| Hudson's Adventure Island 1986 Hudsonsoft, Famicom/NES |
HudsonSoft was one of Nintendo's first official 3rd party vendors when they came out with the Nintendo Family Computer - or "Famicom" for short - in 1983 in Japan. In 1986 they released this game - Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima (高橋名人の冒険島, Master Takahashi's Adventure Island) in Japan, and released it in the United States as "Hudson's Adventure Island" in 1988. It's an adaptation of an arcade game known as "Wonder Boy".
In Adventure Island, you control Master Higgins/Master Wigins/Takahashi Meijin who travels to the South Pacific after learning that a Witch Doctor has obsconded with Princess Tina. Basially, the whole game is collecting fruit for energy while riding skateboards and throwing primitive hammers/axes found around the island. It has a real polynesian feel to a lot of the graphical themes. Apparently, Adventure island was successful enough of a series to spawn 4 sequels, with Adventure Island II in 1990, Adventure Island III in 1992, and Aventure Island IV in 1994.He Look's Like a Southerner's Kooky younger Uncle - My Experiences I rented this way back when I was like...eight, maybe nine, from Blockbuster, and remember playing it and thinking it was alright, but being quite irritated with the extreme difficulty of this first outing. You have to remember, this would have been 1990-1992ish here - and back then, we did not have widespread internet access, actually, most of us did not have internet access at all. So there was no easy way of finding out this was basically an American localization for a Japanese video game from 1986. All I knew was it looked kinda' "old" for the time, and had okay controls but was a bit difficult to deal with. I always hated the name "Master Higgins" - being as I spent 18 years of my youth in the southeastern United States (aka the "Deep South" aka "The bible Belt" aka "Alabama/Georgia"), and the Civil War was somewhat of a sore subject, yet nobody neglected to bring up on the frequent. So I could not help hearing "Mastuh' Higgin'" which just sounded WRONG to me. So I always preferred to call Mister Higgins something more like "Uncle Pull Tab" or the more original "Uncle Florida-Man". He always looked like that fat, overweight, younger uncle with stubble, a baseball cap, almost never a shirt on, and a beer in one hand, and a cigarette in the other. None of my other uncles looked like this, but this was the de-facto "Uncle Attire" in east Alabama in the early 1990's. Blasting Motley Crue and George Straight while fiddling with the fuel system in the Camaro with a Marlboro and some Budweiser! And of course, he'd probably be one of those guys today who supports Donald Trump, believes InfoWars conspiracy theories, and likes to make Crop Circles in his backyard with the Lawn Mower so the "tans" will find him befor ethe "grays" do. LOL. Seriously, all this guy needed is a moustache and some heroin-skinny girlfriend with hair bigger than the State of Texas (and maybe a black eye), and this could have been called "Mr. Hudson's Trailer Park Bash" (Maybe I should make a ROM Hack of that, it'd be frickin' hilarious). As an adult though, I have this on not one, but TWO Cheesy Chinese multi-Famicom thingies - this and the Pocketgames 150-in-1 Famiclone Multicart. The Sup' 400-in-1 version seen here - basically a Game Boy Famiclone with weird proportions and 315 games in it, is pretty true to the original gameplay, but the Pocketgames has some kind of really wacky glitch problem with it where I basically have infinite lives without any cheats whatsoever, RAD! The version I have on both is either the Chinese or Japanese release - not sure which. The way it starts up sounds like some kind of 80's Asian TV show to me, which I thought I may have read somewhere on the internet might be legit. It just seems like the right game to play while wearing a suit with some brown-lens 1970's sunglasses on and smoking a cigarette in a dark room with red carpeting - while some clumsy guy with a bowlcut and bad overbite (American of Course) does stupid crap in the background for comedic effect. That said, it's grown on me as an adult, it's now actually rather fun to play, even with the massive challenge. I never make it past level 2 - though I made it to Level 4 on the 150-in-1 cartridge because "endless lives", So it's one of those I'm glad to have.Videos Other Stuff |
