Skateboards Are Cool (Adventure Island/II/III/IV)

Well, that's a little more like it. An entire series for us to play with. I would hesitate to call it one of the pillars of the 8-bit era, but god damn. These are the best games I've gotten to play for this thing so far, so they have that going for them. Together, these four games span the years 1986 to 1994. I'm no psychochronographer, I'm afraid. I'll do my best to track how these things evolved over time, but they're just kind of fun games. Let's look at that first one.

My music player of choice has helpfully shuffled towards Peter Gabriel's 1986 album, So. Adventure Island does not quite want to be your sledgehammer, but it will be your stone axe without hesitation. What we have here is a game starring a nice fellow named "Master Higgins". His real name is Takahashi Meijin and he can press a button very fast to kill a space monster named Larios. He can also throw stone axes at snails and go out for adventure wearing naught but a hat and a grass skirt. Adventure Island has you running through 8 different worlds, each 4 levels long. At the fourth level of each world you face an enemy and are allowed to move to the next world. Clear all 32 stages and you save the damsel in distress. This may sound familiar to some of you. The nature of the Nintendo Project means that we are hurtling towards that particular planet of a video game, possibly at the speed of light. Its gravity and the gravity of its sister planets is inescapable. More a black hole than a planet. So yes, Adventure Island does take several cues from 1985's Super Mario Brothers. What it doesn't take is being particularly good.

Don't get me wrong, it is more fun than something like Hook or Hudson Hawk... but certain things mar it. You get three lives. 32 levels, levels which become fiendishly difficult at around the world 3 mark. No continues... at least, not in plain sight. A hidden Hudson Bee powerup lies at the end of stage 1. Grabbing it lets you continue... if you hold Up, A, and Select on the game over screen and then press start. This baffles me. It takes the game and just makes it flawed. You'd have to be a madman to try and beat it.

This brings us to Game Center CX. A Japanese television program wherein a middle-aged Japanese comedian attempts to beat old video games. The trick is that he is not very good at video games. Adventure Island is suggested by many as a good starting point for viewing the show. In 2013, Japan exists. Of course it does. It exists, and in 1986 it had a game that was like Adventure Island in just about every way, barring the title screen. Game Center CX took it on, and the results... well, they're best seen. Here's a link to the Something Awful thread about the show, if you dare venture into the secret history of Adventure Island. See how far they go to beat the thing. Trust me.

So then we hit 1990, and Adventure Island II. It is a better game than the first, but in my experience it still got very difficult. Somewhere around the ice world. It is still easier than Adventure Island, the original. It also adds more variety in the levels and worlds, and dinosaurs you can ride. It may feel inspired by the gravity of Super Mario Bros. 3, but riding dinosaurs feels like a trick Nintendo managed to hold on to once video games metamorphed. Better than riding a skateboard, anyway. Always moving forward. Never looking back. This is emphasized by the secret I found in the fourth level. A cloud lifted me to the heavens and a pterodactyl asked me if I wished to skip this island. I hit the warp zone. This, then, is the power of the video game. Sometimes you can break the rules. If you're good enough, you can transcend space and time. Sometimes this is a blue box. A green pipe. A black hole. A pink pterodactyl, flying over the blue sea.

Adventure Island III. 1992. The NES is in what I like to call its "twilight years". The world has become Super. It has become 16-bit with thousands of colors and 6 mega memory. It has become Mode 7 and blast processing and turbo power. The NES somehow still exists in this void. Not on top of the world, but somehow still thriving and surviving. Its song is winding down. It doesn't want to go. Adventure Island III feels like a prettier Adventure Island II. The one new dinosaur I got, a triceratops, spun in a ball. The gravity affecting this series now isn't even from the NES solar system. Things are getting bad in the universe. Very bad indeed. The sun is turning red and Adventure Island III is relegated to the secret history. It was experienced by many as history itself, but the majority knows it now by its reconstruction.

1994. Oh no. This is it, friends. Adventure Island IV did not even reach us. This is where the song stops. This was the final game for the 8-bit system we knew as NES, called "Famicom" in Japan. This game, then, is the Nintendo Famicom's Trenzalore. Its gravity comes from its own past. That strange creature some might have known, called Wonder Boy. Its twin evolved into exploration and item collecting, while Adventure Island was content to stay with dinosaurs and skateboarding. Here now, as the sun turns supernova and the end is inevitable, Adventure Island looks back on itself. We explore a free world. We get a hammer by killing a bat. Now we can go where we couldn't before. Now we can go.

Feels different this time.