I'm going out of my way to write down some words on this game.

I played a LOT of NES games when they came out, and this is the only one I played as a kid that I remember having an intense hatred for. I still hate it today, some 30-odd years later.

Don't play it. It's not worth your time.

This is a beyond idiotic game. But its idiocy is pretty endearing. Collecting clocks? Dodging bees and hula hoop girls? Throwing milkshakes at bullies? The music being at 10000 bpm? It all makes a for a pretty hilarious package.

The actual game isn't too hard once you learn the tricks to it. You just have to stay near the bottom of the screen while clock colllecting, so the bees despawn quickly. And then you basically spam the milkshakes in the cafe stage.

The only cool thing is that the picture of Marty and his siblings won't fade out anymore after the Enchantment Under the Sea dance. That's the only logical thing about this game.

The clocktower run at the end of the game has the DeLorean at least. Too bad you only get one shot at it!

[Played on Retron 5 with Original Cartridge]


Back to the Future on NES is super strange.

I feel like this style of game doesn't suit the original Back to the Future movie very well. There's plenty of action in the movie, but most of it is centered around strategy and conversation, as Marty tries to get his parents to fall in love after messing too much with the past. Truthfully, the movie fits a point-and-click adventure much better, like much of what Lucusarts and Humongous would put out in the 90s.

Though, I can't really be too hard on that choice. This kind of action adventure suits the NES much better than a point-and-click does. It just a shame that this isn't exactly a good action adventure either. The street levels have hints of fun in them once you collect the skateboard and start breezing through Hill Valley, but I generally feel like they're pretty annoying for the most part. The level timer as often pretty strict, so you have little room for error, especially in the later levels. Bullies can be really difficult to get around at times, and you kind of need to hug the bottom of the screen to get bees off the screen early. Enemies shoot these little blue balls sometimes, and I think they can even do some once going off-screen. I found them to be really hard to see at times on my TV, and they would hit me pretty often. Also, power-ups spawn based on how long you go without getting hit, and they tend to spawn at a random point on the screen. I've had plenty of instances where a bowling ball or a skateboard would spawn right in front of a wall, so I'd have no safe way of collecting my well-earned power-up.

And speaking of these levels, they barely have anything to do with the actual movie. Do you recall any point in the movie where there were hula-hoop girls, guys carrying glass, giant bees, and bowling balls? None of them have anything really to do with what's seen in the film, they're just kind of there as an attempt to mayyyybe match some sort of scenery. The only real parts of the street levels that match the film are the bullies, the skateboard (to nitpick, Marty never used an actual skateboard in 1955, he had to take apart some kid's toy to achieve a plant of wood on wheels, but the skateboard is still taken straight from the film), and the 2nd timer in the form of a picture of Marty and his siblings.

Onto the minigames, they're pretty dreadful too. The cafe stage is by far the worst. It's so incredibly hard to tell if you're in the right position to hit the people walking in because of how the stage is set up. You kind of just have to guess and pray, which is awful considering you have to get at least 50 points to pass to the next level. The minigame in the school has similar issues but it's nowhere near as frustrating since hearts follow a line that's easy to follow yourself. The 3rd minigame at the dance is by comparison piss easy. The final minigame frustrated me because of how large the Delorian is and how I couldn't predict where the lighting would strike the road. Also, I'm willing to guess you only have one attempt at this level, but I did it first try so I don't really know.

The mini-games also have barely anything to do with the movie. Credit deserves to be given for trying to replicate major sets from the movie, but some of those minigames are massive stretches. The cafe minigame is just pulled out of the devs' asses, but I don't blame them since not much else happens in the Cafe besides a bit of a fight halfway through the film. The school minigame tries to communicate how Marty's mom falls in love with him, but it's done in the most painfully literal way possible. That's kind of an issue I have with the entire game, some ties to the movie are super literal and it comes off as lazy. They were just like, "The movie's about time so let's add collectible clocks! There's love drama so let's have a girl throw out hearts". In comparison, I applaud the last two minigames for staying on point with the film, depicting Marty on stage at the dance and the attempt to send Marty back to the future.

So overall, this is a pretty disappointingly poor adaptation of the film. This movie has always been one of my all-time favorites ever since I first saw it as a kid (I believe I've made that painfully obvious), so seeing how poor this game turned out really makes me sad.