Saturday, May 18, 2013

#49: Super Adventure Island

Sounds fun!
I can remember playing an Adventure Island game in the arcade as a kid. Funky little island dude auto-running to the right, jumping on a skateboard, throwing hammers, and dying a lot. Looking on Wikipedia it turns out the arcade game I'm thinking of was actually Wonder Boy! It would seem Sega owned the rights to the name and the characters but not the game itself or something, so their partner went to Hudson Soft to make a series of clones starting with Adventure Island on the NES.

Lucky dude...
This game doesn't have the auto-running feature from Wonder Boy, but it certainly has the dying a lot down in spades. This idea was prominent in arcade games to convince the player to put in more quarters. On a console with limited continues it's just frustrating.

Duck-a-rang!
The game isn't terrible. It only uses two buttons which makes me sad, and you have no hitpoints which results in lots of deaths. The music repeated through the first three levels and was starting to get pretty tedious, but then the boss fight had pretty cool music. I could see renting this game and not being too disappointed which is sadly a step up from many of the recent games played. But I don't want to play it again now.

Rating: C

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