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 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. 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. I Like I figured out on my own 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**
The Legendary Axe aka Makyō Densetsu Platform: TurboGrafx-16 Released September 23, 1988 (JP) August 29, 1989 (US) Designed by Tokuhiro Takemori and Keisuke Abe Developed by Victor Musical Industries Published by NEC (US) NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
You’re going to notice a LOT of straight line levels in screenshots of this game that took home actual Game of the Year awards the year I was born.
It was pretty stunning that Legendary Axe wasn’t included in the TurboGrafx-16/PC Engine Minis. It’s probably the most high profile game that was left out of the lineup, and hell, it never even got a Virtual Console release on the Wii either. What makes that strange is that Legendary Axe won a lot of awards and was even named 1989’s Game of the Year by some publications. How did that happen? I’m going to take a stab in the dark and guess it’s because the check cleared? (shrug) I literally cannot believe a group of people who play video games for a living collectively decided that this was better than any other game they played that year unless they were paid to say it. The only other option is that group of people was so impressed by the smallest hint of an audio-visual upgrade over the NES that they have probably since perished from sensory overload when they saw the PlayStation’s loading screen for the first time.
Woo hoo! More straight line level design! You know, I think a jump is going to happen soon. Whoa, slow down, buddy. A jump? You don’t want to overwhelm people. Keep it straight and slow.
But the accolades kept coming years after the fact. Electronic Gaming Monthly named it the 80th best video game ever made in 1997. How did THAT happen? I assume that list was compiled by people who played exactly eighty video games in their lives. Seriously, you guys could only find seventy-nine better video games than this? Really? Or were you so embarrassed that you once named this TurboGrafx-16 game of the year instead of Alien Crush that you just went along with naming it a top 100 game ever as some kind of weird sunk cost fallacy? I found the list and, besides sports games like MLB 98 (hell, even I named NBA 2K1 on the Dreamcast to my original top 10 all-time list in 2012), I cannot stress enough how much Legendary Axe sticks out like a sore thumb among other games on it. This ahead of Bonk’s Adventure? Are you kidding me? Ms. Pac-Man? Oh come on!
As far as I could tell, this is the only thing in the game that feels like a kind of 1989ish level of gaming evolution. It’s a key that opens up a handful of extra health refills and an attack meter increase. It’s like they knew they had to do more than the straight line, but that was too hard so, after programming this, they said “alright, now it’s a ‘real’ game. Back to the straight lines!”
It’s not that Legendary Axe is bad. I mean, it is, but mostly because it’s boring by design and the object of game development is to create a means of escaping boredom, not causing more of it. At best, it’s a run-of-the-mill flat arcade-like combative game. But even those types of games normally had evolved well past gameplay this rudimentary by 1989. This feels like an NES game from two or three years earlier, only with SLIGHTLY updated 8-bit visuals. I just reviewed Cadash in Taito Milestones 3: The Definitive Review. That was another 1989 release that feels like THIS specific genre. That arcade platforming/hack ’em up genre, only that was so much more ambitious than this. Legendary Axe is so BASIC that it’s a nothingburger of a game. This should not have felt like a big deal even in 1989. So what gives?
The final level of the game? Straight lines, but fashioned like a maze. I genuinely can’t believe anyone of any era would give it any award except “most generic” and “most walking in a straight line” and “most time spent waiting around for your weapon to charge-up.” I checked. There aren’t awards for those things except “most generic” only it’s instead called “The Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy” and it’s reserved for movies.
In Legendary Axe, you mostly walk in straight lines and swing your axe at enemies. Occasionally you have to jump over a pit or swing on a vine, but the overwhelming majority of the game is walking in a straight line and fighting spongy enemies with very basic attack patterns. When a game plays out like that, the combat better be phenomenal. Legendary Axe’s is not. Actually, it’s pretty dull in design logic and amateurish in execution. From an execution point of view, collision detection is terrible. Your own box seems to grow by quite a lot when you swing your weapon. Since it’s literally the only form of attack, with no sub-weapons or items helping you, you’ll spend a lot of time getting smacked by enemies who didn’t even come close to having their sprites hit your sprite. Maybe they have REALLY bad breath or something?
This brief section in the third stage is the game’s platforming at its most complicated. Sometimes you have to jump to a higher series of platforms, but that’s fairly rare. There’s no moving platforms and, at most, you have to time a jump after a fireball or enemies has flown up from the pit you’re crossing. There’s just no imagination at all in Legendary Axe outside the final boss. It’s a remarkably uninspired game. Sadly, some decent jumping physics go to waste.
From a logical point of view, Legendary Axe is a game that forces players to spend a lot of time waiting around. The gimmick is your axe has a meter that empties every time you swing it, and a full-powered swing takes a while to charge up. Just mashing the attack button does hardly any damage at all, and so you’re highly incentivized to wait for the axe to charge-up at least half-way. As you go along, enemies become spongier and spongier, but you’ll eventually be able to locate four upgrades to the meter’s size. These give you more powerful attacks, but with them comes a meter that takes a LOT longer to fill up.
“We need to do something besides straight lines and rudimentary platforming.” “I GOT IT! False floors! Everyone loves those!” At least these ones are easy to spot once you know what to look for, I guess.
By time you have all four upgrades, which you ABSOLUTELY NEED if you don’t want most enemies to shrug off your attacks and immediately counter-attack you until you’re out of life, you have to wait a couple seconds for the meter to charge up. You can’t swing upward, and when you’re ducking, your attack becomes a horizontal slice instead of the normal vertical one. Your axe also only does the full damage on the first thing it touches, so if an enemy shoots projectiles right before you land your hit, you waste your charge shot on it. For many of those types of enemies, I honestly couldn’t figure out a way to avoid taking damage. I’m pretty sure a couple of them are life slaps because they spam their projectiles in uneven patterns. This combines with collision issues and enemies that typically counter-attack. You don’t exactly have a lot of range, so all combat is close-quarters. It gets old really fast.
Like these chicks here who look kind of like Marge Simpson when she lets her hair down. They continuously throw three balls and immediately throw again as soon as you land a hit on them. One time I thought I’d avoided the balls and successfully slayed her only to then have a ball spawn mid-air after she was dead and ping some of my health.
Maybe their hearts were in the right place with the meter, but logically, the combat of Legendary Axe is completely reduced to needing to back up, wait for the meter to fill up all the way (which takes quite a while even after getting items to boost the speed) then make your move and hope the thing doesn’t fire a projectile to essentially block the attack you waited several seconds for. You HAVE to do it this way. If you try playing by any other means, you will die from the counter-attacks slowly pinging you to death. To show you what that’s like, watch this clip. In it, I fight a room full of enemies the only way that makes sense if you want to win. THEN I rewind the room and fight the final guy over again, only this time I don’t wait for my meter to fill up.
Mind you, that’s after picking up the items that increase the speed of the meter filling. 1989’s Game of the Year, everyone. I don’t get it. It’s such a basic, unexciting, repetitive nightmare. None of the drawbacks are done in a way that it could be considered a balanced risk/reward equation. A lot of enemies take so many shots that it’s no longer satisfying when it finally dies. You’re just happy it’s over with. And it keeps getting worse from there. A lot of the time, when a game’s collision is bad, it works both ways and you can cheese enemies the same way they do with you. That’s not the case with Legendary Axe. YOUR box is huge, but not the enemies or bosses. Also enemies and bosses seem to have more invincibility frames than you do. So while you can’t let this boss’ fireballs anywhere near you, your axe better be well onto its sprite, and you better not have just hit the thing. I’m not scoring a hit in either of these two pictures.
So, why the hell did Legendary Axe really win all those awards? Was gaming media of 1989 really that f*cking shallow that slightly better graphics overrode all gameplay merits? Because if that’s the case, I honestly think Altered Beast for the Sega Genesis, a game I didn’t like at all, was better than this. The combat was more impactful. The enemies are more imaginative. The bosses are more memorable. And the graphics, true 16-bit graphics and not just a rewarmed NES with a couple extra features, are far superior to the graphics of Legendary Axe. Altered Beast is a better game in every way a game can be better, and it came out exactly two weeks before Legendary Axe did in North America. Look at each game’s first bosses. Legendary Axe’s accolades couldn’t be just because “wow, look at the pretty graphics!”
I don’t even think this looks that good. It only looks good in comparison to the limits of NES games. How about one final comparison? On the left this time is Legendary Axe. On the right is what is essentially the NES version of Legendary Axe. A game called Astyanax that has a similar “wait for the meter to fill up” axe-based combat in a rudimentary platformer. Look, you even fight green eyeball monsters that float just above your axe’s reach in both games! Peachy.
But, nobody named Astyanax game of the year or one of the 100 best games of all time. I guess it really was about a slight audio/visual upgrade. I’ll never understand it. There’s just nothing to Legendary Axe. It features a limited variety of enemies. The level design and stages all feel samey. There’s no exciting set-pieces. The most complex thing in the game are vines you swing across or the occasional ladder that gets you out of a pit. I find it hard to believe that people awarded THIS piece of garbage Game of the Year in 1989, and I really can’t believe it would make a top 100 games of all time list in 1997. Is it REALLY just because of the last boss? Oh God, it is, isn’t it?
I guess this is technically the best part of the game because it’s actually a little fun to play, I think. Anything is better compared to what came before it.
I mean, it’s a cool looking boss and it plays a lot better than the rest of the game. But it’s not that hard. I beat it on my second attempt and probably would have won on the first if I had full life. The boss I fought right before the finale put up a bigger fight, mostly because against it, only one in three direct shots actually counted as hits. For the final boss, you can even strike it in the foot and get credit for a hit every time. I find that when a game responds to my actions, I usually have more fun than I do when it doesn’t, you know? It’s like they put everything into this one encounter. Even with a sweet final boss, Legendary Axe is basic even by the standards of 1989. I don’t think this is a game that sucks now because it aged badly. I cannot believe anyone could ever shower this clunky, unimaginative Conan wannabe with praise.
This is a boss fight. Legendary Axe does that thing where a boss of a stage becomes a basic enemy afterward.
Shame on me for assuming that Keith Courage was a lesser game before even playing Legendary Axe. At this point, I’m starting to understand how the TurboGrafx-16 failed in the United States. If Legendary Axe really was the killer app of the platform, that doesn’t bode well for it. Of course, the real killer app was Bonk’s Adventure, and Legendary Axe just further proves to me NEC made a big mistake not throwing every resource in their vast company towards making sure it was ready by the US launch. But, if given a choice between the pack-in game they chose or their big critically acclaimed game Legendary Axe? I’d much rather have Keith Courage. Like, by a big margin. And now I know why the curators of the TG16/PCE Minis didn’t lift a finger to secure this dumpster fire. Verdict: NO!
By the way, the creator of Bonk worked on this game too. I stand by venom.
It’s a rock. I can’t wait to tell my friends. They don’t have a rock this big. Actually he looks like he’s chewing her out for getting kidnapped, doesn’t it?
Hudson Hawk Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System Released December 27, 1991 Developed by Ocean Published by Sony Imagesoft NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
My father is an unironic superfan of Hudson Hawk, so I want to preface this review by saying that, as miserable a time as I had, I’m happy that I’m almost 36 years old and I still get to play video games with my father, who’s about to turn 76. I love you, Daddy. Amo a mi Papá risueño! By the way, he hated the game too.
So yeah, Hudson Hawk is a terrible game that, like the infamous box office bomb that it’s based on, has a cult following. I don’t get it, at least with the NES game. Apparently most of its fans are fans of the home computer ports. They can have them. After playing the NES game, I didn’t like the concept of Hudson Hawk at all. I don’t even think it had any concept at all besides “hey, we got a license for the next movie starring the Die Hard guy! We’ve made it to the big time and OH MY GOD, what have we done?” At best, the game Hudson Hawk could have turned out to be a bland, rushed-through-production platformer. But, needless to say, the version I played is not the concept at its best. A game completely devoid of polish or craftsmanship, Hudson Hawk on the NES is one of the most sloppily coded games I’ve played at IGC. Currently, the worst NES game I’ve reviewed is Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates. A game that, mechanically speaking, I have nothing positive to say about. Hudson Hawk gave it a run for its money.
What the heck are these sprites? Hudson Hawk’s teeny tiny sprites all look deranged. “Oh look! The baby got into our LSD supply! Baby’s first acid trip! Look at that mouth foam! He’ll be having flashbacks for years and not even know why! How precious!”
I’ll start with the biggest problem. You’re given a whopping eight hit points per life, which sounds generous, but there’s a catch: they never bothered to program most of the notifications for when you’re taking damage. Some elements, like bullets, make a noise, but for the most part, damage is completely silent. There’s no damage sprites. There’s no blinking (my term for invincibility frames). There’s typically no noise to indicate you’ve been hit. You don’t even get to see your life bar during the action. You have to pause the game to do that. Here’s what that looks like with an enemy dropping objects out a window onto you. I had seven hearts going into this and let the guy drop something on me. Despite the fact that I lose six out of seven hearts here, you wouldn’t know it from how the game reacts, which is LITERALLY NOT AT ALL!
It’s unbelievable that anyone making a game that’s supposed to be fun could actually believe this was a good idea. “Nobody likes it when Mega Man goes GLLLLLICK or when Simon Belmont goes PISSHHH. Let’s just not do that, and everyone will love our game!” I’d like to see someone ROM hack those games to remove all reactions to taking damage, including removing the life bar from the primary gameplay screen and see how fun they are. The answer is “they would be next to unplayable.” It’s like how only an idiot would hear about those people who are born with CIPA, aka congenital inability to feel pain, and think “I wish I had been born with that!” In reality, those people live short, tragic lives because pain is sort of essential to survival. Well, the appearance of pain is essential for action games to work. Don’t believe me? Play Hudson Hawk, a video game that has CIPA. That alone qualifies it for a NO! but Hudson Hawk has other fatal problems.
The gigantic slap that I think is supposed to be a punch is one of the weakest-feeling attacks on the NES. Usually a lack of OOMPH is because there’s no damage frames, but the lack of quality sound plays into it here.
Hudson Hawk is based around precision movement and jumping, but this is one of those games with seemingly deliberately rough controls, mechanics, and physics. I hate that. I always have. Saying the game engine itself should be the source of the challenge is like saying a car’s airbag should be attached to the brake pedal. It always feels like a product of having no ambition at all. You get a pathetic jump, but typical to this piece of junk, even that doesn’t work right. For this teeny tiny little jump to work at all, you have to build up sufficient momentum first. So naturally they built the level design largely around ledges that you have to do the hokey pokey on, turning around and trying to position yourself to build that momentum. Then the developers REALLY give players the middle finger by having your movement in general be too loose. Take a look at this segment:
This room, the finale of level two, is divided into two sections. On the top floor, you have to avoid walking on those yellow squares. They’re trampolines which will launch you onto those bookcases and force you to return to the ladder you entered from and start over. These aren’t platforms you’re jumping over. It’s a solid floor. Hudson Hawk does this trick constantly. Instead of trampolines, it’s usually alarms that are the floor tiles you jump over. Regardless of what you’re triggering, it’s always too sensitive and far harder than normal platform jumping to get right. Then you get to the bottom floor, and it’s unstated that you’re playing “the floor is lava” only instead of killing you, touching the floor activates a cage that lowers around the book you’re trying to reach. You can see that the platforms are pretty small, so you barely have enough room to build that momentum up. You can’t just jump blindly either since touching a light does damage. It doesn’t tell you that part either. Hell, the lights don’t even look like danger elements. Neither do the wall alarms in level one.
Touching either of the circled switches triggers an alarm. These are cropped photos. They’re very small in the game, and even more annoying is that there are switches you have to deliberately trigger. Just making contact with the bad ones sets them off.
The level design is probably the only part of the game that comes close to not being thoughtless. To the developer’s minuscule credit, they did try to make Hudson Hawk feel like more than a simple Point A to Point B game. It’s based on a caper film about a cat burglar. Like every other aspect, they failed, because they never even come close to staging it correctly. The above sequence where you can’t touch the floor? That could have felt like a heist, but it comes with no warning, and you don’t even get to see the cage lowering around the book because you’re so far away from it. The consequences for hitting the floor are more likely to happen off-screen. I’d have preferred a text screen before entering the room to explain the rules. A small break in the action would have been better than how they set the table for it, and there are text screens in the game between levels. If you’re a game developer, you HAVE to paint a picture for your higher-concept designs. Hudson Hawk doesn’t do that.
If not for the loose movement and lack of damage sprites/blinking, some of the screens would have risen to the level of “fine.” Really! Nothing special. These are boilerplate video game challenges, but the classics are classics for a reason: they work. Well, provided the mechanics work.
I’m not a fan of the movie, but Hudson Hawk should lend itself to an action game far easier than something like Back to the Future. Actually, they probably should have leaned more into stealth type of elements. Hudson Hawk is a caper film. Make Hudson Hawk a caper game. But the “stealth elements” don’t feel like stealth gameplay at all, so it never really succeeds at being a caper video game. The “alarms” don’t function like alarms because you’re just jumping or crawling under them and, like everything else in the game, they’re too sensitive and too subtle. I’d also think a “caper” game would have more slap-stick based “outwit enemies” combat, but Hudson Hawk doesn’t do that either. You just kill baddies with flimsy baseballs that come with a stiff penalty for missing. Or, sometimes the baseballs only stun enemies for a second or two and you have to finish them off with a clunky slap move that doesn’t even have to make contact to work. They phoned-in everything. Look at this:
It’s a blind jump that, when you make the leap, the platform just appears. It’s not exciting, though. Players are going to try it because the developers built it in a way where there’s literally no other option but to just try to jump. It happens several times in this room, and then at least one other time late in the game. I’m pretty sure it’s the block I’m standing on in the picture below that wasn’t originally visible. I found it by accident when I shorted a jump. You know what would have been more exciting, knuckleheads that made this game? Having it visible, because then I know what needs to be done and the consequences for not doing it. You’ve created the wrong sense of relief: surprise relief that builds no anticipation. Did any of you even play video games before you started making this?
And I might as well say it: this is one f*cking ugly game. I have no idea what motivated the art direction but these sprites are terrible.
My spidey-sense tells me the invisible platform thing might be a relic of a deleted gameplay mechanic that required an item to reveal hidden platforms. That’s a caper-like thing. There’s no items that affect gameplay at all. My father said the game they should have tried to replicate was Konami’s Goonies II. A licensed game with caper-like first person exploration segments. But, Goonies II is an excellent game because it probably took a lot of effort to make, and who has time for that? As a general action platformer, Hudson Hawk has no excitement because of the poor movement and jumping, and because the graphics are so ugly that you can’t even see half the things killing you. All these fatal problems in a game that has so little ambition to begin with. Hudson Hawk is a movie that’s famously overproduced. Maybe the designers felt like they had to balance the scales of the universe by grossly underproducing it.
Oh thank God I’m finished with the game.
The best thing I can say about Hudson Hawk: at least it’s not as bad as Peter Pan & The Pirates. I did have to think about it, though. Probably the second best thing I can say about Hudson Hawk is the game only lasts three levels. That’s probably a pretty good indication of a creatively bankrupt game made by people who were completely disinterested. Maybe they saw a screening of film and were like “oh f*ck, this is what we’re making a game for?” It happens, but you can still make a great game out of a bad property. Ever heard of Johnny Mnemonic? It’s a famously terrible movie that Midway signed up to do a pinball table of before knowing how the film would turn out. Even after George Gomez saw the film and questioned every decision that led to him having this gig, the finished pinball machine is beloved by fans. If you work for a AAA game maker who does licensed games, you’re going to end up working on a mediocre IP eventually. Great developers resolve to make their game the best thing to ever come out of the franchise. The bad developers simply don’t care because they get paid either way, and the worst ones? They make games like Hudson Hawk. Verdict: NO!
“WOOOOO BABY! COCAINE IS AWESOME! QUICK, SOMEONE HAND ME A POGO STICK BEFORE THE COME DOWN!”
Bonk’s Adventure: Arcade Version aka Kyuukyoku!! PC Genjin (Japan) aka B.C. Kid: Arcade Version (Europe) Platform: Arcade Released in 1994 Developed by Kaneko NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
Certainly a gorgeous game with impressive sprite work and memorable enemies.
Calling the arcade version of Bonk “the forgotten Bonk” kind of seems weird when the whole franchise is essentially forgotten at this point. Many of my older readers have talked about the original Bonk’s Adventure for the TurboGrafx-16 as a game that looked so enticing that they wanted to trade their NES in for a TG16. For a while, it looked like Bonk would be a mascot on the level of Mario and Sonic. It never happened. The last fully original Bonk game released in 1995, and the last console release happened exclusively in Japan with a PlayStation 2/GameCube remake of the original Bonk’s Adventure. Back in 2023, I had planned to do every Bonk game. I only finished two games, the original and its NES remake, before I needed a break. I have quite a few games left, including this extremely weird arcade take that’s built around co-op play, though the game is fine in single player.
This might be my new favorite screenshot ever. In the co-op game, Bonk’s girlfriend tags along and you and her can bonk each other till your heart’s content, though as seen in this pic, she might not like it. The dinosaur above Bonk is like “hooo, this will be fun to watch!”
If you’re expecting a close approximation of the console versions of Bonk, forget about it. You can’t even “glide” by rapidly doing and undoing the diving headbutt like in the original games. There’s also no exploration at all during the twenty-one levels, which are bite-sized. Seriously, in my first play through, I usually took about 40 to 45 seconds per stage. Speed is incentivized, as the game keeps track of the fastest times for each level. You don’t have to worry about gathering items, with the exception of the smiley faces. You’ll notice the smiley faces are stacked on Bonk’s head in most of the pictures. In the coin-op, they act as a sort of helmet that both protects you from some attacks and gives you extended reach on your headbutts. But, if you take damage, they go flying like the rings in Sonic. It sounds nice, but I never fully got a grasp on why some enemies were knocking the smileys off my head and others were damaged by them.
Sometimes the ball is a basketball. Sometimes it’s a soccer ball. Sometimes it’s a football. My non-American readers are ripping their hair out and/or screaming at their monitors after those last two.
You’re also expected to grab a sportsball and carry it to the finish line of each stage. You even score points for every second you carry it. The end of stages features a moving finish line straight out of Super Mario World, only the twist is the tape is a hoop that you dunk the ball through. It sounds more important than it is. Arcade Bonk is a straight-up platforming action game that’s based around simple enemy attacks and hazards like spikes or falling blades. Despite all the elements that have been added over the console Bonk titles, this is a much simpler game than those. Play the short stages, all of which are left-to-right scrolling. There’s no vertical stages and no set pieces. The only themed stage of note is a single stage with swimming. That old chestnut, and it sucks as much here as it normally does. Seriously, for all the whining I do about slippy-sliding ice stages (and those are here too) I’d rather be frustrated by them than bored with a swimming stage.
Funny enough, Bonk games tend to have better swimming stages than most platformers and the coin-op Bonk is no exception. But I’d still rather have a normal level. I’ve never understood the popularity of swimming stages in games. “It’s kind of like the game you’ve been playing this whole time, only slower. Much, much slower.”
The tiny stages are weird, but how they play out is even weirder. You can play the twenty-one levels in any order. After every three levels, you then fight one the seven bosses in any order. Normally this would be a sign of a game that doesn’t scale properly since, in theory, being able to choose any level and especially any boss means the levels need to be balanced. That’s not the case here. Bonk’s levels are numbered, and I’d say the sequential order scales as you would expect it to almost perfectly, with the final stages offering a pretty hefty challenge. I have no clue why they made this non-linear. Presumably it’s because this was kind of designed to be a ticket redemption game and, in theory, you can get more tickets on the harder levels since there’s more scoring opportunities. If you do play this, I strongly suggest you activate the SERVICE MODE in the dip switch settings and beef up the difficulty (you can also change the Japanese text to English). The default setting is set to 0 out of 3 in difficulty, but it should be set on 1 or 2, at least.
Some damn good boss fights too, including one against Evil Baby Bonk. Kind of redundant since all babies are evil until they work it out of their system.
Keeping it real, the coin-op version of Bonk is probably going to be one of the weaker games in the franchise. Despite all the effort to give this layers of complexity, it’s one of the most basic platformers to come out during this time frame. Thankfully, the action of the Bonk franchise is really, really good. The arcade game is proof of how good. It was a smart move to take away the ability to hover, as it would have allowed players to circumvent most of the challenge. By removing that, you’re left with a short and basic platformer that’s been polished to a mirror shine. Personality matters A LOT, and they really went all-out with making the sprites feel alive. Despite what the Wikis say, there’s even power-ups that turn you into a robotic skeleton or what appears to be a Native American warrior.
The combat is chaotic and visually loud, but always satisfying, and the levels are well constructed. Including all the downtime between stages, it’ll only take you a little over a half hour to beat Bonk even if you die several times. If you play co-op, since you can attack and bounce off each other, it might take longer. I didn’t get to play it co-op as much as I would have liked, but fans of New Super Mario’s co-op should get a kick out of it. So, will we ever see Bonk Arcade get an official release? I wouldn’t bet on it, but then again, I have no idea what the rights situation is with this one. I assume a Bonk collection is coming soon, but either way, I wouldn’t be shocked if this is missing from it. Hell, as far as I can tell, nobody even knows the fate of Kaneko or its library. I do hope that coin-op Bonk can be plucked from obscurity some day, because as short and strange as it is, it’s actually a lot of fun. Maybe not quite the Bonk you’d hope for, but still Bonk and still fun nonetheless. Verdict: YES!
Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō Platform: Famicom Released January 5, 1991 Developed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE
It looks like it’s going to be so much fun. Sigh.
Hoo, boy this is awkward. A lot of my friends have very different taste in games than me. While I was suffering through the first Wai Wai World, people I like and trust assured me that the sequel would be a lot of fun and to not worry about it. So, I didn’t. I really did have faith this was going to blow my socks off. Well, my socks are still firmly attached to my feet and I’m so darn butt hurt about it I could spit nails. So, it falls to me to knock YOUR socks off. Let’s see if this statement does it. Ahem. I really hated the first Wai Wai World, but I’d rather play it than this sequel because this is one of the most boring competent games I’ve ever played in my entire life. Wai Wai 2 is mechanically fine and it’s dull.
Instead of the possibility of playing as every character in a single run, you’re limited to only three of five Konami all-stars, which are.. you know what? F*ck it. There’s no point in even saying what characters are included or what games they’re from because they don’t feel anything like the original characters.
This is NOTHING like the first Wai Wai World. That’s all I really knew about Wai Wai 2 going into it. I never looked at a screenshot, and if I played this when I ran through hundreds of NES ROMs a few years back, I don’t remember it. So, when I saw the look of the game, my first visceral reaction was “eww.” It’s not what I was hoping for. Wai Wai 2 reminded me of Kid Dracula, which I liked just fine. It’s an okay game, but that art direction worked for it, and I’m over it. For this franchise, I wanted something that resembled the sprites from the Konami library, not hyper-cute versions of them like Kid Dracula did. It’s what the first Wai Wai World did and what I thought I was signing up for. But, I kept my mind open, at least until the gameplay slammed it shut with one of the most intolerable opening stages ever.
Look! It’s the guy from Contra! I mean, it doesn’t look like him or play like him even a little bit. You can’t even shoot the gun diagonally. None of the iconic power-ups that made Contra an all-time classic are along for the ride, which would be the only reason anyone in their right mind would want to play as the guy from Contra in a non-Contra game. Allegedly the spread gun is here somewhere, but I didn’t see it, and it wouldn’t have helped in THIS game. Even with just the basic gun, he’s so overpowered that he takes what little stakes there are out of the game completely. Calling this the Contra guy is jiggling a key chain at its worst.
Unlike the first game, this is a completely linear ten level genre mash-up that opens with one of the slowest auto-scrolling platform stages I’ve played. An introductory stage that has no excitement at all. I’ve never used the fast forward function on my emulator as early as I did here, and then I kept going back to it because there’s so much dead air where nothing is happening because the screen isn’t so much scrolling forward as it is eroding forward. I’m not a big fan of auto-scrolling platforming in general. I can tolerate it, but not when it’s this slow and nothing happens. The enemies are easily dispatched and the game continues to inch forward. When the stage was still going on minutes later, even though I frequently fast-forwarding, mind you, I really started to become afraid the whole game would be like this. When the second stage allowed me to actually do the scrolling, it was such a relief. “Well, at least the auto-scrolling is finished.” And then, later in the game, this happened:
By the way, that robot is the main character, with all the Konami all-stars being like power-ups you switch to.
That is a screenshot from the slowest and most boring auto-scrolling stage in the entire history of video games. LOOK HOW SLOW IT SCROLLS! Who the hell play tested this? Did they think it was exciting? Did they think this was fun? Now, the stages where you actually do the scrolling aren’t the worst levels in game history, but they are very boring. The designers seem to have overcorrected the difficulty problem of the first Wai Wai World, because this sequel is completely toothless. I never died once during the platforming segments, even though I was braining myself on the spikes in the slow-moving swimming stage above. Besides one boss fight, I don’t think I ever had more than one or two hearts worth of damage. I can’t imagine playing this co-op, because it sure seems like one of the two players is going to have nothing to do for all but one level. There’s not enough meat in these levels for one player, let alone two.
I feel like this is the embodiment of the Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the TV meme. I too recognize that scene with three coffins from Castlevania III. Jiggle jiggle.
Instead of switching on the fly between the different characters and using them to get past character-specific obstacles, this is just a pure, mindless action platformer where the all-stars are glorified power-ups. You collect an item that turns on a meter that swaps between the three icons of your Konami all-stars loadout. When you press UP and A on the one you want, you switch to that character for the next sixty seconds. Oh, and you’re now invincible. For sixty seconds. Not even fast counting Punch-Out!!-like seconds, either. Granted, if you take damage, it takes a few seconds off the countdown. That doesn’t matter though. This is a seriously cinchy game. I’m not even kidding when I say this is like a baby’s game.
Most (if not all) platforming bosses can easily be beaten by mindlessly slashing at them. I’ve found that a reliable barometer for how mindful a game’s developers are of the type of game they’re making can be found in how much effort a boss takes to dispatch. If you can literally walk up to one the first time you ever play it and, without making any effort to dodge its attacks, defeat it by simply mashing a button with no regard for how much damage you’re taking by doing that, that’s usually reflective of the game being a product of developers who simply didn’t give a sh*t. Don’t mistake what I just said for easy. It’s not the same. An example of an easy boss is the first Bowser in Super Mario Bros. You still have to actually have timing, especially the first time you ever fight it. Some proactive step has to be taken instead of just not caring what happens to you because you’re going to outlast it regardless.
But even if you do take damage while wearing one of the all-stars, there’s so many power-ups that start that meter. Even if you’re already wearing an all-star, you can start the meter going by grabbing an item, wait for the count down to get low, and activate it for the same character again. By the end of Wai Wai 2, the game is giving you the items for that meter seemingly every screen, allowing you, in essence, unlimited invincibility. On top of that, there’s “health boxes” which reset the timer to 60 seconds. Someone got paid for this idea, and someone else got paid to say “good idea!” to that person, and someone else got paid even more to agree with the second person and green light the first person’s idea.
In addition to the platforming segments, there are also a bunch of one-off distractions from the mediocre platforming along the way. Like, the lead-up to the Castlevania stage is basically Frogger. It lasts under a minute, but it’s better than anything in the platforming stages. And for you shmup fans, don’t worry, I’m getting to that. It’s the only good part of the game.
Of course, having so many of these all-star switchers are probably there to accommodate co-op because, as always, co-op ruins everything. Even taking co-op into consideration, the game abandons the idea of the items being special by the end of the game. I couldn’t keep up with all the meter-starters in the last few levels and didn’t bother trying, but they seem to have forgotten about the 60 second timers. I don’t think I took a single hit of damage for the back half the game, at least in the platforming stages. It’s like Wai Wai 2 gets stuck in God Mode, and God Modes get old fast. You just can’t design a game like this and expect it to be enjoyable, you know?
This would have been neat if Kid Dracula didn’t also do a similar Castlevania, only with much more fun play mechanics. Or if I want to play something like Castlevania, I could just, you know, play Castlevania. I thought the point of Wai Wai was to play Castlevania with the Contra guy, and it’s actually THE Contra guy, with the sprites from Contra and the controls from Contra. That’s the game we all want, right? That’s quirky and weird, especially if you play it completely straight.
I feel like they just had the wrong overall concept for the platforming bits, which make up over half the game. It’s such basic, generic level design with no-frills combat. The closest any Konami game comes to this isn’t actually Kid Dracula. It’s the NES Tiny Toons, another overrated Konami game that’s all style and no substance. What was even the point of doing a sequel to Wai Wai World that doesn’t feel even a little like the first? I didn’t like it, but it does have fans and, at the very least, I’m very intrigued by the concept. I feel like this couldn’t possibly appeal to whatever fans the first game made, but at the same time, this feels so disconnected from the other Konami characters being honored that I’m not even sure why they bothered with this game at all. The platforming stuff is all pure digital boredom and I have nothing positive to say about it, but at least there’s a couple very, very good shmup stages.
A comically gigantic version of the iconic Big Core MK I from Gradius is the highlight of the entire game. It’s very cool and actually very challenging. When I wasn’t capturing screenshots, I lost several lives fighting it. You’d swear these segments are a different game entirely. They basically are. Crying shame that they’re stuck in Wai Wai World 2.
Unlike the first Wai Wai game, the shooting stages actually feel like the real games that inspired them. Specifically TwinBee, which is the third stage and Gradius/Salamander, which is the eighth stage. Both of those are “branching paths” but what that means is if you play the game a second time (or reload a save state to return to the level select screen, which is what I did), you can play a different course. This only happens with the shmup stages. I don’t know why they didn’t cut or merge some of the platforming stages and then have every other stage be a shmup, since they’re really fun. I’m not so much into TwinBee, but it’s alright and so are its levels in this. But I’m a huge fan of the whole Gradius format, and both the stages and the encounter with the giant Big Core are every bit as good as the franchise deserves. It’s basically a slightly less silly version of Parodius.
I literally sat up in my chair when the game transitioned to third-person in the TwinBee section, but it was a massive letdown. This is only a bonus stage that feels like After Burner, and all you do is get bells, and here, you can only juggle the bells into one color instead of many. There’s also no enemies. I was really hoping for a boss fight. I’m about to play somewhere around a dozen TwinBee games for a Konami Shmup Definitive Review, and I wouldn’t mind seeing more of this, as long as it does more.
There’s one other branching-path segment that allows you to choose between doing something that kind of resembles a sliding puzzle, only without the normal sliding puzzle rules, or a car driving level. The puzzle was bizarre only because, while you solve it, you occasionally have to switch the position of a character that has a train heading for her. It’s not hard and just adds busy work to the puzzle experience, but it was different. The car level was somewhat close in both look and feel to the Autopia level from Adventures in the Magic Kingdom, which is shockingly one of the most popular reviews I’ve ever written. It controls looser, has projectiles, manual jumps, a boss fight, and it’s much more challenging, but it still feels similar. In fact, when I reached that stage, I wondered if Magic Kingdom was the game that inspired Wai Wai 2. Magic Kingdom had large, hyper-cute characters and basic platforming. The difference between the two games is that one is the platforming is just better done in Magic Kingdom. No boring auto-scrolling helps.
It’s not hard to figure out why Wai Wai World didn’t take as a franchise. It feels like the first game created an amazing set of blueprints to build off of. You never know! Who imagined after playing the first Grand Theft Auto that it would go on to become one of the biggest things in gaming? For all we know, Wai Wai had that breakout potential, and Konami squandered it by seemingly choosing a team that didn’t get the joke of the first game. The idea of a dead-serious cross-over like Wai Wai World is kind of funny by itself. The first game would have been charming if not for the plethora of technical problems. This sequel isn’t charming. It feels like it’s trying too hard to be irreverent and quirky. Going over the top with the wacky sprites and completely changing how the roster of all-stars is implemented so that they no longer feel remotely connected to the games they came from feels like it betrays the entire concept of the first game. And the designers didn’t even stand by their convictions, because they stuck so closely to the TwinBee/Gradius formula for those stages that they feel like they were stolen from other games instead of belonging to this one. I think a ROM hack could save the first Wai Wai World, but this? I don’t think it came from a place of inspiration. It feels cynical, and I can’t forgive it for that. Verdict: NO!
I honestly forgot this was in the game. After the auto-scrolling in level one, you do this shmup section where you can shoot both ways. It’s as forgettable as the platforming segments.
Konami Wai Wai World Platform: Famicom Released January 14, 1988 Designed by Konami Never Released Outside of Japan NO MODERN RELEASE*
*Really should be NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED but technically a mobile port was released in 2006.
Wai Wai World has two MAJOR problems that I couldn’t get over. This is the first:
Hug the screen to scroll.
Enemy already in shooting animation, leading to automatic damage.
No, I don’t mean Simon Belmont fighting a dragon from the Goonies. Hypothetically, that’s cool. What’s not so cool is how much you have to hug the screen to get it to scroll. I can’t say for certain it’s solely responsible for Wai Wai World getting a NO! (spoiler alert) because this is a generally problematic and boring game. But it’s impossible to know, because the combat would be transformed by normal scrolling. What do I mean by that? Well, the game that Wai Wai is most often compared to is Castlevania. The Wikipedia page says gameplay is, quote, “very similar to Castlevania.” VERY similar. Folks, it’s just not true. I hate it when Wikis say crap like this. Those completely generalized “the game is a top-down maze, so it’s essentially like Pac-Man or Bomberman” type of comparisons like with the PC Engine version of Batman. Do not go into this thinking you’re playing a Japanese exclusive Castlevania that lets you also play as Goemon and Mikey from The Goonies.
Few non-RPGs have as many ROM hack translations out there as Wai Wai World has, but you really don’t need a ROM hack or know Japanese to play it. The walkthrough at StrategyWiki should be more than enough. You might need the slot machine to bring back dead characters, but I never lost a single person. Well, I did but it was BS so I rewound it. What?
Wai Wai World has the stairs from Castlevania that are essentially identical to the ones from the first Castlevania and that’s where the similarities end. The combat doesn’t feel like Castlevania. The action doesn’t feel like Castlevania. Hell, Wai Wai World doesn’t even feel like Castlevania when you’re in the Castlevania level playing as Simon Belmont and fighting skeletons and Dracula. I’m not kidding. It feels like a bad bootleg of Castlevania, and it’s from the same company! That is one of the most f*cking astonishing failures of game design I’ve seen in my life and worthy of mockery, but I’m going to play along anyway and use Castlevania as an example. So, when you’re scrolling the screen in Castlevania, where are you on screen?
IN THE CENTER OF THE SCREEN! And where are you in Wai Wai World?
You’re closer to the side than you are to the center.
Because of the scrolling, combat is lacking in the elements I think the average player seeks from action games, like excitement, catharsis, or a worthy test of your skills. Most of the time in Wai Wai World, enemies are sprung on you, and if they have the capability of firing a projectile, usually they fire and as soon as they appear. For a lot of them, their attack conveniently is measured perfectly to match the exact length of distance between you and the edge of the screen where you scroll. How lucky for them. So, as you scroll them into existence, they fire and you take a hit that you can not react fast enough to avoid. It’s nothing but a GOTCHA and a life slap.
The design is universally crap. That heart had actually been on the ground and in a treasure chest. By the way, as far as I could tell, the only thing in treasure chests are life refills. But, for whatever reason, only Goemon can open the chests, and when he does, the heart flies up in the air before landing. Throughout the Moai statue level, there’s multiple hearts placed within reaching distance that immediately fly up in the air to an unreachable platform. Even hearts that come from chests disappear relatively quickly, and as far as I could tell, you don’t have enough time to touch the chest with Goemon, scroll through the characters to reach Konami Man or Konami Lady, jump up in the air while holding down the button so you can enter your flying mode, then fly up and grab the heart, which only refills the character who is selected anyway. It’s so trollish. Maybe it’s a co-op thing. I dunno, but this game has a mean-spirited attitude in general so I assume these were meant as jokes.
While life refills are plentiful via random drops, that’s not the point of an action game. There’s no sense of tension because the enemy has already spawned and damaged you before you even know there is an enemy, and so all the action is kind of retroactive, as if combat comes with a life tax. It takes the joy out of making progress, because you’re in a state of hyper-vigilance whenever you’re moving forward, especially as the enemies become more dangerous. If you become low on health, you essentially have to heel-toe forward until you rebuild your health because no amount of skill can protect you from enemies who spawn into existence already in their attack animation right in front of you. At one point, I did find my entire roster critically low on health and resources in the Hell stage, and it sure as heck wasn’t fun. I assume the scrolling was done this way to accommodate co-op, which Wai Wai World offers. It isn’t more fun with two players, especially for the person who goes first and does the scrolling. It just goes to show that arbitrary co-op ruins everything. And I’m not even entirely sure it’s the WORST problem.
Here’s the second major problem with Wai Wai World:
In that picture King Kong (yes, King Kong. This game is weird) is successfully landing a punch. LOOK HOW FAR AWAY I’M STANDING FROM THE THING I’M PUNCHING! And this isn’t one of those games where that works only one way. You can’t use sprites to suss out a safe distance between enemies and the bullets they spray because the collision is universally horrendous. That, combined with the fact that most attacks have no middle frames of animation, make Konami Wai Wai World a game completely lacking in cathartic combat. There’s no OOMPH to the attacks, no sense of violence at all, and thus no immersion. You feel like you’re playing a sloppy-ass game that wants to be quirky without any of the actual charm or effort that made Konami an elite NES developer in the first place.
Even the space shooting level that happens before the final level isn’t good. This feels like a bad knock-off of a Konami space shmup. Even the boss at the end feels like it’s a deleted scene from Life Force that was cut for extreme lameness.
It’s just not a fun game to play, or to explore. Rather than being Castlevania, which I can’t stress enough this is nothing like besides the staircases, this is much more like The Goonies. Not the excellent NES sequel Goonies II, but the first one that never got an American NES release. The combat especially feels just like it: flimsy and lacking in weight. If you’ve not played Goonies 1, instead think of this as a poor man’s Zelda II. Specifically Zelda II’s dungeons, which the levels in Wai Wai World are very similar to in structure and feel. Only, there’s no hub-world and instead you use the starting screen on each stage and hidden warp zones to return to the game’s Mega Man-like level select screen.
I probably shouldn’t have used this picture because hot damn, that looks fun. I just played Wai Wai World two and a half times and know it’s a terrible game, and my brain is still telling me “look at that! Golly, that looks good!”
The basic gameplay idea is you start with the superheroes Konami Man and Konami Lady, and you have to go around looking for keys in stages that allow you to unlock the star of a Konami game that’s trapped within the stage. There’s six in total: Simon Belmont from Castlevania, Mikey from The Goonies, Goemon aka Mystical Ninja, the hero of the Famicom exclusive Getsu Fūma Den (which I’ll try to review in 2025), one of the Moai from Gradius (one of 76 games reviewed in Konami Shoot ‘Em Ups: The Definitive Review) and King Kong from another Famicom exclusive called King Kong 2: Ikari no Megaton Punch (again, I’ll try to get to it in 2025). After you save them, you do a single shmup level with Vic Viper from Gradius or the TwinBee. It’s one of the most random lineups ever, but it’s not like Konami in 1988 had a deep roster to pull from.
Dracula isn’t even a boss in the Castlevania stage, but he’s a major nuisance who absolutely spams the screen with bullets. Do you see the armor next to him? You cannot get it until Konami Man and Lady have the ability to fly. If you play the game by the universally suggested order, Castlevania is the 2nd and 7th of ten steps. Unlike a lot of Wai Wai World’s problems, this is one that I get what they were aiming for, but having the stuff just laying around doesn’t lend it that air of importance. They really needed to implement the items in a way that felt more eventful. There are some big bosses that drop keys and one even directly unlocks a new character, but it’s not enough.
It still sounds like such a neat idea, but after a while most of the characters feel too samey. Goemon stands out because he attacks almost diagonally. Simon stands out because the whip has reach. King Kong stands out because his collision box seems King Kong-sized. But, besides Simon’s whip, none of the basic attacks feel radically different, and thus none of the characters feel radically different. You’ll want to rely heavily on sub-weapons for combat. The sub-weapons use one point of ammo, except Simon’s boomerang which uses five points (that was the smartest design choice they made because three can be thrown at a time and it’s very overpowered) and Fuuma’s ninja stars, which cost three points. Each character has a sub-weapon hidden somewhere in their level, but you probably won’t be able to get a few in a single run through their stage and will have to return later. Wai Wai World has far too much backtracking, some of which is optional, and some of which isn’t.
I had to use my standard safety configuration of sitting far from the screen and drowning out the room with lights while fighting bosses because of epilepsy concerns. I figure I should use this space to remind people that I’m partnered with AbleToPlay to help spread awareness of photosensitivity, which is going to be an issue for older games. Wai Wai World wasn’t always bad with it, but damaging bosses leads to my specific trigger of bright, white flashing. Go support AbleToPlay and sign up to help curate information on risky games, or games that are suitable for people with limited motor functions, or colorblind players, or deaf players. It’s a great idea and I’m so down with it.
For example, the easiest level in the game is Feudal Japan, where Goemon is. Find the key, slay a dragon, get Goemon, who has the highest basic attack of any character. Trust me, that comes in very handy for the rest of the game. However, in order to get Goemon’s lucky cat sub weapon, you need to have the Konami Mantle. That’s a cape that lets Konami Man and Lady Fly, which also makes them lay down and stretch out their arms heroically, which allows them to squeeze through tight spaces. The Mantle is located in Hell, which in order to get into the majority of the stage, you need King Kong, since only King Kong can jump high enough to get past one specific jump that blocks off the majority of the stage. King Kong is located in the big city. In order to enter the majority of the Big City’s stage, you need Mikey from the Goonies because only he can fit through the tiny hole that blocks off the majority of the stage.
This is where it gets kind of silly. Mikey is the only one who can fit through this hole, which appears early in the Big City stage. It’s a tried and true Metroidvania trope of “find the thing that lets you get through the small gap.” It can be done well. I have no objection to the morphing ball in Metroid. I can believe that makes total sense. But, for Wai Wai World’s suspension of disbelief to work, you have to make believe that none of the other characters can crawl. Crawling, otherwise known as that thing that babies do. And that sh*t in the picture isn’t exactly morphing ball-sized. It’s a teenager-sized gap. You mean to tell me that Simon Belmont, slayer of vampires, the man who walked into Castlevania and didn’t immediately run back out when he saw walking skeletons and the literal personification of death, can’t duck his head just a little bit to save the f*cking world? Really?
So, you have to go to the Goon Docks stage and get Mikey in order to get King Kong in order to get the cape in order to go back through a level you already beat once just to pick up a couple things you missed before. Some games can pull off this kind of design mentality, but Wai Wai World can’t, because the gameplay’s lack of excitement renders the backtracking and replays a complete slog. If the combat along the way had been good, I might have been talking about this design being genius, but instead, Wai Wai World is just so boring that it’s insufferable. It’s so frustrating because I really do get the sense that somewhere in this disaster, there’s a great video game.
The game ends on a Metroid-like “everything is blowing up” escape. You’ll want to use Konami Man or Lady and just fly through it, because if you mess up only once, you won’t have enough time to finish.
Switching characters is too clunky, as it’s done spontaneously by holding up while pressing the A button. That was silly, because it forces you to jump as you change, which causes a lot of problems in the heat of battle. You can’t pause and switch characters, which would have helped. Changing from your main weapon to the sub-weapon is done by holding down and pressing A. If only there was one specific button on the Famicom/NES controller you could use to help SELECT which character you wanted. A select button, if you will. Well, this is once again a foible of the co-op. The Famicom’s controllers are hardwired into it, and the second player controller is lacking START and SELECT buttons, and thus the crappy swapping system Wai Wai World has. Say it with me: CO-OP RUINS EVERYTHING. Why couldn’t they also have SELECT switch characters for those of us playing single player? Because guess what? They did do that, sort of! You can use select in the shmup stage to switch between the Gradius ship and the TwinBee ship.
Oh, now you’re using a logical control scheme, for one level, at the end of the game? Oh you bastards. You absolute no good rotten bastards. Are we entirely sure this whole game isn’t some kind of practical joke?
Wai Wai’s final nail is that it doesn’t even feel like a Konami NES game. It feels like one of those modern indie games that tries so hard to feel like a popular 80s style generic action game and comes so close that it triggers the uncanny valley. The best example, and this is going to sound like such a nitpicky thing, but just the act of turning around and attacking is totally different here than it is in Castlevania. When I try to turn around and attack a monster that’s right on my ass in Castlevania, I can usually do it. In Wai Wai, I usually didn’t do the “turn around” part and swung my weapon in front of me. The timing of movement and attacking is all wrong, and in a game that’s based entirely around having enemies spawn right on top of you, that’s a mortal wound. You know, I thought I was heading towards a “competent but boring” NO! verdict, but this is actually a very incompetent game. It’s so technically wrong on so many different levels that whatever the hell Konami was aiming for in terms of style and substance doesn’t even matter. You can’t play with good intentions, only the end results.
This part here, where you get Konami Lady’s sub-weapon, is one of the most broken elements I’ve seen in a game. That looks like a normal elevator in the game, but it’s actually a quick-dropping booby trap. So quick that it’s basically an instakill. You have to wait until you get the Mantle to fly down to it. Well, except the gap is so narrow and the collision so spotty that I died anyway several times from the game deciding I had landed and springing the trap when I clearly was not standing on anything. I mostly didn’t cheat playing this, but I did rewind those incidents, because that was straight-up bullsh*t.
It’s really hard to judge creative design like level layout or the potential of enemy attack patterns when the game’s flaws are entirely mechanical in nature. Of all the retro games I’ve reviewed over the last year or two, no game is begging for a quality of life ROM hack as much as Wai Wai World is. I’d LOVE to see a talented, passionate ROM hacker give this game a tune up that fixes the scrolling, collision, and movement physics. Fix two of those those aspects, any two really, and I think Wai Wai World would at least rise to the level of “solid.” Fix all three and, for all I know, this might be a historically fantastic 8-bit game. Wai Wai World is such a mess that I honestly can’t figure out what its ceiling could have been. But, what I do know is myself and everyone else who hears about this game wants it to be better than it actually is. Even as you’re playing it and coming to the slow realization that what you’re playing is actually quite crappy, you still want this premise and these characters to come together and blow you away. I don’t want a re-release of this. I want a remaster, and I want to see what happens. Verdict: NO!
Looney Tunes Platform: Game Boy, Game Boy Color Released October 2, 1992 (GB) September, 1999 (GBC) Directed by Akito Takeuchi Developed by Sunsoft NO MODERN RELEASE
Game Boy (1992)
Game Boy Color (1999)
Early in my play session with Looney Tunes on the Game Boy/Game Boy Color, I thought this was going to turn out to be an underrated game. One of those “jack of all trades, master of nothing” affairs, but a decent one. The idea is neat: each of the seven levels sees players taking the role of a different heroic member of the Looney Tunes cast. In level one, you play as Daffy and make your way through a series of bite-sized platforming screens. There’s even a novel attack gimmick: you throw a frisbee that works like a mix between a boomerang and the Dagger of Throwing from Wizards & Warriors. The controls were a little loosey-goosey and the collision wasn’t amazing, but I loved the projectile and the level design seemed well above average. I thought “okay, this could be special.” Nope. The problem is, after the first stage, you don’t return to that style of platforming until the last stage. And, when it returns, the decent level design doesn’t return with it.
The graphics are fantastic, whether you use the Game Boy or Game Boy Color versions.
The second stage has you playing as Tweety. This is an avoider-style platformer where you’re simply trying to avoid Sylvester. Having just played one of the best avoiders I’ve experienced, ironically a Road Runner game for the Genesis, this really doesn’t cut it thanks to the lack of variety. You just repeat the same tiny handful of obstacles for several agonizing minutes (it feels longer), while the strategy to avoid the cat remains the same: just zig-zag. You don’t die if he catches you, instead only losing a single heart (and there’s plenty of refills). There’s also a variety of open sewers that the cat will blindly run into, and it’s not very hard to trick him into doing so: just stay low. This was completely brainless and one of the worst second stages I’ve ever played.
This isn’t even the “big boss” of the stage. The little star tailing the witch is.
The third stage is the typical and seemingly required-for-certification Game Boy shmup stage, just like Mario Land or the Game Boy Batman. This WOULD have been okay, but the collision is at its worst here. That’s a big problem because the stage’s last boss shoots a heat-seeking fork that’s sometimes seemingly impossible to avoid. It can be shot down, but it takes a lot of shots to do so, and if it’s shot close to the edge of the screen, you just won’t have time. I died twice fighting this boss alone, and all six hit points felt completely unavoidable. I’m not the biggest fan of Mario Land’s shmup stuff, but Looney Tunes made me appreciate what that game accomplished. In the case of this game, I think the sprites are too big for what they wanted to do. Compared to some of the other ideas in Looney Tunes, this wasn’t a disaster, but it certainly wasn’t good.
“Level” four is a waste of time.
Level four is basically a no-fail bonus stage where you have a minute to get as much meat as you can with the Tasmanian Devil. It’s not very good, as it’s too easy to get stuck at the top of the screen. The whole idea behind this bonus stage made more sense in the original black & white Game Boy game. In the Color version, each level has a bonus stage attached to the end, making a mid-game solo bonus stage redundant and a massive waste of time.
The worst attack in video game history? Maybe.
Speedy’s stage I would call a back-to-basics platformer. Like in levels one and seven, you can jump on enemies, or you can use a projectile. But, the Fastest Stereotype in All of Mexico doesn’t get the kick ass frisbee. Instead, a single press of the fire button causes him to dance in place and shoot stars in multiple directions, one star at a time. It’s HORRIBLE! What were they thinking with this attack? His gimmick is literally that he’s fast, and they give him a super duper slow projectile that leaves him more open to attack. This is also where the level design goes off the rails, as nothing is really done to make this feel tied in any way to Speedy Gonzales. I’m going to guess they decided that, since the Road Runner was up next, having two stages based around speed made little sense. So, here’s a thought: DON’T DO THEM BACK TO BACK, YOU IDIOTS!
“We’re out of ideas. Have a couple rocks to jump over and then get the coyote in there.”
The Road Runner’s level is an auto-scroller where you have to dodge a handful of boulders and then the developers ran out of patience and just sent the coyote in almost immediately. He’s a boss that has to be jumped on, and weirdly, the same collision problems that plagued the shooting section are part of this stage, too. I died here in ways that felt completely unavoidable. The coyote certainly isn’t fun to fight, either. When I realized there was nothing to stop me from just going to the edge of the screen and jumping on him like a fleshy trampoline, the fight ended just seconds later. I get the impression that, at some point, everyone in the development side of things lost their will. Or they ran out of cart space.
“Get me out of this game.”
The final stage with Bugs Bunny plays identically to Daffy’s stage, frisbee and all. The problem is that this level leans very heavily into two things: a cramped screen and mini-boss battles. The cramped screen problem is tied to the bad collision. Looney Tunes is counting on you taking damage from not being able to scratch out a safe attack distance from the enemies. After some mild platforming bits, you rematch with every mini-boss (except the shmup one) that appeared up to this point, plus a new one. Then, you have to avoid a boulder in an extended sprinting sequence that had one idea that ran out of both tension and fun long before the level ended, then there’s a final battle with Elmer. This ended when I caught him in a collision cycle and basically could let go of the controller and still win the game.
The final battle is against Elmer Fudd, which I guess makes SOME sense since he’s the only villain to provably beat Bugs, which happened in What’s Opera, Doc?
I’m certain that Looney Tunes was better in 1992 or even 1999 than it is today, in 2025. But, this is NOT a good game. Only the first level was fun, and to its credit, it really is pretty well made. The rest of the six levels range from bland to outright bad. They should have stuck with the Daffy play style and fine-tuned it to perfection, because they were on to something. Without exaggeration, they had the foundation for what could have been one of THE great Game Boy platformers, and it’s a dagger to the heart that nothing that follows comes even a little close to the enjoyment of that first stage. Looney Tunes is like watching one of those Ben Simmons-style pro athletes that has all the talent in the world but without the cutthroat focus you need to break through to elite status. You can’t make a level as good as the first level in Looney Tunes without talent. What they needed was someone on their staff to realize that’s where the money was and not this genre mash-up crap that so many Game Boy titles fell into the trap of. You blew it, Sunsoft. You blew it. Verdict: NO!
Desert Demolition Starring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote Platform: Sega Genesis Released February, 1995 Developed by Blue Sky Software Published by Sega NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED
PURPLE STREAK SPEEDS BY! MEEP MEEP THE ROAD RUNNER! WON’T BE IN THE WILE E’S PIE! MEEP MEEP THE ROAD RUNNER! MEEP MEEP! HE’S NOT ON THE MENU! MEEP MEEP! HE’S NOT COYOTE FOOD! MEEP MEEP! HE’S THE FASTEST BIRD ALIVE! HE’S THE FASTEST BIRD ALIVE!
When I say Desert Demolition is baby’s first Sonic The Hedgehog game, I swear to God I don’t mean it as an insult. I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, and I’m almost certain I was once a little kid myself. In fact, I’m pretty positive everyone was at some point. Even George Washington needed to be burped and likely spit up on someone’s shoulder. There’s something you don’t think about, but that seems to be how life works. With that in mind, little kids need games too. Even though there was an SNES in my house long before I got my own game consoles, my father didn’t own the right games for a toddler. That’s why I admire the hell out of today’s game. Desert Demolition is a fantastic game for all ages, but I think it’s especially well-suited for kids ages 5 to 7, or thereabouts. I have no means to test this theory. All the rugrats in my life grew up, the selfish bastards. The youngest is my niece, Sasha. She’s 9 but she’s already a highly-gifted gamer and pinball player. But, she was the closest option to test this theory of mine. She really liked Desert Demolition a lot.. and said it was clearly for kids younger than her. But, like me, she’s just guessing that. Given the fact that we died a combined total of seven times between us spread across four different play sessions, yea, safe bet. And playing this twice each was necessary because this has two totally different play-styles in one. You can choose to play through Desert Demolition as the Road Runner or Wile E. Coyote. It makes a big difference, too.
Instead of rings, you collect stamps. They don’t fly out of you like the rings in Sonic, but otherwise, you should absolutely think of this as a Sonic game.
Regardless of the character you choose, Desert Demolition’s levels are more or less identical. It’s how you navigate them that changes dramatically. The Road Runner, for all intents and purposes, is just a scrawny Sonic The Hedgehog. You run as fast as you can, not worrying about exploration at all and simply trying to reach the goal. There’s the occasional hazard along the road, but mostly it’s just you and the coyote. Avoid him because he’s an instakill, and otherwise, just run like the dickens. It’s VERY Sonic like, including springs, trampolines, water spouts, and even loops. Does it feel like the cartoon? Not really. Not even close. It feels like Sonic if Sonic was facing off against one lone chaser type of enemy. But, it works really well for the twenty-five or so minutes the game lasts. Yep, it takes less than a half-hour to finish Desert Demolition, even on your first play session, not knowing where to go. It’s a pretty short game. But, it’s pretty much non-stop fun from start to finish. It controls responsively. Looks great. Excellent character models. This is a good job. Then we remembered that we had to play as the Coyote.
This takes a while to get the hang of.
Wile E. Coyote’s half of the game isn’t anywhere near as fun as the Road Runner’s. Even though you move much slower, I caught the Road Runner on the first level in literally under thirty seconds. You know, that thing the Coyote has been trying to do for three-quarters of a century now? Yea, I did it right off the bat. It’s not even how you win the game, and he respawns after a few seconds. You just have to get to the end. Touching the Road Runner just rewards you with extra stamps and time.
It completely deflated the experience. While the Road Runner’s segment NEVER feels like the cartoon series, the Coyote’s outright betrays it. The timer is basically the main challenge of the game. You have energy and take damage from everything, including jumping and hitting your head on low ceilings, but I never died from taking too much damage and Sasha only did once, during the final boss. But, we timed out several times on the Coyote stages. He doesn’t move anywhere near as fast as the Road Runner and he controls much stiffer. It speaks volumes to the can-do spirit of this game that it actually is still a little bit fun to play as the Coyote, who has a variety of ACME gimmicks at his disposal. A couple were quite clever, like this:
The tightrope helmet pulley, where you actually do have to balance back and forth while you slide down the rope. I’ve seen this type of thing in games before, but because you’re upside down, it’s never been done quite as immersive. And this is why being able to catch the Road Runner so easily especially hurts, because this type of thing totally fits the cartoon franchise. If not for the fact that they already completely ruined the connection, this would be the thing that puts it over-the-top as one of the best uses of a slapstick license ever, helped along by some of the funniest animation sprites in any 16-bit game. Seriously, the Coyote’s sprites are FANTASTIC! Genuinely laugh-out-loud hilarious. Even funnier is that I’ve never been impressed with Blue Sky Software. I think Vectorman is lame. I think the Genesis Little Mermaid game is incredibly boring. I can’t believe there’s Blue Sky fans, because I just don’t think they’re very good at making games. Remember, these guys were owned by Titus. F*cking Titus! They were a joke when *I* was a kid. They’re the Superman 64 people! Blues Brothers 2000! This is a bad lineage, but this game? Desert Demolition? It’s fan-f*cking-tastic! How come nobody talks about this one? It’s wonderful!
The final boss is the same in both versions. You have to just run back and forth activating levers that drop exploding barrels on this Acme truck that the opposite character is driving. This is an okay ending for the Road Runner’s quest, but the Coyote’s? It’s so lame. Why would the Road Runner need to drive what is, let’s face it, a monster truck? It makes no sense! I’m sure it would have been a massive pain in the ass to come up with two different boss fights, but they really should have.
I kind of get why Desert Demolition slipped through the cracks of time. Probably for the same reasons the Ronald McDonald game by Treasure on the Genesis did. It’s too short, too easy, and based on a children’s property even though the Genesis was marketed to an older demographic. Okay, fine. But, like the Ronald McDonald game, it’s proof that the Genesis really was a console for all ages. Especially with the Road Runner. In some ways, I like this even more than Sonic. There’s fewer GOTCHAs and the level layouts seem to be based around anticipating where players will jump blindly, because I think we landed nearly every “go for it” blind jump we took. We took enough of those that, statistically speaking, some ought to have failed, but if any failed spectacularly, I don’t remember it. So, either we got insanely lucky, or they did some serious studying of play testers. I’m going to assume neither myself nor Sasha were THAT lucky. That tells me that Blue Sky precisely accounted for where players would take those jumps and adjusted the level layout accordingly. That’s next-level thinking on a developer’s part. The extra effort that you don’t expect from a licensed game. Short as it is, I dare say Desert Demolition is one of the best games on the Sega Genesis. Give me twenty minutes of near-perfection over hours of great gameplay every day. Even coming close to perfect is so much rarer than great gaming. Verdict: YES!
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 Legendary Axe
Hudson Hawk
Bonk’s Adventure: Arcade Version
Wai Wai World 2: SOS!! Parsley Jō
Konami Wai Wai World 
Looney Tunes
Desert Demolition Starring Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote
Indie Gamer Chick 
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