Hudson's Adventure Island (1986)

Preliminary: At first I was worried this was just an outright port of Wonder Boy, meaning it wouldn't be worth a separate playthrough, but it seems though almost entirely a port, it does have enough differences to be worth a separate playthrough.

Look: 7/10 The pots remind me of Zelda Link's Awakening pots with those mouths. And for an NES game, it undeniably has a great, cute look. Almost arcade-style. (That being said, the backgrounds got a bit nauseating when on the skateboard, but that could be more so related to me being ill lol)

Sound: 7/10 People said the music is where it really shines when compared to Wonder Boy, but tbh it sounds so much like Mario as to feel almost redundant?

Play: 7/10 Great NES-style responsive controls. I technically should like this more but just like Wonder Boy, I wasn't "hooked."

Feel: 7/10 Great look, good music, NES responsive controls, but like Wonder Boy, it's just missing something. Too bad because it has all the pieces needed to be something I'd really like. Because it has the Feel of something I should like, though, it deserves a decent Feel rating.

Attachment: 6/10 But here's where I can bring it down from the potential 3 star rating. A) I can just play the better-balanced and -designed Wonder Boy if I'm really craving this game, since this is essentially a port with Lost Levels-style tweaks. and B) The fact I didn't feel motivated to continue after finishing the first boss, which I set as my goal and honestly would have likely quit earlier if I hadn't set that goal, says a lot toward the potential Attachment. If I was super into the later Adventure Island games, or if my grandparents had this game, maybe I would've preferred this one over Wonder Boy. But as it is, I'll play Wonder Boy or neither ha. I am looking forward to see how both those series develop, though.

Completion: Stopped here Playtime: 11 minutes (wow I definnitely don't feel bad about that Attachment score then)

An adaptation of Sega's Wonder Boy, Adventure Island was a game that I enjoyed as a kid, that replaying it now, I find quite mediocre and boring. You play Master Higgins, a hula skirt wearing skateboarder who must fight eight monsters to find his girlfriend. You use hammers, fireballs and other tools to collect fruits, trophies and other items that will help lengthen your "timer".

This game is just... fine. It's not a bad game, it's just mediocre all around. Go right, fight enemies, get items, fight boss. Do that multiple times. Sometimes you can get a skateboard, so there's that.

Super Mario Bros. is just far superior in every way, so go play that instead.

In fairness, the other two sequels for this game on the NES are better.

You play as Master Higgins, our shirtless, barefoot, moustache and baseball cap wearing protagonist out to save his girlfriend, Tina. The gameplay is easy enough to get into, as you jump over obstacles and platforms collecting fruit, pots and hatchets to throw, and other items hidden inside eggs. Yes, what? Fully normal. Snails, bats, snakes and all the other classic enemies are here. Music and sound is whatever, and the 32 (!!) levels are different but repeat the same pattern after a while. The boss battles are lame and repetitive also.

Adventure Island is a lot about momentum. Your energy is determined by how much fruit you keep eating, and it's better for you to keep your speed instead on inching your way forward. This is easier said than done. I never played this game as a kid mind you, so the nostalgia is not there for me. I've heard that the sequels are a bit better so I'm gonna check those out next. I feel like 3/5 is a bit generous here, don't @ me guys.

I have a long history with platformers that started with my third ever game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System. The NES opened the door for me to the genre and let me see it at its most pure, with games like Super Mario Bros. and with various spins on the genre like Mega Man or Castlevania, which are obviously more action oriented. I ate all of them up as a kid, playing any I could get my hands on during my weekly trip to the rental store with my parents.

One of those lucky rentals I took home was Hudson’s Adventure Island. The game has a totally unique plot where a short and stocky guy runs around jumping over crazy chasms and fighting off local enemies hell bent on stopping him from reaching the castle where the evil master holds the kidnapped princess. But wait. He’ll need to do battle with the evil master eight times before he finally picks the right castle and is able to rescue the princess. OK, so maybe not very unique but maybe worthy of a weekend rental from the two night video store by a kid that has already devoured Super Mario Bros.

Hudson’s Adventure Island, not to be confused with someone else’s Adventure Island, has an interesting history. The game orginally started out as an adaptation of the Sega arcade game Wonder Boy but somewhere along the line it was decided to change the character model from Wonder Boy to one based on Hudson Soft’s spokesman, Takahashi Meijin. I personally don’t really see the resemblance but suposedly that is what happened.

Anyway, the rest of the game holds pretty true to the Wonder Boy arcade game. Master Higgins, as the player character was called, runs through a world broken up by four rounds (levels). Inside these rounds, are four checkpoints that need to be cleared. At the end of the fourth round in a world, the player will fight against the Evil Witch Doctor. Defeating the witch doctor, by hitting him in the head with Higgins axe or magic fireballs, will unlock the next world, which is generally more of the same with more enemies and obstacles to overcome.

More of the same is pretty much what Adventure Island is after the first boss. Four more levels in a similar looking world, with the same enemies, and same boss fight. It’s kind of dull. As a kid, I remember liking it but I only ever had the game for a couple days and that was an era where I would go back to playing Super Mario Bros. or Ninja Gaiden for the 100th time after my rental period was up. But now looking at it, even though the structure is very much the same as Super Mario Bros., I see that the level design in that game is light years beyond what Adventure Island offers.

Super Mario Bros. had different pathways, secrets, and was all together more challenging. Adventure Island is just hold to the right. It’s level design isn’t clever and most of its challenge comes from the ever diminishing hunger bar Master Higgins sports. Higgins has to eat non-stop, if he doesn’t he’ll die. And I mean non-stop because there are areas where there are no fruits or veggies to consume and Higgins’s health bar drops quickly making getting to the next checkpoint or the end of the level a tense struggle. Not tense as in this is appropriately challenging but more along the lines of this level is absolute bullshit and its designed specifically to take away one of my lives.

I feel this is a holdover from Adventure Island’s arcade origins. The game doesn’t want you to finsih it because it wants more of your money. Guess what? That was a bullshit mechanic then on arcade machines and its more of a bullshit mechanic on a home console because you already got my money (or the rental store’s money). It’s also something that they drop in sequels, at least from my quick look at Adventure Island II.

As a piece of platforming history, Hudson’s Adventure Island should probably at least get a cursory glance. The series after all it did spawn seven sequels but it’s not a particularly good game and I can’t see recommending this to someone over other, better NES platformers.

Platform:

NES

Description:

Simple run-to-the-right-until-you-reach-the-goal type arcade platformer.

I liked the theme and style, surprisingly since in the beginning I thought "why should I wanna play as a fat guy in a grass skirt?", but there you go. I also liked the simplicity of the gameplay, and while looking at the levels they seem awfully repetitive, dull and bland, it's actually fun to play through them. It's mostly because of the urgency that is created by the auto-diminishing health, that makes you try to dash through and risk everything.

Disliked:

The difficulty, as with many arcade games is frustratingly high. I didn't like that you get stripped of any means to kill monsters when you die. So even if you make it through many levels with many lifes left, it might still mean game over, since where you respawn you don't get your weapons back and it might be impossible to go on. (faced that myself). Luckily the content is just repeating itself so you really saw more or less everything when you've managed to play throught the first three worlds or so.

Summary:

It may look boring, but it's fun. While it's very simple and doesn't offer much depth, it's entertaining and thrilling to see how far you can get. Still fun.

Adventure Island is a platformer released by Hudson back in the golden days of NES. The game I played was the Gameboy version so I'll base my review on that. You take control of Master Higgins, video gaming's first diabetic hero. I say this because as you stroll through the stage you have to constantly eat fruit to keep your life meter up, and if it runs out you die. I guess they didn't have insulin back in the prehistoric days. You can pick up hammers to use as projectile weapons and ride dinosaurs for added firepower. The game was pretty simple and overall enjoyable, even though a lot of the stages felt repetitive, and the boss fights were painfully easy. If you like platformers but are not very good at them, give the Gameboy version of Adventure Island a go for some good practice and guide Jackie Gleason's twin brother to victory.

Rating: B-

History:
I think I've heard this game come up in conversation a few times, but I've never actually played it, nor do I remember it from my childhood.

Expectations:
I've read that it's basically the NES' answer to Wonder Boy for the SMS, but since I only remember playing two or three SMS games growing up, and this wasn't one of them, I don't really know what that means. I'm just hoping for a decent platforming experience after the frustration that was Double Dragon II.

Night 1:

It was very late, but I really wanted to get at least a few minutes of this game in.

First impressions were great, actually! It was like Super Mario Bros. but with a fat nekkid guy. The game handled really well and I had a lot of fun. I was only able to make it to 1-3 before forcing myself to turn it off and head to bed. Planning on giving it a lot more time tomorrow.

Night 2:

Okay, time to get serious...

So the game gets pretty nuts. Master Higgins is a bit more "floaty" than Mario ever was but not so much that you feel out of control, just enough that you really need to mind your momentum. Despite dying over, and over, and over, I'm finding the challenge of the first few levels really enjoyable, learning each new section.

The level tilesets change frequently. I had to traverse everything from tropical islands, to ancient ruins, to icy caverns, to archipelagos to murky swamps. Each stage felt unique, even when tilesets were reused.

I'm also loving the power-ups in the game, like the skateboard and whatever the hell the invincibility thing is. What I found I don't actually like is the hatchet. It almost feels mandatory, and if you ever lose it you're punished harshly as the game suddenly becomes a thousand times more difficult. Areas that would be trivial with a bit of fire power suddenly become nearly impossible.

The bosses, while nightmare fuel, were ironically the most anticlimactic thing about each area. Every boss follows the exact same pattern, and you really have to be asleep at the controller to even possibly die at them.

And right about here is where the game started going from fun and challenging to frustrating and sadistic...

I wonder how many Americans back then knew they were looking at a Famicom controller.

Yep, @#$% this game. The music, oh god that music! I think the music is going to give me a seizure!!! It's at this point I realized the only reason I'm continuing to play this game is out of spite, and for the fact that if I turn it off I'll lose my continue point and have to start all the way back at the beginning. Seriously, those damn birds! After the birds it's the snakes, then the boulders, more snakes, pits, rocks, snails... @#%!

...we're done.

Liked:
The of the game, while simple and silly, was pretty great. The controls were above average, while not my preferable type of handling. I definitely got a sense of satisfaction getting through the trickier parts of the stages, though I think the fun in this game, for me, comes from playing it more like an arcade game. Playing with a group of people and seeing how far you can make it on one continue.

Disliked:
The music... I mean it was fun at first, but after playing through stages so many times I thought my ears were going to start bleeding. The game gets obscenely hard at the halfway mark, almost to the point of feeling unfair. It's not unfair, and with practice I could eventually make it through, but I feel like I would end up hating the game at the end of it all.

Personal Score: