately following this is another totally flat straight line with no gaps to jump over. They needed to cut the levels by, oh, 40%. Maybe 50%.
Adventure Island II’s first three-to-four game worlds feel like they would be early world one levels, if not outright tutorial stages, in any other game. This game’s difficulty curve is as flat as its level design. I might not be seeking a challenge specifically, but I do expect to, you know, do stuff! Calling this uninspired is underplaying it. It’s like a baby’s game, honestly. I don’t know if they thought players would be overwhelmed with the four dinosaurs. Except three out of four control intuitively. The fourth, the pteranodon, is about as rough as the typical flying mechanics of any other platform game. It’s not a deal breaker. You also only get one weapon, the axe. No fireballs this time. Those are reserved for the red dinosaur. So I’m not entirely sure why the first twenty to thirty levels are so basic and bland. It’s not like they didn’t have the ability to make a tougher game. A couple of the later stages are pretty dang challenging and bold in design.
A level late in the game is based around the rushing wolves. Shockingly it was pretty well designed, with measured tension spots. They basically squeezed the wolf attack pattern for everything it could possibly do in this one level. I should also note that most of the stages are bite-sized. Maybe a quarter the size of Adventure Island 1’s stages.
But the fact that it took half the game to get to the good stuff, maybe even longer, sort of negates the value of everything good that eventually shows up. It shouldn’t take an hour or more of a 90 to 120 minute platformer to get to the good stuff. Hell, even then, the truly challenging levels are usually followed up with three or four more bland, basic, samey levels. I think a big part of the failure is they cut and pasted the enemies from the first game. But, those enemies only made sense in that game, with its less-than-perfect controls and difficult jumping physics.
While the bosses might have different sprites, most of them feel samey, just like Adventure Island one. They appear in one spot, then teleport to a different spot.
Now the controls are next to perfect and players are riding overpowered dinosaurs. Given that, those old enemies don’t make a lot of sense anymore. There’s only a handful of new enemies, and at one point, a volcano that spits out three pieces of lava at once. But the overwhelming majority of enemies retain their exact attack patterns from AI1. Try to imagine if Nintendo cut and pasted the exact versions of Super Mario 1’s enemies into Super Mario 3 and put most of the new enemies in the swimming stages or in the ice stage in world 6. How fun does Super Mario 3 sound now? Not very fun, huh?
The volcanoes show up at the tail end of the game. You’ll also notice my dinosaur literally swimming in the lava. The red one is immune.
Actually, a bigger problem might be the new inventory system. You’re allowed to take any dinosaurs you finish a stage with or even the axe itself and bank them for use later. Since the first two or three dozen levels are completely gutless, you can quickly max out the inventory for the tougher stages. This idea was broken from the start and should never have been implemented. Hell, if I had actually used my stockpile EVERY stage, I wouldn’t have had any material at all to work with. I was playing the majority of the stages in the first few worlds without even an axe to start the stage and was still making minced meat out of them. The dinosaurs, especially the flying ones, make it too easy to circumvent the levels. So, most of my final inventory I’d accumulated at the start, until the game stopped spitting them out. This was what I had left going into the final level:
I know how many times I died. Nine total times. The first time wasn’t exactly the game’s fault. I swear to God I died because I was glancing at the NBA Finals Game 6. So that wasn’t a REAL death. That came in the ice stage in world four, then in that same world I died twice to the fourth boss (the only boss that killed me) and once trying to make my way to it. I also died once from a skateboard that you get at the start of a stage because what followed getting the board seemed like it would be damn near impossible to survive with the skateboard. I skid into three total things, two of them involving the snake.
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I should note the sixth death was the worst one. At that point, they decided the best way to actually do a challenge was to just not spawn the fruits in some levels and let you starve to death if you don’t B-run the whole stage. How can you tell those levels from others? Well, you can’t. “I guess you better B-run every stage that comes after and not take a moment to enjoy anything at all.” That’s why you can’t do that type of thing. Oh, and you’ll notice my counter remains at 9 lives. It’s because you’re practically tripping over extra lives in this game. Literally once I got to 9 lives, every time I lost one I immediately got one back. Normally I do at least one play session with rewind/save states, but here, that wasn’t necessary.
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The final really bad idea is that there’s alternative levels in every stage. How do you get to them? Well, you have to die while fighting a boss. Not even on the boss stage, either. Specifically you must be killed fighting the boss. I didn’t discover this until I died twice fighting the octopus.
Presumably this means there’s levels that no human being has ever played involuntarily because most of the bosses are such pushovers that I can’t imagine anyone ever lost a life to them. I just don’t understand any of this design mentality. Adventure Island II isn’t a total wash. With its excellent controls, it might make for a great introductory platform game for young children. Like, ages 5 to 8. I know that sounds like an insult but I swear it’s not meant to be. It’s colorful and it has decent combat and fun to ride dinosaurs. Kids might love it. Platforming veterans, on the other hand, should be able to chew this up and spit it out without breaking a sweat, and they’re likely to be bored the majority of the time. As a sequel to an infamously punishing game? It’s a stunning collapse. It wasn’t until I played Adventure Island 3 that I really appreciated how epic a failure Adventure Island II is. Do you know what it feels like? A game with AI-designed levels. No effort. No heart. No soul. Verdict: NO!
Super Adventure Island aka Takahashi Meijin no Daibouken Jima Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released January 11, 1992 Developed by Produce! Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Wonder Boy Wiki
This is the closest the game comes to a set-piece. It lasts, oh, about two or three seconds, twice in the level it appears in.
I swear, a rebound in the Adventure Island franchise is coming. But, at the time I was playing Super Adventure Island, I was saying to myself “this whole feature was a bad bad bad bad bad idea.” Well, at least they took my advice from Adventure Island II and cut the levels. There’s only twenty total stages divided into five worlds. The problem is, of the twenty levels here, two of them offer any substance, and the rest are bland, basic world one/tutorial type levels. It’s plainly clear now that there was zero inspiration behind the last couple Adventure Island games. Flat levels? Those are back.
This entirely flat level is not an opening stage. This is immediately after the first boss. This is level 2 – 1. Wow.
How about the swimming stages? Those were kinda decent in Adventure Island II. Lots of stuff to dodge, plus their stages weren’t plain straight lines. Well, Super Adventure Island has two swimming stages. They’re literal straight-lines with no solid features to swim around. Just, scroll right, kill enemies or just avoid them. Either/or. Continue to swim right until the game says you won. Did the second swimming level add anything to change up the previous one? Nope. Not even a single new enemy or obstacle. Just swim right until the game says you won. This might be the laziest game by a major studio I’ve ever played. Here’s the first swimming level in its entirety:
And here’s the second:
Why even bother with two swimming stages if you’re that out of f*cks to give about what those swimming stages include? Not that the other levels are better. The only new gameplay additions are the ability to duck, a super jump that’s done from the ducking position, and a boomerang. The eggs are gone completely. Items are just laying around now. Often, the axes or boomerangs are placed in a way where it’s hard to avoid switching them. I quit trying after a while because once you gather four of any specific item, they become fireballs, then that carries over if you’re forced to swap weapons.
The only two levels in the entire game that I thought were decent were 3 – 1 and 5 – 4. This is 3 – 1, and it’s a run of the mill vertical climb, but it’s okay. I guess.
The first couple bosses each took just a couple seconds to kill. The third boss took maybe 10 seconds and I just barely didn’t die from lava dripping on me. The fourth boss I thought was going to require finesse, until I realized my super jump was high enough to cause damage even if it didn’t seem like it. Finally, for the final boss they just stole the “move out of the way and let the bad guy smash through the floor” gimmick that Nintendo used for the Bowser fight in Super Mario Bros. 3. “Well, if people loved it in Super Mario Bros. 3, they’ll love it in this game, right? Let’s not strain our brains over here trying to come up with something original!”
Paaaaaaaaaathetic.
Like Adventure Island II, they created nearly perfect controls and mechanics, but the actual level design is boring so it goes to waste. If you’re one of those types of people who like to invent your own challenges and try to beat the game without picking up weapons or not upgrading your loadout, I don’t even think that’ll be an option here because the choice is often forced on you. By the end of the first level, I was an unstoppable tank. My death count for Super Adventure Island was significantly lower. I died nine times in Adventure Island II. For SUPER Adventure Island, I died once. It happened in level 5 – 1. Of course it was an ice level. I got sniped from behind by a penguin.
It’s ALWAYS the ice levels.
To the game’s limited credit, when I lost that one life, there was something resembling tension and excitement because it took me more than a full stage to get my tank-like loadout back. I didn’t need to be tense. I found out really fast that, with cautious play, the enemies aren’t that hard to avoid, at least for a minute or two while you build up your weapons. That’s when I realized that one of the biggest problems with Super Adventure Island is they just made the player too powerful. Being able to spam your weapons means not having to react to enemies with any sense of urgency. When I was capped at one boomerang or even two, the game was just better for it. Not by much, but by that point the mood had already been spoiled.
I wonder if this would have been tougher on an old CRT television? Because, like, I could see everything. This was more annoying than challenging.
Everything about the last two Adventure Island games has just been so arbitrary that you’d swear that they’re randomly generated. It’s like Hudson had a hit in Adventure Island 1 and the rights to make sequels, but nobody knew why the first Adventure Island (or Wonder Boy for that matter) resonated as much as they did. Apparently they determined it was the axe and the tropical setting. It wasn’t. What else is clear is nobody at Hudson knew what to do with it. They certainly weren’t at all curious about why other platform games were hits. What’s there to it? Just make a map, place a handful of enemies on it, you know, wherever, and maybe a jump or two and watch the money roll in, right? There’s no artfulness or logic to level design. That’s what’s missing from the first game. No sense that the enemies and jumps are very precisely measured. These sequels feel thrown-together. Consequently, the series was dead before 1995. But I swear, the losing streak will end soon. Verdict: NO!
Adventure Island Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima II Platform: Game Boy Released February, 1992 Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE
I wish they were all this easy to review. Adventure Island 1 on the Game Boy is a stripped-down version of Adventure Island II for the NES. You’ll note from the Adventure Island II review that there really wasn’t all that much to strip-down. They basically kept cutting until they reached that game’s skeleton. The big differences include having less enemies to deal with, the level design is even simpler (though less of the flat design than the NES game, oddly enough), high jumping is much easier, and the dinosaurs no longer separately help out during the boss fights. Also, bosses that teleported around the room stay mostly stationary now. Maybe. In fairness, I was killing them in under three seconds on the Game Boy, so for all I know they could change spots.
I came into Adventure Island GB with the same “I have to actually play the levels” mentality I had for the NES game. For most stages, I banked my axe and dinosaur I’d acquired the previous stage and started the next level with nothing. I never flew past a stage with the flying dinosaur, unless I found one within the stage (I found two the entire game). Other than using autofire, I took no shortcuts (actually I never found the offer to skip an island like I found in the NES version multiple times) and used no emulator trickery. I didn’t need it. Even without those things, I never lost a single life in my first and only play session with this.
Can I play whatever game he just got instead?
In fact, Adventure Island GB was so easy that I only lost a single dinosaur throughout the entire game, and that happened when the final stage had a water segment and I wasn’t riding the water dinosaur. That means I never once even took a hit from a baddie. I’m not a pro gamer over here, so that should tell you how easy this is. If Adventure Island II is like a baby’s game, then the Game Boy version is like something for the recently lobotomized. But, that’s not why I’m giving this a NO! All I’ve ever cared about is having fun, and Adventure Island is a repetitive, uninspired, soulless slog. Verdict: NO!
New Adventure Island aka Takahashi Meijin no Shin Bouken Jima Platform: TurboGrafx-16 Released June 26, 1992 Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE* Listing at Wonder Boy Wiki
*Included in all versions of the TurboGrafx-16 Mini/PC Engine Mini.
This is what I was kind of hoping for after the first Adventure Island.
It took a while but New Adventure Island is the first game after the original that actually feels like it’s attempting to be a sequel to the first. It adds a handful of new enemies, a handful of new settings, and a couple “new” items (though the SNES game had the boomerang already), BUT, it’s a no-doubt-about-it continuation of the original Wonder Boy’s formula. The level design mentality is the same. The controls and physics are largely the same. It’s certainly a little bit easier than Adventure Island. I was constantly dying playing New Adventure Island, but unlike AI2, I never came close to maxing-out the lives. It’s also nowhere near as repetitive as the first. They’ve subtracted seven levels total from the game. There’s twenty-five stages that are fairly fine-tuned to the same degree the first game is.
Even a straight-line skateboarding level isn’t REALLY a straight line, with excellent enemy placement and some tricky timing on moments where you have to dodge.
So, a total improvement on the original, then? Well, no. Unlike the first game, the challenge doesn’t scale as well as you’d hope. Per tradition, I lost a few lives on the ice levels. I was actually sweating that I might game over but then I started racking-up extra lives. In fact, the boss of those stages was the only one I lost a life against. But after the ice world, it was pretty clear sailing besides one or two mistimed jumps or the occasional GOTCHA death. It sure seems the ice boss, the finale of only the third world, who has an attack pattern that looks like this:
Should have been fought after the fire guy at the end of the fifth world, who has a very easy to dodge attack pattern that looks like this:
And while I’m on the subject, the sixth boss’ attack is so weak that you can even jump through the sprite at times.
You can see that I’m literally jumping through the ball. Apparently it’s not armed until it hits the ground.
Now granted, the levels are as poorly arranged as the bosses. Every single death I had after the ice level was pretty much a result of mistiming something in one of the castle stages. Every fourth level (plus the 25th level that is apparently world 7 all by itself) is a castle, and these do actually pose legitimate threats to your life count. The stages leading up to them? Not so much.
These things especially have some atypical timing about them. You certainly can’t just B-run your way through the castles. If I actually took my time, I probably could have aced the game after the 3rd world. I’m not amazing at taking my time in platforming games.
Actually, I never died outside of a castle after world three. Hell, when I got the eggplant, I realized I didn’t even need to worry about it. It doesn’t drain your hunger meter anywhere near as quickly as the original versions did. Maybe this is why I went into cruise control and paid the price for it in world seven, which is just a single castle stage where I lost all but my last life. The biggest adjustment I had to make was to the jumping. It took me a while to drum into my thick skull not to settle for landing on the edge of any platform, since I tended to clip through them. But there’s almost no edge-of-ledge jumps and every platform, even near the end of the game, is measured enough that you should be able to land in the center. Once I figured that out, I did enjoy New Adventure Island well enough. This is the direction the series should have gone all along.
I was down to my last life but made it to the final boss. My heart skipped a beat when I tripped over this guy, but it’s just a trip. I beat him on my first try. Well, his first form at least. Not so much for the second form. I was sweating that I would need to rewind to “continue” since I never found a Hudson Soft bee, but this game doesn’t screw around with that. You can just continue.
The fact that I ate a GAME OVER is a positive, even if it took a while. After the NES sequel and the Game Boy game, I wasn’t sure if the series had lost its nerve to actually be difficult. This is the right kind of challenging, and I’m all for it. New Adventure Island isn’t going to blow you away, but if you want a TRUE follow-up to the original Wonder Boy/Adventure Island that’s still an old game and not a more modern remake, this is your best bet. It has a couple mild surprises that worked well and some unexciting but suitable new settings. It’s not a major leap forward, but New Adventure Island offers a meaty enough challenge without going overboard, like the first game did at times. Even though I dropped a ton of lives during the climax and ultimately game overed, it was 100% on me for being impatient. There’s no insane level 8 – 3 jumping sequences here. Just a good, solid, challenging action-platformer. Really, isn’t that what the series should be? Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection
Adventure Island 3 aka Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima III Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released July 31, 1992 Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Wonder Boy Wiki
Oh hey, what’s this? Memorable settings? An actual EXPERIENCE instead of levels that feel like they were generated by AI? This ain’t half bad!
After Adventure Island II, my expectations for the third NES game were right up there with my expectations that I could hit a ball out of Yankee Stadium. Like, maybe if Aaron Judge physically took me by the feet and swung me as a bat, but I don’t know if that technically counts as *me* hitting the ball out of the park or just Judge hitting one with an unusually shaped bat. Partial credit? No? Okay, well, either way Adventure Island 3 is actually a lot of fun. I know, right? And here’s the really weird thing: they didn’t change any of the mechanics of Adventure Island II. They just took those mechanics and built a better game around them. Since the difference between 2 and 3 is like night and day, that tells you how much developers need to focus on levels, huh?
This was my final load out in the life that finished the game.
Getting back to the mistakes: the item system is every bit as absurd now as it was in Adventure Island II. Let me explain this delicately: if every single item you picked up in a platform game was stored for later use, you could do a continent-wide domino rally because the genre would be full of push-overs. I might not seek a challenge specifically, but even people who play games because we’re experience seekers need some kind of push-back from the games. It’s good for immersion! I mean, unless you have a God complex. While I might have lost more lives playing Adventure Island 3, I was NEVER in danger of eating a game over. Let me show you just one more inventory screen.
Those crystals are prizes for perfect bonus rounds. They give you one extra hit. I never used one throughout the game.
That is my inventory after three levels. Not worlds. LEVELS. Go ahead and count it! There’s nine items on it. NINE! That means after only a couple minutes of playing Adventure Island 3, I had three times the amount of inventory than I had actual levels finished off. You just can’t do that sh*t and think it’s a net-positive for the game! This could easily be fixed, too: just limit players to banking only one of each item/dinosaur. That would add desirable risk/reward factors. Also, lose the pteranodon entirely, which is often just a free pass to a stage’s goal even if you skip the fruit. You know the P-Wing in Super Mario 3? The pteranodon is like that, only with you getting to keep it after using it. Also, if you switch to a different dinosaur while riding the pteranodon, don’t worry because you didn’t waste it. It’ll be waiting for you in the inventory screen between levels. Isn’t that kind of silly? It’s basically a cheat code without the code part.
The new dinosaur is a triceratops that I nicknamed “Tricera the Hedgehog” since its gimmick is that it can do jumping spin attacks just like a certain blue mascot. Its only other advantage is that it can walk on quicksand without sinking, which is basically useless since there’s only a tiny handful of quicksand appearances in the game. Each of those are about as wide as your average jump over a pit, or maybe slightly bigger. Also you’d basically have to stand still in those spots for them to pose any danger, which literally nobody is going to do because, you know, it’s f*cking quicksand! Tricera is right up there with the Cloak of Invisibility from Wizards & Warriors in the “useless power-up hall of fame.” BUT, look at those beady-yet-adorable puppy dog eyes. So cute I could just pinch it.
So the inventory system and some of the items are overpowered. But, unlike Adventure Island II, I wasn’t miserable playing this. The levels have actual design logic, with enemies placed in a way to pose a threat instead of just someone seemingly inserting them because it’s been a screen or two since you had to throw the axe at something. The boomerang shows up in AI3 (no relation to Allen Iverson), but it actually isn’t overpowered, and in fact, cost me at least two lives from misuse. You can’t spam it and have to wait for it to return before you can throw it again, making it MUCH slower to use than the axe. But, in return for that, you can throw it above you. Now that’s how you balance a weapon. It just works better from a game design perspective.
This gag is used a couple times in the game. Two eggs are presented. One has the eggplant, the other the fairy. Naturally on my first attempt I always picked the eggplant. By the way, I died every single time from it.
While I’m on the subject, I died from timing-out more playing Adventure Island 3 than any game I can remember. But, it never really does the dickhead “there’s no food in this level” thing either. There was only one instance where there was something that was so calculated, yet so far-fetched that it seems hard to even imagine they thought they could implement it, that I kind of want to shake hands with whoever came up with it. Okay, so I’m running out of heath and have to jump out of the water, but one spider and a bat are there. So I try to throw my axe to stop them, only the axe stops. Huh. In other words, there’s a hidden egg right there, only the hidden egg is shielding the bat and I really need to get moving because I’m out of health but the bat will kill me if I try to go forward and…… I ran out of time.
Oh! OH! You….. stinky poo bastards! That was downright dastardly! And actually kind of brilliant. The amount of fine tuning required that would assure the player was short on health there (and it had to have been fine-tuned because the next life had the same thing happen) and needing to rush AND avoid not one but two enemies working in collaboration with each-other? Well played! I mean, sure, a little too “trial-and-error” for my tastes, but Adventure Island has always leaned heavily into that. If you’re going to have trial and error gameplay, you might as well be clever about it instead of just setting lazy instakill booby traps. Adventure Island 3 is pretty much always clever about it.
So Adventure Island 3 is really good. Damn pretty game too. Okay, so some of the settings repeat, but it’s the NES. For the limitations, they did manage to get a lot of different locations. Most enemies feel like they maximize their potential. Ironically the only one not like that is the wolf, which was the one clever enemy usage in Adventure Island II. But Adventure Island 3 hell, I died on at least half the bosses. They actually put up a fight, but always a fair fight. The last boss ran a little long, but otherwise, they were highlights. So were the levels that led to them. Adventure Island 3, for all intents and purposes, IS just an expansion pack for Adventure Island II, except, you know, better in every imaginable way. It actually makes the previous game’s lack of effort stand out. Play both back-to-back. No joke. It’s fascinating to experience. Verdict: YES! – $6 in value added to Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection
Adventure Island II: Aliens in Paradise aka Takahashi Meijin no Boukenjima III Platform: Game Boy Released February 26, 1993 Developed by Now Production Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE
Like the previous Game Boy release, this is a stripped-down version of the previous NES game. And, much like the difference between Adventure Island 2 and 3, the Game Boy sequel is a vast improvement over the previous game. The whole “stripped-down” aspect is even more prominent this time around. Even when B-running, your movement feels slow. Jumping is high and sluggish, and momentum factors in a lot more. If it’s an ice level, it might take you two seconds to turn around and move off the space you’re on. That makes a BIG difference during the ice world’s boss stage, and especially when big boulders are rolling down a hill and you don’t have the right equipped weapon.
I didn’t mention the clock in the NES review, but it’s another dumb addition right up there with Tricera the Hedgehog. It’s like a Starman or Fairy, except you don’t actually kill anything. All hazards freeze and if you walk into them, you just kinda step up over them. This includes the little stones that you trip over, which somehow makes you hungry. Hey wait a second. IF you can just step over the rocks with the clock, why can’t you do it without the clock? The enemies are one thing, but they’re just stones for God’s sake!
Oh, and there’s one other thing I didn’t mention in the NES game, because I didn’t find it, because I wasn’t skipping levels. I can explain. There’s an overworld map that you go to before the inventory screen between stages. On the NES, it’s just a map with no icons or level markers. It looks like this:
On the Game Boy, it looks more like something from the Mario franchise, with pathways and icons for the levels. It looks like this:
Look how happy he is that you selected the next stage.
And I noticed on the Game Boy that there were pathways I wasn’t using. Something I never realized on the NES because it’s just an abstract map with nothing clearly defined in a “this is a level” sense. Well, it turns out, there’s branching paths. The rooms that have the fork have a very poor choice of word when they give you the branching path option. “EXIT” returns you to the stage, but the word for the branching path is “SKIP.” Well, since there are additional skip-like options, like the ability to SKIP straight to the current world’s boss, I never went the “SKIP” route. But near the end of the Game Boy title, curiosity got the better of me. So I gave it a try and:
Huh. Let me guess, the NES game had the same thing, right? Sorry it’s in Japanese but I figured I might as well see if that ROM felt any different while I was at it (it doesn’t, don’t bother). So, did I miss a bunch of stages?
Well……… crap. Okay, well, for what it’s worth, you’re not missing any amazing stages. For all the extra effort I made, hell, some of the levels felt nearly identical to ones I already played the first time around. No one-off set pieces or amazing hidden bosses you’re missing out on. I don’t even know why they bothered.
How is it these ice levels are still getting me so much more?
Anyway, the Game Boy title’s biggest changes are mostly to bosses, which all feel kind of smaller in scope. That’s due to having some of their more dynamic attack patterns removed due to hardware limitations. Plus the playfield is much more cramped as well. After playing the NES game, this felt so slow, small, and lacking. Don’t mistake this for being a bad game. It’s really not. I imagine a Game Boy owner in 1993 must have been VERY happy with this. But it’s not 1993 anymore. Unlike the Mario Land games which don’t have console counterparts, this is a port of an existing NES game that attempts nothing the console version didn’t, and it even retains the level ordering. Adventure Island II on the Game Boy was probably VERY good once, but for my 2026 set, it really only has value as a +1 bonus and a curio. Verdict: YES! – $1 in value added to Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection
While you’re reading this review third-to-last, this is actually the last game I played for this feature and it was VERY CLOSE on whether or not I saved the best for last. I hadn’t decided at the time I typed this sentence. Or this one. Okay, now, I’ve decided. No, wait, I haven’t. Maybe I should write the review first.
The last two official Adventure Island two releases of the classic era are a shift in genre, as they now enter the Metroidvania phase of their existence. However, only the first one, a Famicom exclusive, actually feels like it belongs in the Adventure Island branch of the Wonder Boy/Adventure Island family tree. Super Adventure Island II is basically the worst game in the Wonder Boy franchise. THIS is Adventure Island as a Metroidvania, and it’s awesome. What a shame it never came out in the States. I say this a lot about late-era Japanese exclusives, but this would have been the ideal send-off for the NES.
Near the starting house is Jurassic Park. Well, that’s what I called the homes of the dinosaurs you rescue, one of whom nerfs at least some of the heart room challenges. The designers were smart enough to only allow players to take out one dinosaur at a time, and actually, I’m pretty sure you can beat the game without ever mounting a single one. It would just be tougher.
Now, don’t get too excited. This isn’t exactly Super Metroid or Symphony of the Night over here. In fact, you never need to backtrack all that much. All the entrances to the game’s six distinct worlds are right near the starting house and open, one at a time, as you beat bosses. Exploration is such a cinch I didn’t even need to use a guide. It’s a very basic map with mostly basic platforming templates, but it just works. In fact, it works so well that I’m pretty pissed they didn’t build off THIS game for Super Adventure Island II. Adventure Island IV might be too basic. There’s not even that many roadblocks where you can’t get past a certain point until you get a certain item. Like this below, where you can’t make this jump on your own:
That’s a logical type of layout that you tease players with early, and then they return to it when they have the snowboard, right? Nope. Adventure Island IV doesn’t really do that type of thing. By the time you reach it, you already have the snowboard that allows you to build up momentum to jump higher. Think of this more as a six world, linear game that’s just structured differently. And not every level is fantastic. In fact, the only one that I think rises to the level of memorably excellent is the fifth stage, which is also the longest. It’s quite the trek up through clouds, then down to a desert, and finally through a gigantic pyramid. Inside the pyramid, it’s a maze with lots of false walls. That whole three-part segment was really well done. I wonder if they regret not making the rest of the game’s levels that big. The other worlds, including the finale, feel like two normal stages stitched together. Sometimes they’re so short that I was startled by reaching a boss when I did. For those stages, the level design is, you know, fine. Same with the combat. Same with the sense of exploration. It’s all fine. Even good, but nothing mind-blowing.
Seriously, fantastic level. Castlevania would be proud of this one.
There’s also a few head-scratching decisions. There’s rooms where the gimmick is you have to make your way across platforms to press a button that lowers another platform that allows you to reach an egg, which could contain something to increase your health capacity. One little problem though: if you have the flying dinosaur, you can circumvent all that and just grab the egg. Since those rooms were so fun that I could see a Game Boy title based solely around them earning a YES! and a buck or two in value, they really should have disabled the ability to use the dinosaurs in them. Also, they kept all the food around but now there the hunger meter is gone. What does the food do? Collecting eight refills a heart. The sense of urgency is gone, as a result. Part of me wonders if they had plans for the food to work the way it always had and they lost their nerve at some point.
If I had to choose the biggest problem with the game, it’s probably that they didn’t build enough stuff around the items you collect. I honestly think this right here is the last time you need to use the spear this way. I just got the damn thing.
It’s certainly a bizarre twist on the Adventure Island formula in other ways. You start out by throwing bones at enemies. What about the axe? What about the skateboard? They’re literally the last two things you collect! I didn’t even realize the game was building up to the axe. I get that the axe and skateboard are the icons of the franchise, but I wouldn’t think they’re “grand finale” iconic. I figured they just dropped them from the game. When you really stop and think about it, it makes no logical sense that they’re the big deal final items. They’re the literal basic items of the first game. It’d be like building a Zelda game around acquiring the most brittle sword in Hyrule. It also has a pretty damn lame map system. It looks like this:
What the heck is that? Adventure Island or Crystal Castles?
And since I’m complaining, I should note that autofire is an absolute necessity for this game, since there’s a few moments where you have to compete in a button mashing race in order to earn a medal that allows you to pass deeper into the world you’re in. There’s also post-boss set-pieces designed to show off new items you acquire that never worked for me at all and felt like an excuse to fast-travel you back to the hub world. Like at one point you win a surfboard, but you never again need to use that surfboard after you finish that brief segment. Like I said in one of the above captions: they needed to create more item-specific segments for the inventory you collect. Most of it will get used once or twice at most. On the other hand, the variety of weapons are nice, and many enemies have specific weaknesses to encourage experimentation. It’s a short game too if you want a Metroidvania that can be beaten in a single sitting. I finished it without a guide or cheating in four hours, give or take.
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As a spoiler warning, the next game, and the last official Adventure Island in this feature, really, really sucks, and I played it before this. I was pretty worried about Adventure Island IV after playing it. But I shouldn’t have been. Why this one works better (besides the obvious answer of being superior in every way, including graphics) is that this one remembered that it’s Adventure Island. From the movement physics to the combat to even the basic principles of level design, this still feels like it belongs to the Adventure Island franchise. They’re not suddenly trying to copy what Westone had been doing for over half-a-decade by the time this was released. Adventure Island did its own thing, and that’s the thing a Metroidvania based around it should keep doing. And hey, the end result is really fun, and that’s something the SNES sequel didn’t even come close to becoming. Better than Adventure Island 3? No, but I did have to think quite a while about it. Verdict: YES! – $5 in value added to Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection Add $1 in bonus value if a translation is included.
Super Adventure Island II aka Takahashi Meijin no Daibouken Jima II Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released October, 1994 Developed by Make Software, Inc. Published by Hudson Soft NO MODERN RELEASE Listing at Wonder Boy Wiki
Random encounters didn’t earn this game its NO! all by themselves, but they certainly came close to that.
The reason I played this before Adventure Island IV is because I had completely forgotten that Super Adventure Island II was a Metroidvania. I’d previously sampled it when I ran through SNES games in 2021, gave that brief hour or two a NO! and kind of vaguely knew the SNES games would be pretty miserable for this feature. That’s why I saved IV for last. I actually love 2D Metroidvanias. Gun to my head, they’re my favorite genre. So it really gives me no pleasure at all to say that Super Adventure Island II is the worst Metroidvania made by a major AAA I’ve ever played. It’s really shockingly horrible.
The currency system seemed pretty useless to me. Enemies only drop coins worth one, and that’s if you’re lucky and they don’t drop health or magic refills you don’t need. You’re dependent on finding these chests, but finding one should be enough to buy all the techniques. You have to acquire the ability to push, do a downward thrust, and do an upward thrust.
It couldn’t be more obvious that this was a cynical attempt to take Adventure Island in the same direction Westone took Wonder Boy, but they didn’t seem to fundamentally understand how to make those kinds of games. You’re given a huge world map with islands that you have to paddle a raft to. During the rafting, random attacks can happen. Do you get experience points? Nope. There are no experience points. It’s like a stripped down version of Zelda II, with only one background that you see over and over. The only thing that changes is the enemies. And because you’re on the water, hell, you might not be able to catch all the loot they drop. It’s just busy work. It does seem to be random too, because sometimes I could go straight from one island to another with only one random encounter, and other times so many happened as I tried to raft towards an island that I started screaming. The amount of spaces you can move before the next encounter seems to be decided as soon as you reach the map, so you can’t rewind around it.
Speaking of not being able to cheat, here’s the one thing I *did* try to cheat at. Now mind you that I never ran away from any enemy in the game and, when the coins dropped in a way where they weren’t impossible to get, I did collect them. I should have been loaded with cash when I reached the Casino before world four (of six) where you finally get a shop with items. And mind you, I didn’t actually go there when it opened up. I went there after the fifth world. The shop has a sword, armor, shield, the boomerang, and a half-heart. I bought the half-heart because who doesn’t want more life? It cost 1,275. But I had like 8,000 gold so no problem. Then I went to get the sword next and…… it was nearly 50,000 gold. Are you kidding me? The light shield is nearly 10,000, while the Armor is nearly 30,000, and the boomerang is 15,000. I think this is one of the first games like this I’ve ever played where I didn’t get a single one of the top items. I hadn’t cheated a single aspect of the game up to this point, but I was growing listless so I decided it couldn’t hurt the integrity of this review to use save states to cheat at the casino games. Hah, so much for that. After ONE HOUR of trying to stop the last reel on “7” using save states and having a lot of ones where it looked like the 7 was going to stop in the center, only it kept going in a way no other spin ever looked, I’m going to guess that it’s probably rigged to pay out after only X amount of spins. And by the way, if you DO get all 7s, you’re still 20,000 short of the sword. Had I won, I still couldn’t have afforded it.
Super Adventure Island II is NOT an adventure. It’s BUSY WORK: THE GAME. It has so much fumbling through menus and items and so much backtracking that it’s exhausting, and that’s even before I get to the level design. Let me walk you through an ordinary puzzle from the fourth level of the game. On the other side of these tunnels of dirt is a switch that I have to press.
Thankfully, I have a shovel. Unfortunately, there’s multiple buttons that go unused on the SNES pad in this game. Specifically, L, R, Select, and Start. So, to get the shovel, STEP ONE, I need to pause the game.
STEP TWO is I have to go to the “WEAPON MENU” and STEP THREE is I have to select the shovel. STEP FOUR is return to the main menu and STEP FIVEis to return to the game, where you’ll note that you no longer have your armor or shield. So I hope there’s no enemies around you, because you’re defenseless now. You can use the shovel as a weapon but it’s not very effective. Also, when you hold the shovel, you duck automatically, but you don’t duck when you jump, meaning while you can go through the bottom tunnel, you can’t come back that way because you can’t crawl and there’s no mechanic to get you back through the tunnel you dug. That’s why a lot of dirt tunnels come in pairs, one high and one low. Also-also, you cannot use the shovel while jumping. Also-also-also, you can’t climb ropes while using the shovel.
STEP SIX is to dig the tunnel to the switch, which is activated just by pushing it. That’s step seven right? Well, no, because there’s one “also” I left out about the shovel above. You also-also-also-also cannot push switches while holding the shovel. You know, that item you’re holding that has the word SHOVE in it.
STEP SEVEN is you pause the game to go to the menu. STEP EIGHT is selecting the weapons menu. STEP NINE is equip any sword. STEP TEN is you exit to the previous menu and STEP ELEVEN is you exit the menu to return to the gameplay, where you’ll note that your armor and shield are back. How nice of the game designers to throw you that bone. Now you can push the switch. If you’re a complete moron like me and didn’t dig your way out while you had the shovel up, repeat steps two through five and then step six your way out of the tunnel, then repeat steps seven through eleven so you can have an actual sword and armor equipped for whatever comes next. The minimum is eleven steps to push a switch on a wall when there are four unused buttons on the controller, two of which are action buttons. Are we having fun yet?
In this picture, I’m actively damaging the boss. This swing of the sword landed a shot. Draw a box around the boss’ sprite that reaches as far as the tusk does and it still makes no sense at all. Now, in fairness, this is the only time that the collision detection stood out THIS badly. And no, there’s no future vulnerable spot here. Actually, in this boss’ second form, you go for the eyes and brow. I legitimately have no idea how this is landing a hit. The trunk is not vulnerable at all. In fact, it’s a shield in the second form. It’s one of the most baffling collision issues I’ve ever seen.
The best aspect could have been the level design. I’m not so stone-hearted to say Super Adventure Island II got NOTHING right. In fact, I’d say more than half the levels would have average level-layouts appropriate for the genre. Except, even the positives are turned into negatives. Each of the first five worlds has a section that’s gated off. If you’re stupid enough to not use a guide, they might drive you crazy. Well, I didn’t use a guide for my first day with SAI2. It turns out, those gated-off areas stay gated-off until you acquire an item. Then you have to go back to those stages, play a flute inside these little shrines, and they open up the rest of the stage for you to get the macguffins that you need to enter world six. There are shortcuts and fast travel spells, but they also liberally seasoned unreachable treasure chests, including valuable life boosts, throughout the stages that you can’t initially reach, so using those shortcuts makes little sense.
The thing on the right wall is what the block switches look like. You have to turn them off to beat most of the worlds, but when you try to beat world six, surprise: you need them back on, which meant I had to go back to the first five worlds AGAIN. Then I returned to world six only to discover I had forgotten the one pictured above, and I almost threw my controller. I’m stunned I actually finished the game. I wanted to quit several times.
Now, average (if somewhat bland) level layouts can also be helped by quality combat, but Super Adventure Island II’s combat is just kind of samey and boring. The sword-based combat has no OOMPH to it. It’s feathery and lacking in a satisfying crunch, which sucks because all those random encounters might not have been so bad. You can get items like daggers or axes, but they aren’t much better. They just give you range. The enemies don’t really have complex attack patterns or memorable sprites. The bosses aren’t much fun to fight either, and they tend to be a little spongy as well. More telling than all of that is when I finally activated key moments to push the progress along, I wasn’t happy so much as relieved. I couldn’t wait to be done with this game. Go figure it took me two morning-to-night days to finish it. I spent more time playing this than all the other games combined INCLUDING my practice sessions with the first Adventure Island. And it was never even a little bit fun.
This is the second-to-last boss. The final boss’ door is directly above this one. Just two or three jumps above it, actually. But, after beating this thing, you’re sent back to the starting spot in the overworld and have to raft back to the island (or use the quick travel spell and hope enough things drop magic refills) then go all the way back through World Six again to make those two or three final leaps. Like I said, BUSY WORK; THE GAME.
I can deal with moments of blandness in a Metroidvania. Hell, I liked Castlevania: Circle of the Moon just fine and it has tons of problems like having way too many flat hallways, illogical backtracking and “key moments” that don’t feel important enough. But you can get away with some blandness if the core mechanics are fun. Or, failing that, cool sightseeing or set-pieces can carry mediocrity over the finish line. Super Adventure Island II has none of that. The settings are as commonly generic as it gets and never go the extra mile from a graphical point of view. There’s no stand-out moments. This isn’t a launch title. This is pretty deep into the SNES’ existence for a game to have almost no artistic ambition.
You’re fighting a space crayfish. This is the big finale after all that?
Once again, excellent (if completely unoptimized) controls and movement physics go to complete waste. I feel bad for whoever coded the controls of the bad Adventure Island games. Usually when games are this big of a disaster, the controls are abysmal. This controls great! That really tells you how badly done the level design is that I’m ranking this dead last, even lower than the MSX game. At least that was over with quickly. Even the story is ridiculous, and this has the slowest unskippable text I’ve seen in a long time. At best, AT BEST, some of the level segments rise to the level of average-at-best. And I feel bad for saying even that because I’m afraid someone might mistake that for saying there’s something of value here. This is one of the worst games I’ve played because it’s boring to the point of sucking the life out of you.
This game was rigged too. I only spent 20 minutes trying it, but I never got the 20 box.
I said they were aiming for Wonder Boy in Monster World type of vibes, but clearly Zelda II was an inspiration too. They missed the mark on both, as it doesn’t feel like a Wonder Boy game or even a bad Zelda II knock-off. For that matter, it doesn’t even feel like it has any connection to Adventure Island. None at all, at least from a gameplay point of view. I don’t know why they took the franchise in this direction, but this was essentially the end of the series. Attempts at revivals were made for the GameCube and Wii, but they haven’t done anything with it since. THIS was the end of Adventure Island as a franchise with new releases in regular intervals. That tells you everything you need to know, doesn’t it? If you find yourself stuck on a desert island with only this game, swim for it. Verdict: NO!
I think a bad ass prestige retro collection needs some nifty bonus features, and Adventure Island 1 specifically seems to be a speed runner’s dream, right? Apparently, Nesrocks thought so too. I don’t like doing anything but quality of life ROM hacks in these features, but this is the type of ROM hack where I think there is a chance something along these lines could be included in a set like Adventure Island: 40th Anniversary Collection. So, here’s a bonus review!
Adventure Island Abridged Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Unauthorized ROM Hack of Adventure Island Released March 14, 2017 Developed by Nesrocks Link to Patch at RomHacking.net Use THIS tool to apply patches.
How’s this for a bonus review?
It’s long overdue that Nesrocks appeared in a Definitive Review. From the man I call “The Iron Chef of Gaming” comes this reimagining of Adventure Island that’s built specifically for the speed running community. Now, this is “Abridged” and not a remake. There’s no new levels in this. The thirty-two levels of the original have been condensed down into the nine that offer (1) maximum difficulty (2) specific types of challenges. The nine levels are shown in the slideshow below, along with what stage they originally were in Adventure Island.
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Remember what I said about how you can play for fifteen to twenty minutes and see everything Adventure Island has to offer? Nesrocks took that to heart. This really is a sizzle reel of not only the level settings but the type of challenges offered by Adventure Island. It’s VERY hard, but in a good way. Well, except in one regard. I’m a big fan of Nesrocks, but the difficulty scaling, which was perfect before, is now all wrong. The hardest level in the game, 8 – 3, is now the sixth of nine stages. Okay, so he couldn’t put it last because it’d be weird to fight the boss and still need to play another stage. Fine. Put it eighth, not sixth. Meanwhile, once you know where the eggplants are in 8 – 1 and that there’s no hidden milks to save your life from the lack of food, it’s not THAT hard. I’d put 8 – 1 fourth or fifth in the ordering. It’s also worth noting that he beefed up the last boss, which now offers a legitimate challenge instead of just being more of the same. Though I’m insanely happy that, in my fastest run, I didn’t die on the 8 – 3 jumping sequence. Other times? Oh, I died. I even ate several game overs on it thanks to the lack of extra lives.
This was my best non-cheating run. I missed seven of the pots, BUT I didn’t die.
You also have to grab the bee and the hidden pots if you want an extra challenge. The game keeps a tally of what you collected. Also nice is the timer stops between each-stage. Now, if the main mode is too hard for you, Abridged is still something you should check out because it has a second mode called “Arranged.” It’s the same nine level game, only much easier. You start every life already possessing the axe and all hidden eggs are revealed. Oh yeah, and you only lose health from touching enemies instead of dying. All enemies, actually, and even the fire and boulders.
Okay, so Nesrocks didn’t exactly get the order of levels right. But, what he’s done here is actually an amazing idea. Adventure Island really is kind of perfect for this type of speed-running challenge already, but who wants to sit and play THIS game over and over? I put a lot of time into the NES game, and even though it was nowhere near as dull as I imagined, I was certainly ready to move on to the next game by the time I was ready to write the review. I was having fun, but not so much that it wasn’t getting exhausting. Shrinking the thirty-two levels into nine was actually brilliant. The order might be wrong, but he NAILED the choice of which nine levels to include. If Konami really does do a 40th Anniversary Collection, they should honestly just kick Nesrocks some money and use his hack as bonus modes. Verdict: YES! – $3 in value added to Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection Check out Nesrocks’ Patreon, and if you like his work, kick him some bucks!
FINAL TOTAL
They are cute together!
YES!: 6 NO!: 6 Total Value: $26 Total Value without ROM Hack/Translations: $22 Projected Price: $29.99 to $39.99 Final Value with Emulator/Bonuses: $32 to $36
It’s in the range, folks. If my hypothetical set releases at $39.99, even the most boilerplate special features would earn Adventure Island 40th Anniversary Collection an outright victory. Box art, ads, instruction books, concept art, a jukebox, etc? It probably makes it over the finish line. Of course, the opposite is true. If this comes with a featureless emulator, especially one missing the big three (button remapping, quick save/quick load, and rewind) there’s almost no chance any bonus features could make up for the missing bonus value of the emulator features. Not only that, but I’d probably drop the value of the first Adventure Island down a buck or two. Since I strongly suspect Konami has their eye on a set like this, hopefully whoever they partner with goes all-out on the emulator and special features. But, with half the Adventure Island games holding up pretty well to the ravages of age, a set like this seems to be worth doing. With the right package, at least.
FINAL RANKINGS
I normally don’t make a note like this, but I feel I should say that the drop off in quality between the #6 game and the #7 game is HUGE. Bigger than any gap between the worst good game and best bad game of any collection, real or imagined, I’ve ever reviewed.
Adventure Island 3 (NES)
Adventure Island IV (Famicom)
Adventure Island (NES)
New Adventure Island (TurboGrafx-16)
Adventure Island Abridged (NES ROM Hack)
Adventure Island II (Game Boy) **TERMINATOR LINE**
Welcome to the final part of The Simpsons: The Definitive Review! Make sure to read Part One and Part Two. Sorry this took a year for me to get to, but when you see the lineup, hopefully you’ll understand why I’ve been putting this off. Here’s the lineup. The Simpsons games were so low-quality that I threw in a bonus review for a Japanese-exclusive NES game based on Jack & The Beanstalk.
The Simpsons: Bart & The Beanstalk for Game Boy
Jumpin’ Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari for Famicom
Virtual Bart for the SNES
Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness for Game Boy
The Itchy & Scratchy Game for the SNES
Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror for Game Boy Color
This is not going to be pretty, BUT, the #1 ranked Simpsons game from a classic platform is in this feature. Alright, do the Bartman! Lucky for you, you only have to read these. I have to play them. I’m in deep, deep trouble.
The Simpsons: Bart & The Beanstalk Platform: Game Boy Released February, 1994 Designed by Brian Ullrich Developed by Software Creations Published by Acclaim NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Sometimes the game is pretty ugly, and other times, my jaw literally dropped from how detailed the backgrounds were. Game Boy games are quite capable of looking fantastic. Too bad the game is horrible.
The thing I had the most fun doing with Bart & The Beanstalk? Using it as a coloring book! Seriously, I enjoyed this a lot more than actually playing the game. I think I did a pretty good job, too! My parents were so impressed that they patted me on the head, then they followed my suggestion that they print it out and stick it to the refrigerator! They then went into another room, locked the door, and started to cry! I heard them say “did you ever imagine this is what she’d be like in her mid-30s?” Do you know what that means? I have exceeded their expectations so much that I made them weep! I love you too, Mom & Dad! You’re the best parents!
The sad thing is, this had potential besides a play activity for my inner 6-year-old. It actually does closely follow the story of Jack & The Beanstalk. The first level is climbing the beanstalk. The second level is entering the castle, then after some adventures inside an oversized cupboard or hopping along floating things in a bowl of soup, the final two stages are escaping the castle and parachuting down the beanstalk. I personally think Jack & The Beanstalk is hella boring, but if you’re a fan, this might be the most accurate video game of it ever made. It’s too bad the gameplay is every bit as dull as the source material. The core gimmick is that you’re not simply trying to get from point A to point B. You have to collect X amount of coins in stages one through five. This is only really a challenge for level one. The first time I played this in 2024, I failed to collect the minimum when I reached the end. I was so happy I put this off for a year.
The character sprites are pretty good for 1991 Game Boy. But, and this is a strange complaint, there’s too much animation. When you use the slingshot, there’s frames for aiming that I’d swear the enemy placement and level design logic (as in when a player should logically be expected to react to the element) don’t factor-in. It’s as if they were added after the game was finished. It’s so weird. I don’t remember ever thinking that about any other game.
The combat just isn’t very good because the slingshot is a very boring weapon to use. Each enemy takes two shots to kill unless you can find a power-up that doubles the power (at least against basic enemies), but that usually doesn’t show up until the end of stages. I still took a ton of damage anyway because enemy sprites are large but the screen is small and there’s a pronounced delay to your attack. Normally, that by itself should be a deal breaker, but it isn’t. You have a life bar so big that they could have shot Titanic on it and had room to spare for the next Bond movie as well. It renders every non-boss encounter pointless busy work. Plus, I kept refilling my life, though I’m not even sure how. One time was from grabbing a harp shaped like Lisa, which the game never mentioned as a goal but it’s part of the lore so I imagine it was necessary. I wasn’t even looking for it. I just stumbled upon it. Same with the goose that lays the golden eggs.
You’ll notice I’m taking damage in the right picture, but actually, I’m taking damage in both! That level was a huge pain in the ass where you start taking damage just by touching scenery that’s in the background. No other stage did that. That rule is sprung on you specifically in this level. Well, that’s because you’re supposed to “stay out of the light.” What f*cking light? It’s a Game Boy game! Some of Bart & The Beanstalk’s graphics are pretty dang good, and it had been full of background graphics by time you reach the “don’t touch those background graphics” rule. Take a look at these screenshots. On the left, I’m safe. On the right, I’m taking damage.
Safe
Damage
Notice how, like, the entire background is lit up like that? Because you take damage everywhere during some stretches of the stage. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s not like there’s a complex series of dodging moves or ways to sneak around. It’s a life-slap! It’s such an obviously bad idea that it should have been killed on the drawing board, and certainly never should have made it past play testing. It’s not exciting, which would be the only reason to add such a danger element that makes no sense at all from an artistic point of view. The level designs are not the worst I’ve played. Not even close. The mechanics in that stage, though? Oof.
For the most part, this is a generic 90s Game Boy platformer. If you can’t get sick of those, you’ll probably like this more than I did. At least they remembered to make everything oversized.
The bosses are even worse. The first one takes an outrageous twenty hits to kill, but that’s reduced to a measly fifteen if you got the slingshot upgrade. Then there’s the second boss. I thought I had the upgrade, but apparently it doesn’t matter if I did or didn’t. I stopped counting hits when the thing was still alive after two dozen shots, PLUS I’d hit it with a stick of dynamite at the start of the battle. Eat my shorts, game.
1st Boss
2nd Boss
If those are only the bosses for the first and second level, you can imagine how spongy the remaining bosses are. Especially the last boss, which is obviously the giant! Why, it must take a hundred shots, right? Well, no, because there are no more bosses, meaning you never fight the giant. Seriously? I mean, yeah, I’m relieved because the two bosses they actually programmed are so spongy that they rank among the most intolerable boss fights I’ve ever experienced in my life. But still, you set it up and everything, game. What the f*ck? Instead, the game climaxes on an auto-scrolling escape out of the castle, then a set-piece that sees you parachute down the beanstalk.
This is also auto-scrolling. The giant catches you if you linger too long on any platform.
It’s not the worst idea for a level, but it makes for a terrible finale. It feels more like a mid-game type of set-piece. Once you reach the bottom and grab the axe, that’s it! The game’s over! It’s weird that they thought to put bosses at the end of the first two levels, then just dropped that. Something is horribly off about this game. I’d be interested to know about its development. It shouldn’t have been “rushed” because it’s not like they had to time the game’s release to coincide with anything. By 1994, it was a safe bet the Simpsons was firmly entrenched in pop culture. Yet, it feels like a rushed, half-hearted game. It’s nowhere near the worst Game Boy release I’ve played, but it feels so soulless and uninspired. The worst thing I can say about it is that Bart & The Beanstalk was so enthusiasm-sucking that I delayed this feature by a year to avoid playing it. Verdict: NO!
Since this feature is flooded with terrible games, how about a bonus review of a Jack & The Beanstalk game that you’ve probably never even heard of. I know I hadn’t. I literally found out about it before hitting publish.
Jumpin’ Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari aka Jumpin’ Kid, aka Jack the Giant Slayer Platform: Famicom Released December 19, 1990 Developed by Now Production Published by Asmik Ace Entertainment, Inc Never Released Outside of Japan (legally, at least) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
From the same development team that brought you Jackie Chan’s Action Kung-Fu (read the reviews of the NES and TurboGrafx-16 versions in Kung-Fu Master: The Definitive Review) comes a halfway decent take on the Jack & The Beanstalk fable. My use of “halfway decent” was carefully chosen, by the way. The other half is generic, half-hearted crap. Jack the Giant Slayer is nowhere near as well done as the Jackie Chan games were, nearly rising to the level of “okay” before cratering in the home stretch. Initially, I decided to post this here instead of as a separate review because I wanted to show how it shouldn’t be THAT hard to make a bland but acceptable game based on the Beanstalk Multiverse. Well, maybe I should have posted this separately since I ultimately am giving it a NO! as well. This feature is cursed, and it doesn’t even come with a free Frogurt.
There’s too many bonus stages. This one plays like Pooyan. By the way,
This is a boiler-plate hop ‘n gunner with a focus mostly on vertical levels at the start of the game and side-scrolling at the end. I mean, obviously. The main hook is you have to acquire temporary items that allow you to jump higher, which allows for easier navigation. You also collect beans that increase your attack power. The combat is straight out of Mega Man in that you can only shoot straight ahead. Try not to miss, because if you do, you’re screwed. Only one of your bullets can be on-screen at a time, and they travel fairly slowly.
It’s a glitchy game. I went to dodge this boss and scrolled so far over it wasn’t on the screen anymore. When I scrolled back, it was gone but the door was still locked. It seems like it would have been a soft lock if I hadn’t rewound the game. I think what happened is it clipped through the left wall and got trapped in the room next to it. That room is gated off by a locked door that you can only open by killing the boss. At one point, the sprite was starting to go through the wall, and when I scrolled away I’m guessing it continued on. By the way, these bosses were such a boring slog that they were the final nails in the coffin.
There’s two major problems with Jack the Giant Slayer. The first is that you can’t actually kill most non-boss enemies. After the first beanstalk level, the majority of them are just stunned and very, very quickly come back to life. That wouldn’t be an issue if not for the second major problem: the collision detection is awful. You clearly have a very big hit box, and so it’s not enough to just try to avoid enemies. You need a LOT of space between them and you. Take any damage at all and all the jumping and shooting power you’ve accumulated is reset to the beginning. Granted, it doesn’t take much effort to accumulate a max load-out, but that’s not the point. I’ve never seen a game with poor collision ever rise above being barely okay. It kills immersion, dead. It kills the sense of accomplishment. Plus, Jumpin’ Kid is one of those games where the poor collision only seems to work one-way, as well. As far as I could tell, the enemies require direct shots with your projectile.
Most levels end on a boss at the top of the screen, but it’s usually the other enemies that continue to spawn and attack that makes these battles a pain in the ass.
Now, if you could somehow make this sprite-accurate, this would be a decent game. So decent that the studio who did Bart & The Beanstalk would have been better off licensing this for adaptation and re-spriting it into a Simpsons game, then converting THAT to the Game Boy. It’s a lot better than Bart & The Beanstalk. It’s still a bad game. At least there’s a battle with the Giant! Here it is:
Pretty lame, Milhouse.
That’s the world’s tiniest giant right there. I don’t know what else I expected since the whole game has a sense of smallness about it that doesn’t really fit the whole Jack & The Beanstalk theme. But the level design is mostly fine. There’s some good jumping layouts here. Actually, the NO! was secured after those levels ended, especially in the very, very dull castle finale. I really think if they had stuck to the vertical theme and just traded the beanstalk facade for a castle facade, this MIGHT have barely squeaked out a YES! It was heading towards it, even with all the warts! The levels are all pretty small but well-designed, and there’s a wide variety of set-pieces, including the goose that lays the golden eggs (actually it’s supposed to be a hen) and a pirate ship for some reason. Seriously, is that part of the Jack & The Beanstalk lore? How did I miss that part of the story?
What’s NOT here is the Giant’s house, including oversized, well, anything. I guess they had to cut stuff to make room for the pirate ship. I also don’t remember seeing a harp. The fun set-pieces totally end during the final stretch, ending with a trio of really horrible bosses that take forever to kill and then the letdown final battle with the giant. I can forgive the bad boss fights, but not having the oversized belongings of the Giant? Why even do a Jack & The Beanstalk game? Gameplay is king, and poor mechanics apparently override decent level design because I spent most of my gameplay session wanting to be done with it. Okay, so Jumpin’ Kid shouldn’t have been included in this feature because it’s not even an example of a good Jack & The Beanstalk game. It’s better than Bart & The Beanstalk, but not significantly so. It controls better, which is usually the tiebreaker if I can’t decide between two games.
I don’t know if this is a bonus stage or if they got distracted playing Rainbow Islands.
If you could somehow tighten the collision and maybe eliminate the “stun enemies only” aspect, this would be a decent game. I get how this could have been popular at the time, too. Apparently, this was a BIG hit on Famiclones in Central and Eastern Europe. I get that, because it certainly stands out among platforms of 1990 and games based on popular fairy tales were just getting a start. Jack the Giant Slayer just didn’t age well because collision detection has come a long way. It’s got a lot of heart, but heart doesn’t make for a good game in 2025. Apparently, this was earmarked for an American release but it didn’t happen. It’s probably wise, because had this come out in 1990, they would have heard “fee-fi-fo-fum” in an Italian accent. Verdict: NO!
That was really stupid and pointless to include. Now if I were reviewing Family Guy games, a lazy cutaway review would make more sense. Anyway, back to the Simpsons.
Virtual Bart Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System Released September 26, 1994 Directed by Hal Rushton Developed by Sculptured Software Published by Acclaim NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Here we go again.
Virtual Bart uses the same format as Bart’s Nightmare: a series of disconnected mini-games. Hell, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear these are all segments deleted from other crappy games. This time, they wisely ditched the hub-world. You just select which of the six games you’re stuck with using a roulette. For NO REASON, they also added a whammy, the skull and crossbones, which takes away a life. Well, that’s stupid. Timing the wheel is a cinch, by the way, as whatever you press the button on is eventually where it will stop. Anyway, since the developers recycled the same formula from Bart’s Nightmare, so shall I recycle my format from the Bart’s Nightmare review. These are in the order I drew the games. Plus, since they all seemingly have no names, I’ll have to make them up.
This uses Mode 7. No, I’m not also doing the Genesis version.
MAD BART
aka THE BART WARRIOR
It’s a combative motorcycle game, though the object is simply to make it to the finish line. I never came even a little close to timing-out, but I was probably one hit away from death when I crossed the finish line. You get a pathetic pea-shooter type of weapon that I never successfully killed anyone with. Whenever I tried using the brakes on the assumption the enemies would pull out in front of me so I could shoot them, they just stayed alongside me, which sucks with Kearney because he whips you with a chain. In fact, Kearney was the only baddie I know for sure I defeated (and multiple times at that). Using the shoulder buttons, you can perform a kick move. It takes a few shots, but it works, and you get a speed boost for it. The Bart Warrior is a shameless Road Rash knock-off, but honestly, this was way better than anything in Bart’s Nightmare. So far, so good, I guess.
WATERSLIDE
aka “WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!” “WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!” “WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!” “WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!” “WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!” “IF I DO THE REVIEW, WILL YOU QUIT BUGGING ME?” “OF COURSE! SURE! WELL, WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!” “YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!” “THANKS CATHY!”
Well, this is lame as hell. You go down the world’s most overpopulated water slide, swaying left and right while trying to avoid other sliders, sharks, and other hazards. It takes several minutes to finish this stage, assuming you don’t pick the wrong direction. There’s multiple forks along the way, and if you pick the wrong direction, best case scenario is you run into Homer clogging the slide and get reset to the previous junction. Worst case? You die. I had a cow when this happened only to discover that, the next time you spin this stage, it starts you off at the previous junction you passed. Okay, so the developers weren’t TOTAL tools this time. So, how do you know which direction to take?
Do you see it? Well, I didn’t until Angela’s friend Jason pointed it out to me. The lines on the bald guy’s shirt are pointed one direction or the other. He shows up right before every junction. I’m sorry but that’s too damn subtle, especially considering the speed and the stakes. Hell, they could have done a satire of Dragon’s Lair and had the correct direction flash on the screen and it would have landed much more as both a gameplay mechanic and a joke. This whole sequence was too long and very, very boring.
JURASSIC BART
aka BART-A-SNORE-US REX
Three whips of a tail to defeat Barney right here would have worked as a typical, totally average platforming challenge. How many whips does it actually take to defeat him? Eight. Most of the enemies in this level are like that. The people who made these games presumably aren’t morons. How did they not grasp that this sh*t was boring? I assume this is classic “rental proofing” but if it doesn’t add to the challenge and instead makes the game a slog, isn’t “rental proofing” going to assure kids who rent these games would never want to actually own them? How is it possible they never understood that?
Why stop with Barney? Krusty and Marge here, fought back-to-back, each take eleven hits. Eleven!
If a dinosaur using its tail as a whip isn’t enough to shatter every bone in a human in one shot, that must be one brittle-ass dinosaur. When enemies take that many hits to kill, even if you have a nice WHAP sound effect, it feels weak. Because, you know, it is weak. It’s some of the worst combat I’ve ever experienced, so I hope it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up when I say that the platforming and level design is even worse. First off, cue Smalls because this level goes on FOR-EV-ER. It’s gaming hell because none of it even rises to the level of mediocre. We’re back in Bart’s Nightmare territory here where this segment has no redeeming value. None. Just an ultra-repetitive series of platforms, cheaply-placed enemies, and GOTCHA traps. Like, there’s a point where you have to climb up a tall series of platforms, only some of them crumble underneath you.
Hmmph.
When the platforms crumble, they’re gone until you scroll off the screen. Well, as you can see, there’s no other path. It usually means starting all the way over. If the climbing was something like the castle level in Wizards & Warriors where the screen is full of platforms and you can find your own jumping rhythm and pathway, that’d be one thing. But this is just creating soft resets of progress. It’s a roadblock, but not one that makes the game flow better. What makes it all especially infuriating is they did clearly measure the jumps, because a lot of them were fine tuned for the shallow jumping height.
This does the whole “split pathway that’s supposed to have depth but it doesn’t work because it’s a 2D game and there’s no shadows, so the platforms look like they’re on the same plane” thing. I hate it when any game from this time frame does this. It NEVER works right.
The enemies are measured too. This is a game where you can jump on most enemies to avoid damage. In fact, that inflicts damage on baddies. But, to counter this, you BARELY can reach the height required to get up and over the enemies. Most of my attempts at both swinging my tail and jumping on enemies ended with me being damaged. The only saving grace for this whole sorry-ass level is that life refills are plentiful.
Always fun to have boss fights where the boss is so high up that you can’t even see them. This won’t be the last time something like this happens in this feature, either!
I didn’t realize until I reached the end of the stage that the point isn’t for players to lose by being damaged to death. They’re either counting on you to die via a bad jump or by timing out. The final stretch of the last part of this miserable slog of a stage is the dreaded slippy-slidey ice trope. This one leans heavily into moving platforms that you have to wait quite a while for, which runs out the clock. Then, as if to truly salt the wounds, the ultimate boss of the level takes place on a moving platform while the clock is ticking away. Moe and Homer throw stones at you while you whip with your tail at the stack of sheets they’re on, trying to completely destroy the stack. Except, the platform moves back and forth between them, and the playfield is so big that you can’t even see both bosses at the same time. You can only get a couple shots at most per pass, but the stacks are pretty big. I timed-out in my first attempt and barely won the second time with seconds to spare.
Here’s my question: who the hell would want this in a Simpsons game? Instead of playing as a normal Simpsons character in a Springfield setting, you play as a ugly-ass dinosaur in a prehistoric setting. For f*ck’s sake, just make a normal, non-spongy, non-cheap platformer starring Bart Simpson! How f*cking hard is that? Capcom, even with a massive time crunch, did an Aladdin game that had only a couple bosses, an entire tension-free, enemy-free auto-scrolling segment and the whole game was f*cking amazing. What the hell is this? Were you guys working on a dinosaur game and decided to just copy and paste the work you had done over to this for a quick buck? If so, good call not stretching this into a full game, because this was the absolute sh*ts. There’s no way Virtual Bart recovers from this.
BABY BART
aka NON-TRADITIONAL PLATFORMING BUFFET
Finally, one of these 16-bit Simpsons games has something that’s ALMOST a good platform segment. Almost, but not quite. This is kind of like a series of extra gameplay mechanics that would enhance any other normal platforming game, only without, you know, the normal platforming mechanics. You can swing off pegs to launch yourself high in the air. You can ride a balloon, where you have to move up and down on the strings to avoid obstacles. You can balance on a tightrope, which is the closest the segment comes to feeling like a run of the mill jumping game. You can use your diaper as a parachute for a second before it fails. Then, out of nowhere, there’s a section where you ride in a baby carriage and have to move up and down a few channels, avoiding hazards.
“Why didn’t they use Maggie?” asked, well, basically everyone in my family. It’s because in 1994, Bart was still the “main character” of the show, before it became the Many Occupations of Captain Wacky (later renamed Homer). But yeah, it should have been Maggie. The dinosaur segment probably should have been Homer. This feels like it wasn’t made by fans of the show.
It’s so radically different from everything else in this segment that I wonder if it was meant to be a seventh game in Virtual Bart, until they figured out they couldn’t stretch it out to five minutes. It’s basically a glorified LCD game. After this, it’s back to the peg-swinging, trampoline-bouncing stuff for a circus-themed finale. In truth, this is probably the strongest overall segment in any 16-bit Simpsons game so far. They really did seem to try and make an exciting, well-constructed mini-quest with unique mechanics. It even had decent combat for the first half of the game, as you can shoot your pacifier eight directions and enemies didn’t take dozens of hits. So, naturally they took the combat away completely at the end and then spammed the course with enemies. Of course they did. Baby Bart wasn’t the worst, but when the segment was over, I was happy to be done with it. That’s usually not a good sign.
PIG BART
aka SPIDER-PIG: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE
How sad is it that it took this long to get a decent platforming stage? And when I say decent, I mean BARELY so. I’m not even sure it’s really okay in a vacuum or just okay compared to all the crap that came before it. Pig Bart has a spring-like move that you can use after jumping that lets you get to higher platforms, and otherwise, this features the same crappy platforming physics and hop-on-heads combat as the dinosaur stage. But, the level design works. The segment is divided into four stages. The first is far and away the most interesting. You have to locate and rescue trapped pigs in a maze-like series of doors. This section closes in a hunt for three different keys that each match a specific door. It’s not amazing or anything, but it’s a nice, solid platforming maze.
Sadly, the rest of Pig Bart isn’t so interesting. There’s a couple traditional A-to-B sections, with the only twist being a room where you have to push five pigs frozen in blocks of ice to spring, then time when to activate the spring in order to launch them into the air where a hook catches them. While this happens, a clown that can’t be killed walks back and forth and freezes YOU, and it’s so annoying that it almost ruined it. I wasn’t sure if I was missing a step because five blocks is a lot. After this, you do another platforming segment before fighting a terribly sloppy trio of generic businessmen bosses. You actually can’t damage them directly. You have to get them to attack next to a bookshelf, so the books fall off and hit them. Apparently, a lot of people consider this the worst segment. I didn’t think it was THAT bad, especially compared to everything else in Bart’s Nightmare or Virtual Bart. It’s fine. Nothing special.
SCHOOL PICTURE DAY
aka Oh Thank God, It’s The Final Segment
Okay, this really would be like a between-levels bonus stage in any other game. In the first level, characters walk in a straight line back and forth and you throw tomatoes at them. In the second level, they move diagonally and you’re throwing eggs instead. You have to start a meter that quickly travels in a straight line down the center, then press it again to throw the object. While you can aim left and right after you throw, I only successfully hit one single person trying this the entire time. You can still hit every character by just waiting and throwing straight down the middle. You have unlimited ammo (I think) and are just basically working against the clock. Hitting any grown-ups automatically ends the round and, if you didn’t hit every single classmate, you have to start over.
I almost coughed up my heart when Homer climbed in the thing. I thought I was going to have to keep going.
Once you finish all six segments, the game just ends. No finale, just like Bart’s Nightmare. Homer gets into the contraption, it starts to spin, he screams, and then the credits roll so you can tell everyone listed on it to go f*ck themselves. If the 16-bit games were any property but the Simpsons, they would be considered among the worst games of this era. Saying Virtual Bart is better than Bart’s Nightmare is faint praise. Unlike Bart’s Nightmare, there’s no segments like the Godzilla or Indiana Jones stages that cross the line into unplayable. The dinosaur level comes the closest, and it’s simply a sh*tty platform game. There’s a LOT of those on the SNES. Worse ones, actually. So, Virtual Bart is better. Technically, half of the six segments would get a very pained YES! vote out of me and one other (Baby Bart) comes very, very close to it.
What the actual f*ck?
But, the net gains of the three okay segments don’t even come close to outweighing the net-negatives of the tediously long and boring water slide and especially the excruciatingly terrible Dino Bart segment. It’s also worth noting that the level I personally enjoyed the most, Pig Bart, is often cited as one of the worst parts of the game by others. Had it been the full game, I probably would have gone the other way too, but just as I was starting to lose patience it ended. The second best segment is a really shallow Road Rash knock-off, and the third best would be an average-at-best bonus round in any other 16-bit game. So, while Virtual Bart technically went 3 for 6, read everything above. Does Virtual Bart sound more fun than not? If it did, please note that I was THRILLED when I finally finished the review process. That should tell you everything you need to know. I’d rather be stuck watching the Principal and the Pauper on repeat than ever play this or Bart’s Nightmare ever again. Verdict: NO!
The Simpsons: Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness Platform: Game Boy Released November, 1994 Designed by James Halprin Developed by Beam Software Published by Acclaim NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Logically, shouldn’t it be Itchy you play as? Scratchy is the one who is constantly mauled, maimed, and mutilated in the cartoon series. This is hella violent, too. Look, I just decapitated Itchy with a frisbee, with visible gore dripping. This came out two months after Nintendo caved in to public pressure and allowed Mortal Kombat II to be published on the SNES uncensored. “Nintendo folded! Quick, add dripping blood!”
Well, this is the best Simpsons video game on a classic gaming platform. I figure that should get the Simpsons Arcade fanboys to back off by noting I said “classic platform” which in theory excludes arcades. Heh heh heh, that ought to hold the little SOBs. So yeah, I had a lot more fun with Itchy & Scratchy’s golf game than I did the coin-op or Bart’s House of Weirdness. This isn’t “miniature golf” either. Ever play Ninja Golf, the famous Atari 7800 game where you hit a golf ball, then fight enemies on the way to your next shot? This is like that, only instead of a very basic, highly-repetitive Kung-Fu Master wannabe mixed with all the fun of stopping a meter in time, this mixes all the fun of stopping a meter in time with a very clever platforming game that heavily factors in the ball itself. It’s so insanely ambitious that it hurts my heart that it’s so far under the radar.
Or perhaps the worst part is being a Game Boy title instead of the SNES or PlayStation. This is such a one-off experience that I wish it had the highest audio-visual presentation possible for the era.
First thing’s first: this is a seriously very, very violent game, and it’s even pretty gory for a Game Boy title. You decapitate Itchy (completely with dead, vacant postmortem eyes), cleave him in half, and shoot him dead. And the ending? Seriously, I’m going to spoil the ending of the game right now in the slideshow below after the gameplay pic of Itchy being cut in half, because it almost doesn’t seem real for a 1994 Game Boy release. Had the ESRB been in effect by this point, this would have almost certainly gotten an M rating.
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Jesus Christ, dude! JESUS CHRIST! Not that I’m objecting or anything. It actually makes me kind of proud that we live in an era with video game violence so awesome that it makes even the most grizzled, dead inside, flint-hearted people physically ill. But, the practical person in me notes that publishers care about ESRB ratings and the graphical content of this alone might actually prevent it from ever getting a re-release. Imagine putting a collection of Simpsons games out that wears the M rating because of a f*cking Game Boy golf/platforming hybrid where a cat performs an unscheduled vivisection on a mouse. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the game doesn’t actually need it. If I must choose either glorious cartoon violence or one-of-a-kind, genuinely fun gameplay, hey, I can get the violence from TV. I think there’s whole shows based around it and everything!
I can’t stress enough that if you think of this as a golf game, you’re going into it with the wrong mindset. Perhaps you should stick to Nintendo’s game? The golfing here is more like a series of timing/platforming tropes, only instead of just doing the jumping alone, you also have to manipulate a ball to the goal along the way. There’s no timer and, as far as I can tell, there’s no actual penalty for going over par. If there is, I never got it, and I did bogey at least one hole. You can even explore the full level to figure out the path you’re going to need to take to get to the hole. It’s not a straight line. In fact, many stages are downright maze-like. Now, if you do explore, you have to manually make your way back, but I still enjoyed doing this. The level design is actually fantastic. They didn’t half-ass this concept at all, nor were they conservative because the concept is experimental. Rare, but bold and very admirable.
Every hole culminates in a typical miniature golf trope. And yes, the ball becomes airborne if you hit it hard enough off the hill.
At the start of every level, you walk up to the ball and press UP to take position. Instead of the standard triple-click mechanics of the 80s and 90s, this is a double clicker because there’s no English to put on the ball. It’s a 2D side-scroller, so you can’t hook or slice it. That’s mostly because you can’t manually make the ball lift off the ground. You need a hill or some object like a magnet for that. After hitting the ball, you chase it down. It’s not hard to locate thanks to the helpful radar that appears when you’re not taking a stroke. Instead of having pars like 3 to 5, the pars are anywhere from 9 to 28. You can also find hidden erasers in the levels that shave a stroke off. That’s how you can tell it’s not real golf, where you normally just wait to finish the hole and then lie about how many strokes you needed. Oh, and Itchy tries to kill you the whole time.
This is bad golf etiquette. You’re supposed to wait until after the person takes their shot to throw a knife at them. Pssh, this must be taking place at a public course.
Itchy is actually the easy part. I figured he would probably screw with the ball, but he never does. Actually, no enemy does. Itchy’s goal is to kill you directly. No matter his attack gimmick in any situation, he’s a one-shot kill every time. In addition to being able to use your club, there’s a wide variety of weapons to dispatch him. Where the golfing gets tricky is that there’s often moving platforms that you not only have to get the ball onto, but you also have to leave enough room to be able to square-up to it so you can take a shot. The good news is that every moving platform, or at least the first ones in a sequence, go lower than the ground, so you don’t have to have EXACT timing. If you position the ball in the center of where the platform will eventually go, the platform doesn’t crush the ball and will scoop it up. They were really wise with the design in general. There’s only nine levels too, and the variety of gimmicks keeps things fresh.
The underwater level is actually a door maze, and was, for my money, the trickiest level in the game. But the wise design continues even in it. You can’t enter any door the ball didn’t already enter. You won’t get lost, BUT, it still works as a great twist on the door maze trope.
I don’t know what critics at the time had against Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Mayhem. Not only does it offer a truly inspired premise, but it has the gameplay mechanics to live up to that premise. It even goes the extra mile, as stages are full of secrets and hidden passageways that contain items, extra lives, or the valued erasers. The jumping mechanics and the platforms built around them feel natural and intuitive. The golf meter is really well done, as it’s simple to use but hard enough to clock that I still didn’t manage to have it down completely cold in two full game play sessions.
Here’s the worst part of the game: after you finish, when you enter in your name for high scores, if you get nine high scores, you have to manually input your name nine times. It doesn’t automatically go to the same letters you used the first time you put your name in. How the hell did they make such a great game and screw up the “enter your name” bit? I’ve never seen that happen. BTW, apparently I didn’t even come close to the best possible scores. This game is going to have a seat in my regular rotation.
Not only is Itchy & Scratchy’s golf elite in the realm of Simpsons games or licensed games in general, but it’s actually one of the best original Game Boy titles I’ve ever played. Plus, I love violence, and this is overflowing with so much of it that I have a niggling desire to hit my father over the head with a mallet. The best Simpsons game before Hit & Run? I think so, actually. It offers a lot more replay than the coin-op thanks to the golf score mechanics. Whoever owns the rights to this, I have to say either the ROM or a full remake of it could easily anchor a collection of Simpsons games if you can’t get the rights to the arcade game. Verdict: YES!
The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Gear Released March, 1995 SNES Version Developed by Bits Studio Game Gear Version Developed by Bits Corporation Limited Published by Acclaim NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
(SNES) See the pig snout on the right side of the screen? Yeah, I spent a while fighting this thing, and the only way I could figure to actually damage the boss is to stand on the platform I’m on and throw the bricks at it. Oh, you wanted the satisfaction of actually seeing the boss be damaged? Well, too bad. It’s almost like the people who made this didn’t actually play video games and thus didn’t comprehend the basic reasons why people like them.
The Super NES version of Itchy & Scratchy is a good looking, boring video game. The Game Gear version crosses into actual developmental incompetence. Both games have the same basic objective. Although framed like a normal mascot platformer, they’re not. Instead, levels are playfields and the object is to whittle down Scratchy’s life bar. You’re given a mallet as a default weapon, but throughout the playfield are various other instruments of violence that are usually tailored to the level’s theme. On the SNES, Scratchy takes a stick-and-move approach, but at least when you swing at him, contact is made.
SNES
SNES
The same can’t be said about the Game Gear version. Sometimes I went several minutes without seeing Scratchy. There’s a radar that purports to point you in the correct direction, but I’d end up reaching a wall only for the arrow to suddenly point the opposite direction. It probably took me around four or five minutes to beat the first SNES stage. If I beat the first Game Gear stage in under thirty minutes, I’d be stunned. Maybe it just felt longer. The combat is horrifically bad on the Game Gear, with some of the worst collision I’ve experienced. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Scratchy’s hit box was a single pixel in the center of his chest. That’s especially annoying because YOUR hit box is so big and so sensitive that, during multiple instances, I was damaged by the poofs of enemies that I’d already killed, even if they weren’t even a LITTLE close to me. Look at this sh*t:
Game Gear
Game Gear
I really do hate saying this to game makers because it’s really mean to say and sometimes they have nightmare deadlines, but there really is no excuse for collision THAT bad. So, here it goes: have a little f*cking pride in your work! This is a game aimed at kids, and if you think kids don’t deserve better than this, you should not be working on products made for children. Itchy & Scratchy: The Game on Game Gear is Action 52 levels of broken, and I’m not even really done. Scratchy almost always won the quick draw against me even if he wasn’t facing the right direction and even if the sound effect for what would be a normally on-target whack sounded before Scratchy began his weapon’s attack animation. Look at this screenshot below. Despite the blades of a hedge clipper encompassing his full body, I’m not doing damage. Oh no, I’m taking it.
Game Gear
And here’s how THAT ended, without Scratchy even turning around.
Game Gear
Huh. They charged money for this experience and everything. Even when you do score a hit, it’s not fun. Scratchy feels like he takes hundreds of hits to kill. On the SNES, you can do a powered-up charge attack, a move that’s gone on the Game Gear. I hit Scratchy so many times that I had to rewind to make sure that his health was actually trickling down faster. I’m not even sure if *I* killed him or he died of natural causes. Oh, and they cut out the bosses, which should be a positive since they sucked ass on the SNES. But, it’s still pretty telling that they didn’t even attempt them on the Game Gear. Itchy & Scratchy on Game Gear is so bad it’s the rare game I wrote-up that I didn’t finish. I have my limits and I couldn’t take it. It has to be one of the most half-assed, broken games EVER on a Sega device.
(SNES) Reminder: these two just starred in one of the best licensed Game Boy titles ever made.
At least in the SNES game, when you hit the charge attack or especially attacks with weapons, it quickly drains the cat’s health. The problem is the combat, for a game that’s ENTIRELY combat, is boring. You can’t do any jumping attacks at all. If something is right above you and the weapon you’re using has a swinging animation that looks like it’s going from up to down, EVEN IF the enemy is in the space of the motion blur, the attack will miss. It sure feels like this is one of those games where everyone involved regretted getting the assignment and couldn’t be bothered to do better. Maybe Acclaim should have hired studios that had inspiration instead of just going with whoever made the lowest bids. I mean, come on! It’s not like you’re building a hospital!
For MOST of the bosses, just sit and spam the attack button. You’ll win the life slap fight.
Occasionally you’ll get a wedge of cheese that makes you run as fast as another blue animal, but I found no practical use for this except losing Scratchy’s position. Which you’re not actually trying to do. The only interesting idea is that you have to kill little versions of Scratchy to build up ammo that only can be used on the boss fights. In fact, the bosses are immune to your hammer and MUST be killed by these weapons, which have different sprites but are all just identically-behaving throwing items. Okay, it’s not THAT interesting. You know what’s the saddest thing of all? Itchy & Scratchy: The Game is the best 16-bit Simpsons game. They bite, alright. And bite. And bite and bite and bite. Bite bite bite, bite bite bite, it was the Itchy & Scratchy Game! Verdicts: NO! and NO!
The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror Platform: Game Boy Color Released March 19, 2001 Directed by Jonathan D’Cruz Developed by Software Creations Published by THQ NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Just what everyone wants: a game that leans extra-heavily into exploration that also runs on a timer. Was there some kind of rule that you could only develop a Simpsons game if you repeatedly smashed yourself in the head with a cinder block?
I feel like this is the first time I’ve played a retro Simpsons where it makes me feel EXACTLY how I feel watching the show. That’s because being letdown by Treehouse of Horror is an annual tradition! Actually, this takes a page out of the SNES games by offering a few distinct play-styles in bite-sized vignettes. I was going to do the review the same way, but I changed my mind since three of the seven levels are the same basic concept: a platforming scavenger hunt, and a fourth uses the same engine for a door maze. Also, I legitimately screwed-up this review. I didn’t realize until after I’d turned off the game that I forgot to switch back to my normal emulator. I normally use mGBA, but Treehouse of Horror was so damn sluggish that I swapped emulators and tried other games to make sure everything was running right. You never know if the kids monkeyed around with the settings.
Ah, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. This is my go-to emulator test for Game Boy/Game Boy Color. This plays so smoothly. Which reminded me how inexcusable the sloppy movement and jumping of Treehouse of Horror is.
But, for whatever reason I forgot to swap back to mGBA and instead played this on an emulator that made a lot of my screenshots look like this:
Whoops. Always check your progress, Cathy. In fact, I got so few usable screenshots I had to use passwords to grab better screenshots today before publishing, but I wasn’t upset. It wasn’t like this was an unbearably dull game or anything. Sigh. Anyway, nobody screwed with my settings. The game just plays really, really poorly. Movement is stiff, slow, and sluggish. Except for Maggie’s stage, which is a-okay.
The second level, where you take control of Maggie Simpson after she’s turned into a fly, is certainly the best executed level in the entire game. You fly around searching for three microchips, then have to activate five light switches to open a portal. This actually wasn’t bad at all. It played so well I have to assume it was made by someone who wasn’t involved in the platforming bits. I wouldn’t want a whole game of this, but this was, dare I say it, pretty good for two or three minutes. Now, I should note that most of the levels just unceremoniously end and return you to the treehouse level select screen. There might be a dancing animation sprite, but the Maggie stage just ends. It’s a really half-assed game.
What frustrates me is EVERY stage runs on a timer. It’s REALLY slow moving, so while I never timed out, I was still pretty annoyed just by its existence. In games where you’re dropped-off in a big maze, I want to be able to explore. I felt like I was being given the bum’s rush instead of being allowed to go at my own pace. Not that it matters. It’s a very short game that, once you know where all the doohickeys are in each stage, you could probably finish in under thirty minutes. But, while I didn’t enjoy this all that much, I concede there are some good ideas. In fact, the level design COULD have won me over, but not with the technical mechanics this poorly coded. Again, the big book for most of the game is you’re placed in a maze and have to search for macguffins. For Bart’s stage and the Robo-Homer stage, you have to retrieve the target items one at a time.
What makes the timer REALLY aggravating is that there’s a lot of situations built to work the timer. Like, in the level based on “If I Only Had a Brain” from Treehouse of Horror II, you can’t actually fight anything. There’s no combat at all (though enemies do die if you touch them), and the starting room that you have to return the target items back to one at a time always has guys on the only ladder out of the room. Eventually, I realized I either had to accept damage and count on finding health refills (which don’t seem to respawn on this level like they do others) or I would time-out.
In the first level, that item is fuses that you have to return to the basement of the house. Returning the fuses turns on lights in the home which allows you to search the three keys which eventually lead you to the attic. Did you follow all that? The combat is just awful, and it took me all of a minute to figure out to just accept damage because the life refilling donuts respawn unlimited times just by scrolling off the screen. There’s a lot of backtracking and red herrings in the platforming segments, but if the game controlled well, they would have been fine! A lot better than the TERRIBLE Marge top-down shooting section where you have to shoot zombies with manure or puddles of water before fighting an ordinary, non-zombie Krusty the Clown. It’s like a really poor version of Zombies Ate My Neighbors. I quickly realized the best option was to just leg it past the basic zombies until I reached one of the four bosses.
Homer’s robot level is the same basic idea as Bart’s, only without the ability to attack. You have to just accept damage. This one introduces the ability to search drums and cabinets. If it’s a searchable thing, an eyeball will appear. If they had implemented combat, this wouldn’t have been such a frustrating stage. The final fetch quest is easily the best. Based on the “Nightmare Cafeteria” segment from the best Treehouse of Horrors episode (the fifth one, duh), you play as Lisa trying to find five keys and then the corresponding jail cells to rescue your classmates. There’s a stealth element to this one. While you can’t defend yourself, you can hide up against walls to allow the adults to pass you. It’s the only platforming stage I liked.
Okay, so sneaking past the baddies wasn’t exactly the hardest thing. You just wait for them to walk past you and, once their sprite has cleared you entirely, you bolt for it. They’ll never see you and you’ll have a clear path to escape. But, once again, the level design is really well done for this, as only the first key unlocks a kid who is right there. The rest requires you to search them out and it’s, gasp, genuinely satisfying! I wouldn’t have minded a whole game like this! It’s certainly better than the mediocre door maze that makes up Homer’s first level, based on “Bart Simpson’s Dracula” which also includes a long, sloppy “escape the rising floor” segment. And then there’s the finale, King Homer. It’s a god awful Rampage wannabe where you can shrug off all the damage as you make your way towards the tall building on the right side of the map, where you’ll fight a boring airplane boss.
After beating King Homer, a UFO sucks all the Simpsons family members out of the treehouse. I figured there was going to be one last level where you fight Kang & Kodos, but I guess the developers were as bored making this as I was bored playing it, because the game just cuts to the title screen. That’s it. The end. Now, I’ve played a lot of bad Simpsons games over the last year. Thirteen, to be exact, but this one kind of frustrates me the most because it certainly had the most potential to be good. Well, I suppose Bart vs. The Space Mutants did too, but that one actually was fixed (see Part One). Everyone loves Simpsons Halloween Specials, so getting fans excited for a game based around them should be easy, right?
Well, they had the right idea. I’m not being sarcastic, either. I don’t know if this was the BEST way they could have done a Simpsons Halloween game, but the fetch quest stages are well mapped. As bad as this plays, and it plays horrifically bad, the levels are so short that they don’t really leave too much time to become exhausting. Only the Marge stage (WTF were they thinking?) and King Homer (ditto) are unmitigated disasters. The other five could have worked, and had they controlled like even an average Mario knock-off, hell, this could have gone down as the second best console/handheld Simpsons game ever. It had no shot at beating Itchy & Scratchy Golf or the Japanese version of Simpsons Arcade, but third place was on the table. Some people train their whole lives just to make the podium. Instead, it’s just another mediocre Simpsons game. I can’t imagine why Hit & Run didn’t sell as much as they were expecting. The franchise had such a great track record! Verdict: NO!
Is the game implying Bart murdered Homer, cut off his head, and then submitted it as a science fair project?
FINAL RANKINGS
Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness (Game Boy)
The Simpsons – Japanese ROM (Arcade)
Bart’s House of Weirdness (MS-DOS)
Bart vs. The Space Mutants Redux (Genesis ROM Hack)
Bartman Meets Radioactive Man (NES/Game Gear)
Swamp Thing (NES)
Bart vs. The World (NES)
**TERMINATOR LINE**
The Simpsons – International ROM (Arcade)
Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror (Game Boy Color)
Bart & The Beanstalk (Game Boy)
Bart Simpson’s Escape From Camp Deadly (Game Boy)
Krusty’s Super Fun House (SNES)
Bart vs. The Space Mutants (NES/SMS/Genesis)
Bart vs. The Juggernauts (Game Boy)
The Simpsons Arcade Game (MS-DOS)
The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product (SNES)
Virtual Bart (SNES)
The Simpsons: Bart vs. The World (SMS/Game Gear)
The Simpsons: Bart’s Nightmare (SNES)
The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product (Game Gear)
Kid Icarus
WarioWare, Inc.: Mega Microgames!
And the next might look like this:
Super Mario Advance 4: Super Mario Bros. 3
Super Mario Advance
All Night Nippon: Super Mario Bros.
Yume Kōjō: Doki Doki Panic
Super Mario Bros. 2
Super Mario Bros. Deluxe
Milon’s Secret Castle
Hudson’s Adventure Island
Takahashi Meijin no Bouken Jima
Takahashi Meijin no Bug-tte Honey
Adventure Island II
Super Adventure Island
Adventure Island
New Adventure Island
Adventure Island 3
Adventure Island II: Aliens in Paradise
Takahashi Meijin no Bōkenjima IV
Super Adventure Island II
Adventure Island Abridged
Adventure Island 3 (NES)
The Simpsons: Bart & The Beanstalk
Jumpin’ Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari
Virtual Bart
The Simpsons: Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness
The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product
The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror
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