Adventure Island (NES) - Quick Review
Adventure Island on NES focuses on the character of Master Higgins to travels to titular island after learning that Princess Leilani has been captured by an evil witch doctor. The game is broken down into eight worlds, each of which is broken down into four stages, and each of those are broken up into four checkpoint sections. At the end of each fourth stage, you must face a form of the evil witch doctor before passing on to the next world. The controls are simple, D-Pad moves you, A jumps and B throws your weapon and makes you move faster.
This game is pretty fun and a little quirky, one of the power-ups you can get in the stages is a skateboard to move faster. Your health bar also serves as a bit of a timer on the stage as it will deplete slowly over time, or whenever you trip over a rock in your path. But let's see what's good about it, what's bad, and if it's worth it.
The Good
- Adventure Island plays a lot like the original Super Mario. So close in fact that it's nearly the same game with a minor facelift. There wasn't much more games could do at the time, especially for side-scrolling platformers, so it was a very popular formula to follow, yet it gets enough of it's own flavor to set it apart as well. Master Higgins gets the skateboard that I mentioned above, and his main weapon is a stone axe that he can throw at his enemies. There is another weapon that can be found too which is a magic fireball that can be thrown further and damage tougher things like rocks and boulders.
- Earning extra lives can be frustratingly difficult. This is done when you reach the marker of 50,000 points, and again at 100,000 and 200,000. However, the game tries to help you with this, as in each level there is a ceramic pot hidden that if you collect it, it'll nearly double your score for the level.
The Bad
- While the game tries helping a little bit to earn extra lives, it's not very nice by lacking in continues. There is a hidden way to obtain a continue, or a glitch you can capitalize on for a level select, but they're not readily available for you and it's very annoying being sent all the way back to the beginning.
- Some of the textures in the game don't reveal themselves to be enemies until it's too late. For instance in one of the levels, there is some sort of spider that stays completely still. The coloring chosen for it makes it look more like a flower in the background image, so I ended up just walking into it and dying for what I thought was no reason. This goes hand in hand with the previous note with being forced all the way back to the beginning when you lose all lives.
- The boss is far too easy. Each time you face him, he's exactly the same. He spawns on a platform, and crawls at you pushing you back to the left edge of the screen. In addition, he only uses one attack, a slowly lobbed fireball that is more than easy enough to dodge as it takes the same path every time. The only thing that changes in the boss fights is each time you face him, it takes two more hits to defeat him than in the previous fight.
Is it worth it?
I got this game for my collection because I had seen it on just about every "Top X NES Games" list I looked at. After playing it, though, I don't really see the hype. While it is pretty fun to play, and it does present a good challenge, I've seen plenty of other games that are more challenging that give you a reason to want to push through the difficulty and try seeing it through to the end. That umph is missing from Adventure Island. Instead of driving you to beat it, this game will have you setting it aside for days or weeks before trying to come back at it fresh and get further. So I wouldn't say this game is a must-have, but I wouldn't say to avoid it either. Adventure Island falls in that awkward gray area of indifference where if you pick it up, it will be a mid-card game that sits on your shelf, but if you steer clear of it, you won't feel like there's a void of something missing from your collection.
This game is pretty fun and a little quirky, one of the power-ups you can get in the stages is a skateboard to move faster. Your health bar also serves as a bit of a timer on the stage as it will deplete slowly over time, or whenever you trip over a rock in your path. But let's see what's good about it, what's bad, and if it's worth it.
The Good
- Adventure Island plays a lot like the original Super Mario. So close in fact that it's nearly the same game with a minor facelift. There wasn't much more games could do at the time, especially for side-scrolling platformers, so it was a very popular formula to follow, yet it gets enough of it's own flavor to set it apart as well. Master Higgins gets the skateboard that I mentioned above, and his main weapon is a stone axe that he can throw at his enemies. There is another weapon that can be found too which is a magic fireball that can be thrown further and damage tougher things like rocks and boulders.
- Earning extra lives can be frustratingly difficult. This is done when you reach the marker of 50,000 points, and again at 100,000 and 200,000. However, the game tries to help you with this, as in each level there is a ceramic pot hidden that if you collect it, it'll nearly double your score for the level.
The Bad
- While the game tries helping a little bit to earn extra lives, it's not very nice by lacking in continues. There is a hidden way to obtain a continue, or a glitch you can capitalize on for a level select, but they're not readily available for you and it's very annoying being sent all the way back to the beginning.
- Some of the textures in the game don't reveal themselves to be enemies until it's too late. For instance in one of the levels, there is some sort of spider that stays completely still. The coloring chosen for it makes it look more like a flower in the background image, so I ended up just walking into it and dying for what I thought was no reason. This goes hand in hand with the previous note with being forced all the way back to the beginning when you lose all lives.
- The boss is far too easy. Each time you face him, he's exactly the same. He spawns on a platform, and crawls at you pushing you back to the left edge of the screen. In addition, he only uses one attack, a slowly lobbed fireball that is more than easy enough to dodge as it takes the same path every time. The only thing that changes in the boss fights is each time you face him, it takes two more hits to defeat him than in the previous fight.
Is it worth it?
I got this game for my collection because I had seen it on just about every "Top X NES Games" list I looked at. After playing it, though, I don't really see the hype. While it is pretty fun to play, and it does present a good challenge, I've seen plenty of other games that are more challenging that give you a reason to want to push through the difficulty and try seeing it through to the end. That umph is missing from Adventure Island. Instead of driving you to beat it, this game will have you setting it aside for days or weeks before trying to come back at it fresh and get further. So I wouldn't say this game is a must-have, but I wouldn't say to avoid it either. Adventure Island falls in that awkward gray area of indifference where if you pick it up, it will be a mid-card game that sits on your shelf, but if you steer clear of it, you won't feel like there's a void of something missing from your collection.
