A classic side-scroller by Hudson Soft.

This game was quite infamous for its unforgiving difficulty, with obstacle and enemy placements almost feel like unfair. There are even some levels giving less fruits to replenish your energy, eggs that contain an Eggplant that will eat away your energy very fast, and platforming that requires very precise jumps. Not to mention losing a life will make you restart at the last checkpoint unarmed.

Controlling the player character is quite tricky, too, as every jump and directional movements are greatly affected by your current momentum speed. It may take some time getting used to its mechanic.

Here's a tip: It's very important to collect the Hudson Bee item inside a hidden egg in the very first level since it gives you unlimited continues. When you get a game over and return to the title screen, press and hold any direction on the D-Pad and then press Start. The game will let you continue from the last stage you died in; Otherwise, you'll restart at the very first level, effectively losing any progress you've made.

I never beat this game as a kid, but few years ago I decided to finish it just so I can say I'm done with it. It's really THAT hard, but BOY it sure was satisfying to finally see the ending.

That was fun! I'm NOT playing it again soon.

[Played on Retron 5 with original cartidge]

This game is pretty much identical to Wonder Boy, so my points from there apply here.

You enjoyment of Adventure Island depends entirely on how you approach it.

If you approach it as an arcade title, focusing on score and what you can accomplish on 1 credit, you'll likely enjoy yourself. If you approach it like other home NES titles, trying to reach the end, you'll hate this game. Levels ramp up in difficulty substantially around the halfway point, and you won't enjoy any of that challenge if you're trying to brute force your way to the end with the continue code. Usually I hate a game this hard with no (or in this case a secret) continue function, but I think hiding that continue function was a good choice. This game really is at its best when you're just pushing yourself to get better and better on one credit, popping the game in every once n a while to see how far you can go and how many points you can get.

An issue I have with the game are the controls. Higgins is extremely slippery and it can really take some getting used to trying to land jumps exactly how you want them (which is troublesome considering later levels really rely on you being at your top form in that regard). Also you have little to no jump correction. You can kind of control where you land in front of you, but you can't jump right and then arc your jump so you land to the left. You really need to commit to a jump. I really don't like this uncomfortable middle ground where you can kind of correct the jump but you still have to commit to the direction.

This game is definitely going to reward patience, which you wouldn't even expect considering the huger bar and the skateboard power up which forces you forward. I think this is where I got tripped up when I played this game for the first time. Everything about what I was seeing told me I had to keep moving forward without stopping, but really, if you stay away from those eggplants you can stop every now and then and more carefully assess your surroundings.

Oh and about those eggplants. In Wonder Boy, the eggs which contained eggplants were denoted by a spotted pattern. In Adventure Island, there's no indication. So, I kind of like Wonder Boy better.

If you want a quick arcade platforming experience to pop in for 10-20 minutes, give this a go. It's not one of the NES's all time best in that regard, but it's definitely not horrible if you play it this way. Otherwise, I'd just move on the the sequels.

6/10 - Ok

O melhor: O controle do personagem é até que fluído
O pior: O sistema de stamina só faz passar raiva
Berinjelas: O verdadeiro inimigo

Eu não fazia ideia de que o primeiro Adventure Island era uma versão do primeiro Wonder Boy, mais uma das conversões e ports malucos que os anos 80 proporcionaram. Sempre reconheci esse jogo como "aquele plataforma com skate", mas essa é a primeira vez que jogo do começo ao fim. E, pelo menos essa primeira versão, não envelheceu bem.

Os controles até funcionam bem. O pulo é um tanto estranho para quem acostumou com Super Mario Bros., o pulo só é alto quando uma direção é segurada, ao invés de determinado pelo tempo em que o botão é pressionado, mas é algo que dá pra acostumar rápido. O skate em si como power up é um tanto estranho, por um lado permite que o personagem tome um dano sem perder vida, por outro você fica preso num auto run que, especialmente nas plataformas das últimas fases, pode ser mais prejudicial do que qualquer outra coisa. Há pouca variedade nos estilos de fases e de músicas, todas elas num loop bem curto (uma em especial beira o insuportável). Os chefes de cada mundo são exatamente iguais e o jogo todo num geral só é um tanto cansativo. Devo conferir as sequências para ver como a série criou sua própria identidade, mas esse aqui é difícil de recomendar.

I like the fast and reflexive gameplay. It really locks you into a certain zone and gives it a unique feeling compared to the sea of other 8-bit platformers. It is fucking hard though. It's also just a reskin of Wonder Boy, but I find this game's visuals much more charming, and the music is worlds better.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCWzCQOrR6w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcoqPzRt1OQ

Like come on, it's not even a contest.

It is clear that Hudson Soft was in the same meeting as Nintendo on what it took to create a 2D platformer. Unfortunately, I can only assume that the former was in the bathroom while they were discussing the most important details.

Adventure Island is a game I really wanted to like. And for the first few levels, I thought I would. I saw some good ideas. It controlled okay. The music was fine. I assumed that this was going to be another typical mascot platformer. Oh how naive you can be, Mr. Bones.

By far the most notable thing about the game to those who have beaten it is its difficulty. Because the game loves to find new ways to make your experience miserable, they crank it up to high heaven. Especially in the later stages, the player is bombarded with waves of enemies that require always being on your toes to fight against. They can be placed in the most inconvenient spots, or be stuck close together and force you to make tight jumps to pass. But the platforming itself is nothing to gloss over. Take the final section of 8-3 for example. You are required to perform near-pixel perfect jumps on falling platforms. Along the way, bats will swoop down and force you to kill them, with the final one being especially annoying for being right in the way of where you land and being super hard to kill without the right set-up. This turns the game into a trial for how much bullshit one person can take.

But of course. Hudson decided that wasn't enough. They needed something else: the hunger meter. It is a meter at the top of the screen that goes down unless you eat the fruit that appears. And if that bar is fully depleted, Higgins dies of starvation and you lose a life. What results is you having to juggle the already-hard platforming with collecting fruits that disappear if you take too long. This can piss you off when you are trying to deal with all the garbage mentioned above, sometimes forcing you to slow down so you can save yourself from succumbing to a lack of nutrients. It only serves to add another stone block to the rest that are already crushing you.

Now, all of this would be fine if I at least had some power-ups to help me. And luckily you do with eggs that can drop a variety of goodies. The axe is going to be your best friend. Sections that are a pain normally can be completely cheesed and put more focus into collecting fruits. The worst part about the axe is losing it. Dying results in you having to give up the ax until you can find another one. While the game will give it to you for free in sections the developers felt required it, this is a luxury. The late-game has many sections where there is not an axe in sight, forcing you to deal with the waves of enemies unarmed. There were times where I lost the axe mid-way through one level, and I would not have a chance to retrieve another one until I was a decent way through the next level. Unsurprisingly, this makes the game even more of an endurance test.

There is also the skateboard. On paper, it seems like a good idea. It lets you move faster and allows you to take an extra hit. But in practice, it is completely wasted and, dare I say, better off avoided most of the time. For one thing, it is impossible to come to a complete stop, only slow down. So this can cause complications when you can just careen into oncoming obstacles. And on top of that, the extra hit point is largely negated considering that there are no I-frames. So if you hit an enemy and there is one right next to it (which there probably will be), consider yourself deceased.

But by far the worst thing about the eggs is that they can potentially turn against you. The eggplant will drain your hunger meter to two, giving you mere seconds to find fruit before you die, and even then it might be too late. And there is no way to get rid of it, only delay the inevitable by finding the milk power-up that fills up the meter completely to give yourself more time. The most egregious eggplant is in 8-4. It is placed right in the middle of a series of tight jumping to avoid spiders. And it is practically unavoidable unless you are unbelievably precise. But in the likely scenario in which you do touch it, your only hope to reaching the next checkpoint is grabbing the egg which contains milk that can easily be missed or go off-screen right before you notice that it's there.

And after all of that, you would think that the game would reward you for your efforts by ending each world with a satisfying boss fight. Put your skills to the test for a similarly hard showdown with the main villain. Yea-NOPE! The boss fights have even less variety than the stages. All eight of them are exactly the same: the Witch Doctor moves back and forth throwing fireballs while you throw axes at his head. That's it! At least Bowser in SMB1 had some variety with his encounters, such as throwing hammers or making the fight area smaller. Here, the only difference is that the boss takes more hits to kill and maybe throws fireballs at a faster rate in the final level. So you are thrown through hell hole after hell hole all for the sake of essentially target practice.

It is nice that, from what I've researched, the later games in the series are a stark improvement, so maybe I'll check them out some day. But this was a really bad place for Master Higgins to make his start. If anything, this game makes me appreciate Super Mario Bros. even more than I did already. Because it shows just how much Nintendo could have shat the bed if they weren't dead set on making an enjoyable experience.

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.