as a kid i remember playing this on my Megajoy, a chinese plug and play that came packed with lots of famicom early games like Circus Charlie, The Legend of Kage, etc. you would just insert 4 AA batteries on the back of the controller, plug the AV cable to your CRT and BOOM, you had a full working console with like 2000 games (or more like 20 or 30 games repeated over and over again with a different title).

and i simply don't know why i always came back to Adventure Island. it wasn't that fun and it was definitely NOT an easy game for a 6-7 year old to play. with luck, i would beat the 2 first levels and then i would simply game over and go back to the beginning. i remember getting to the boss level of the first area one day and i thought, well, this is it, the game will be over after this (little did i know you have to beat 7 more areas after that and they just get diabolically harder). ofc i got so nervous (and also kinda scared) of the boss magnitude i simply died and game over right there. and there i was back to the first level, trying again and again.

i still can't grasp the exact reason i always come back to this game, even now, almost 25 years later, bc it isn't a good game by any means. i think it's just the pure nostalgic feeling of being a 7 year old, on my godfather's house, with my Megajoy, playing the first 2 levels of a game i knew i wasn't able to ever beat and not worrying about that. or about anything at all, for that matter. so this might not be a good game, but it is my game. and i will always come back to it.