Let’s Play Adventure Island! For my money one of the most difficult games ever made for the NES, Adventure Island should be renamed “Unfair Pits and Enemies at the Most Annoying of Places Island”. You know how I feel about pits as a device to make games harder at this point. Throw in some instant death when a monster touches you and believe it or not you’ve got a classic, if not one that made me chew on my controller in frustration on a regular basis as a child.
We star as Higgins, the ever-hungry Hawaiian islander out to, you guessed it, save his girlfriend. What the hell is with the constant theme of girlfriends being kidnapped in these games? What were you trying to tell us Nintendo!?
Anyway, the first five of eight worlds were admittedly not that difficult. Then, all of a sudden, pit city. The frickin sort of cave level just before the end of this game is more difficult than the entire Ninja Gaiden series combined! And forget if you get to 8-4 without a freaking weapon, just turn off the game at that point, call your mother, and ask her why she let you play video games as a child.
At the end of each world you fight a very anti-climactic boss which never really gets any more difficult or changes in his approach to killing you. And don’t even think about getting a skateboard after world 2… you’ll always just ollie your way into a pit or the ocean. I know that’s not really related to the boss bit, my brain is scattered just talking about it.