Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates: The Revenge of Captain Hook (NES Review)

Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates: The Revenge of Captain Hook
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released January, 1991
Developed by Equilibrium
Published by THQ
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Peter Pan v. Rambo? Nah. That’d actually be fun.

Based on the Fox Kids cartoon Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates, Fox Kids Presents Fox’s Peter Pan & The Fox Network Approved Pirates: The Revenge of Captain Hook (sponsored by Fox) is a legit contender for the worst game on the NES. A game with absolutely no grace, no finesse, and especially no polish. It’s one of those rare titles that I have nothing positive to say about it. One of the most lazy and soulless games I’ve ever played in my entire life. It’s actually kind of astonishing how out of f*cks it is. A sloppy-ass platformer where the object is to kill X amount of pirates before exiting the stage. I didn’t even realize that was the object at first. I beat stage one in about ten seconds when I jumped on a mushroom near the start of the level that flung me all the way to the end of the stage. It was quite a distance too. Mind you, it only took me those first ten to twenty seconds to realize how unresponsive and awful the controls were. So when I saw the points of my surprise victory start to be tallied-up, my jaw literally dropped. “Maybe this won’t be so bad!” I thought. Then I did it again in the second level, only I hadn’t killed enough pirates. “Maybe not.” When I went to replay the game, I’m honestly not sure how it happened since I couldn’t have possibly killed enough pirates to beat the stage. I went back and looked at my screenshots, and it says there were 7 left. This never happened again, and in fact, the second time I played it, the mushroom did not throw me the full length of the stage. What happened? I still don’t know.

This is one of those games where the weapon barely extends past your body. I can’t think of any game like that I actually enjoyed. At least Wizards & Warriors added the throwing weapons.

By 1991, I don’t think there was any excuse for a game that can’t even do jumping or platforms right, but Peter Pan & The Pirates screwed up both. Jumping is super sluggish and quite worthless. There’s a handful of environmental hazards, and most of the time, your jump isn’t good enough to clear them. It’s also often unclear what is or isn’t a platform. My family, because they like to dabble in trash TV, recently binge-watched a Netflix game show called “Is It Cake?” where you have to guess which thing among a handful of objects is actually a cake decorated to look real. Yes, I watched it too. I’m doing MY part to inch us closer to full-blown Idiocracy. ARE YOU? Anyway, I’d like to propose a spin-off show called “Is It a Platform?” Can you tell me..

IS IT A PLATFORM?

THAT’S A BIG JUMP! SURELY IT MUST BE..

WRONG! NOT A PLATFORM!

TRY AGAIN! IS IT A PLATFORM?

I MEAN, THERE’S NO LITERALLY REASON FOR ONE TO BE THERE SO..

WRONG AGAIN! IT’S A PLATFORM!

Yikes, right? But that’s okay, because this is Peter Pan, and Peter Pan can fly. To do it, you just hold up when you jump, which transitions you to flying mode. There’s no actual flying animation or anything. That would have been a LOT of work. Like, at least an afternoon. Maybe two. MAYBE EVEN THREE! So you just lock into your jump sprite.. a single gosh-darned sprite.. and move around with the most sluggish, unresponsive air hockey puck movement imaginable. It feels like they just turned the debugging tool into the flying mode, but it’s even worse than that sounds. You collect fairy dust as you go along, which always tops you off at 250 points, but it drains really quick while you fly. You’d think letting go of a button or something is what would turn the flying off, but it doesn’t. You have to push yourself down onto a platform to end the flying. And it gets even worse than that, because you can be knocked out of the air if you clip into any solid surface like, say, a platform. And the platforms are often smooshed together, so when you NEED to fly with the cement hockey puck physics, if you hit anything, you could very well fall into a pit. It doesn’t even need to be that way. Even graze a platform you’re trying to fly up onto and you’ll fall. This is one of the worst controlling platform games I’ve encountered.

And of course there’s instakill gotchas in the form of these cages.

You’d probably think Peter Pan & The Pirates must be impossibly hard, but actually, you get so much life that I never came close to dying from enemies. Each treasure chest you collect gives you two points. I finished my non-cheating round game with 65 health, with a high of over 110. Oh and it turns out the pirate that I was killing with one or two hits at the end levels WAS Captain Hook, but in the finale, the rules change and you have to knock him off the plank. They couldn’t even be bothered to do a unique Captain Hook sprite for the finale to signal the change in rules. But in that entire cleanly-played session, I never died once via enemies. All my lost lives were falling deaths. Thanks to the magic of rewind, I also discovered a lot of weird things, like how sometimes enemies spawn and sometimes they don’t. Remember how I beat the first stage from what must have been some kind of glitch? Well, the game got its revenge in later stages. More than once, even though I killed every enemy I passed, I’d reach the end of a level and still have not filled my dead pirate quota. I’d have to walk back until another one finally spawned. But it wasn’t just the pirates. The booby-trapped cages didn’t always fire, or sometimes a gotcha-placed spider wouldn’t show up.

Weirdly, this is the second awful licensed game I’ve reviewed this year with a final “boss” defeated by knocking them off a cliff. Wolverine for the NES did the same thing.

What else can I say? The level design is basic, uninspired, and bland. The combat is inconsistent, unsatisfying, and somewhat glitchy. It’s one ugly sucker, too, with little in the way of convincing sprite work or even thoughtfulness about what colors to use so as not to totally confuse everyone. After playing through it twice (which didn’t take long at probably an hour combined) I honestly wonder why Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates isn’t up for “worst NES game.” It has to be close, and I really think if this had been released a year or two earlier or gotten a wider release, it might be universally regarded as one of the worst video games ever made. Absolutely miserable to play from start to finish with no redeeming qualities at all. A game that actually made me really angry. Peter Pan & the Pirates was before my time, but they showed reruns on Fox Family when I was a kid. It actually had something resembling a soul. It didn’t FEEL cynical. It had Tim f’n Curry as the voice of Captain Hook. Enough said. I’m sure it doesn’t hold-up today because it’s basically a typical 80s/90s animated cartoon designed to sell merch, but it’s also not hard to imagine that the cartoon had a lot of fans who might have been excited to play a video game based on it. And this is what they were given. A game so terrible that it practically holds the kids who would be inclined to want a Peter Pan & The Pirates game in contempt, as if they’re idiots for being fans in the first place. Not every bad licensed game feels like it comes from bad faith. This one does. It’s so obviously rotten that it feels hateful towards potential buyers, and if that isn’t grounds for being a contender for the worst game ever made, I don’t know what is.
Verdict: NO!

I wouldn’t know. BTW, this is not doctored. It really looks like that.