Remember The Game? #375 - Adventure Island I-III

And if you haven't played those, there's a lot of running in those ga- basically, that's the entire game is running.

Um, I know that the Adventure Island games aren't necessarily the best-known games on the NES, but we're covering them today for two reasons.

One, I grew up playing and loving this trilogy, and frankly, the number of games that I grew up playing and loving that I can still talk about here on the show is getting pretty short.

Hence why over the last couple years, it's really transitioned into more of a I play games for the first time and then talk about them on the show.

But these are ones I grew up with that are near and dear to my heart.

And the second reason I wanted to cover this trilogy on the podcast is because, in my opinion, the Adventure Island games are like, I don't know if I'd say full-blown hidden gems, but they're halfway hidden gems.

You know? I, I don't know if they're straight up gems.

They're just, they're good, not great games, and I don't know if they're totally hidden based on the comments.

A few of you grew up with them.

Not everybody did.

But whenever you see, like, a list of people listing the best games on the NES or podcasts about the best games on the NES, the Adventure Island games very rarely, if ever, get mentioned, and I think that's wrong.

I frankly think that they should.

Maybe not the first one, but the second and third one at least so.

Uh, if you've never played them, in all three of the games, you basically play as this pudgy caveman in a baseball cap, which could quite possibly be why I relate to him so much.

And, uh, the levels are basically running and basic platforming and stuff like that.

You can fight enemies.

There's some boss fights, all that stuff.

But the big, to me, the big, uh, the secret sauce of the Adventure Island games is that the timer for each level is actually your health bar.

So it forces you to keep moving 'cause if you go too slow, you'll run out of health, which means you've run out of time, which means you die, rinse and repeat.

Uh, they're pretty tough games as, as NES games should be.

I like my NES games like I like my insert whatever you want here but...

Well, that doesn't really work.

I was gonna say, you know, very tough, very hard, but that, saying insert it here and then saying very hard doesn't...

W- whatever.

I like my NES games tough.