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October 03, 2005
The Forgotten: Adventure Island
Everyone loves an established video game franchise. After all, some of gaming’s best loved characters have been going on adventure after adventure for years, prompting players to line up to reserve the next installment of Super Mario, Link, Samus Aran, or Sonic the Hedgehog. Over the years, however, some games just haven’t struck gold; they’ve been overshadowed by more popular fare that shares the store shelf or are even passed over due to something as petty as unimpressive box art or an unusual premise. They deserve to be remembered and revived, but instead they are The Forgotten.
Adventure Island
Developed by Hudson Soft
Released for NES, Super NES, Game Boy, and TG-16
Another of the "also-ran" mascot platformers born in the 1980s, Hudson's Adventure Island follows the adventures of tropical islander Master Higgins as he journeys across a series of islands in search of his beloved girlfriend Tina who is being held captive by the diabolical Witch Doctor (and later, space aliens). A full-on run-and-jump game, Higgins makes use of weapons such as a stone ax and fireballs in addition to skateboards for transportation, milk for energy, and in later games a collection of friendly dinosaur pals. Each level has a notoriously short time limit which can be slightly extended by collecting piece after piece of island fruit. Nevertheless, Higgins must keep moving and keep collecting fruit in order to finish each level before time runs out.
Four games were released for the NES (two of which were ported to the Game Boy), two new games were released for the Super NES, and one game made it to the TurboGrafx-16. The games of the Adventure Island series follow the same formula for every game with two exceptions: Adventure Island IV (which went unreleased outside of Japan) combined the familiar play mechanic with the style of Metroid in which Higgins backtracked across levels to gather new items and open new paths, while Super Adventure Island II crossed further into the action/RPG realm by equipping our hero with customizable swords, armor, and magic spells (all of which are quite out of place in a tropical island setting).
Master Higgins was retired after Super Adventure Island II (which was an average game at best), but what really needs to make a appearance from the Adventure Island canon is the fourth game in the series that was not released worldwide. Adventure Island IV infused a fresh direction into a rapidly graying series while retaining the best aspects of the character and original games. While a new Adventure Island game would be nice, Hudson is planning an Adventure Island collection for the Game Boy Advance in Japan featuring all four original NES games. Here's hoping they release it elsewhere as well. Master Higgins deserves a respectable final send-off.
Posted by MattG on October 3, 2005 at 09:45 AM in The Forgotten | Permalink
Comments
the original nes adventure island is really just a port of escape's monster world (released first in the arcade and then on the master system) with the protagonist changed because sega owned the wonder boy trademark. although the later games in the adventure island series were developed by hudson, they really didn't have much to do with the creation of the original.
Posted by: dessgeega | Oct 3, 2005 8:40:21 PM
It’s really a shame. All these pussy-wussy 1990’s born kids don’t know what a real man’s video game is. Sure, they were raised on PlayStation 2 and X-Box; if you give them a real game like Adventure Island, they’ll probably piss in their pants and cry like little babies because they can’t make it past the Lake Island boss.
I was raised on Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Kid Icarus, Astyanax, Mega Man, etc. We used to play men’s games back then. We were lucky if we managed to get three extra lives, and if we screwed it, it was back from scratch.
Adventure Island is one of the greatest sagas of all time. I was fortunate enough to play all of them, from the 1986 Japanese-titled one to the amazing Super Adventure Island 2, which I consider one of the best platformer-RPG games ever developed.
Hudson Soft would have sold lots of games if they developed one for Nintendo 64, for example, because it’s the classic gamers who really buy more games. Bomber Man 64 and its sequels weren’t a huge hit, true, bit they had their respectable audience. The problem nowadays, the first step before developing a game is an extensive meeting with marketing folks, and the most important thing for these greedy slobs is how much dough they’ll get for it. Same applies for cinematographic companies. This means that both classic gamers and movie-viewers are placed aside because what they like isn’t the new and hot and won’t sell like they did ten or twenty years ago.
How wrong they are.
An example for anyone who likes Disney films: what the blazing heck happened to Margery Sharp’s The Rescuers? The last 1990 film was a crappy sequel which had no relation with the nine novels that compose the Rescuers series. Disney is wasting enormous potential, and instead is making crappy sequels to all its movies, and none of them is even released theatrically, all in over-priced poor-quality DVDs with boring extras that nobody watches. By the way, Disney hardly ever makes movies on their own account. They always base themselves (and often mutilate) other people’s hard work. Count the films and see which ones are originally Disney’s. And once they do their dastardly deed, they claim the characters as theirs and can do whatever their bloomin’ MEIN FÜHRER Eisner pleases, like put them in that horse-crappy show House of Mouse with that showoff, f******, son of a ***** faggot mouse of theirs.
Oh well. Capitalism. There you have it.
Classic characters can be eternal if they’re properly immortalized. Just look at Mario. He’s been in countless (too many, if so can be said) uncanny situations: fiery castles, in a wrestling arena (Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door), as a referee of a boxing match (Punch-Out!!) and even in a kitchen flinging food around so Princess Toadstool can catch in a frying pan (Game and Watch Gallery 2), and he’s still alive. Sure, people will tell me that he’s versatile and all, but what about the others?
Three examples: Master Higgins, Knight Arthur and Firebrand from Ghosts N’ Goblins, Gargoyle’s Quest and Demon’s Crest, and Pit from Kid Icarus. Pit has incredible potential for an adventure video game like Zelda. Say that he can upgrade his arrows and wings and use all kind of Greek-like weapons. It would be great. But no…they’re forgotten and replaced with crappy games like Geist and the Mario Party series.
And what about Colonel Scott O’Connor from Kabuki: Quantum Fighter? After battling the last boss and finally passing the game, I clearly remember the words ‘I’ll be back. Watch for my next game.” So…where is it? Human Corp. has done a great job with Clock Tower and Twilight Syndrome, but why did they forget Kabuki like that?
Well…that’s about it. I’m saying forget the new ideas. New ideas have made incredibly amazing games like Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem. I’m just saying that these big bucks who have nothing to loose because they’re already filthy rich should think about us damned aching-backed workers who crave for the characters we loved when we were kids. This goes for any big-buck, not only video game designers. Think about it, imperialistic f******s.
Posted by: Aaron | Mar 22, 2006 11:34:35 AM
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