Zool: Ninja of the Nth Dimension (1992)

Beat. Don't remember picking a difficulty. I almost gave up a few times because this is not a good game. At the 3rd level I reached the exit but it would not let me leave. What the hell? It was then through trial and error that I figured out you have to collect 99 of the coin like things in order to unlock the exit. Why was this designed? Mario does not absolutely require collecting coins. Pain in the ass backtracking to find more things, and that level had one of the most annoying features I have ever seen in a platformer; water that slows your movement to a crawl and can't be jumped out of until you reach the edge. That backtracking was terrible, and I ran out of time and lost a life, which was how I found out the switch box things were checkpoints. I almost gave up a couple more times due to obnoxious level design and terrible boss design. I felt like I was missing a move because in some places it was impossible not to take damage. Some kind of greater distance jump or something. I thought I propelled off a wall somehow in the 1st level but was not able to replicate it. Good thing you could take so many hits and had several seconds of invincibility after taking damage. A few times I had to farm enemies for health drops, especially for the bosses which felt so arbitrarily difficult that you needed full hp to get by. The final boss was oddly the easiest with actual mechanics to learn and moves to avoid. The other bosses felt more cheap or required such pixel perfect moves to avoid damage that how would you ever expect to do it 1st try? The cactus boss was the worst; try as I did I could not figure out how to get back in front of him without taking damage. I went in with 2 hp and no way could I survive. Had to die and try again with full hp, and lower the speed to 20 frames per second (which didn't really help but let me shoot more accurately).

The graphics were garish with the absurdly themed worlds that reskinned the enemies and coins. The mechanical controls were very annoying and difficult to control. The guy felt like he was wearing ice skates, not coming to a stop until a couple seconds after stopping pressing the button, slipping around and down slopes. Going up slopes was very annoying, as was trying to make precise jumps without hitting a hazard or sliding too far and falling off. The jumping was very floaty and the upward momentum from jumping on an enemy, and obnoxious knock around for taking damage, meant you did not have proper control of the character a lot of the time. There was nothing compelling about this game, nothing pushing the player on. No "your princess is in another castle" or menacing boss to defeat. Rather it felt like a bunch of random stages and bosses with nothing connecting them. I did like the shoot em up bonus stages though. Much better that the silly Mario minigames. Especially how a lot of the environment was destructible. They should have made a pure shoot em up instead of this crappy platformer.

5.2/10

Holy shit, this is really hard. Harder than sonic. Though if I had this while growing up I'd probably play like it all the time. You only see something is bad if something better comes your way. This is basically why people feel the way they do about Super Mario Bros. when the "youngsters" talk trash about old games.

But even if this is the case I must confess I did like it a little, more than Sonic, no, of course not (this game is supposed to be a rival of Sonic). What I didn't like really was the fact that this game doesn't have a soundtrack like Sonic or Mario.