A portable version of Hudson’s classic, cheery arcade platform game.

Story

The lovely princess Tina has been kidnapped by monsters and is being kept somewhere on one of the eight islands. Higgins must travel from island to island to search for her and defeat the monsters stand in his way.

Introduction

Adventure Island for Game Boy is a hand-held port of Adventure Island II which was originally released for the Nintendo Entertainment System home console back in 1992. The Adventure Island series quickly became a beloved franchise with its approachable design, cute graphics and fun gameplay.

The Game

Adventure Island is a side-scrolling platform game where you play as Master Higgins on a quest to rescue the kidnapped princess. The goal of the game is simply to get yourself across all of the eight islands in the game, and there are mean bosses waiting at the end of each island.

The game does not have any options or difficulty settings that you can adjust, but it has a fair difficulty level out of the box. This is certainly not a hard game when compared to what’s out there, but it will keep you entertained for its duration.
It starts out easily as it introduces you to the various elements of the game world, but gradually gets a little more tricky the further you go. The game has support for scrolling in all directions and there are a few occasions when you can take alternate routes in the stage.

Controls

Right from the start you can only run and jump, and Master Higgins dies from one single hit. But along the way you’ll be able to find eggs which contain useful items that you can use to increase your chances. The most basic item is the throwing axe which will allow you to throw axes and thus knock enemies out. Indeed, without this weapons you have no means what so ever to defend yourself – well, unless you happen to find the Honey Girl fairy, which makes you invincible for a short duration, but she is a rare find. Luckily though, you’ll be able to find the axe fairly easily most of the time.

The controls are as simple as ever and you’ll be able to master it in no time. Master Higgins tends to slide a short distance as he slows down from running and this needs to be taken into consideration when running on small platforms and making precision jumps. You really need to have the momentum of speed when making long jumps – and long jumps are required most of the time. In this regard the controls can feel a little sluggish.

Content

In many ways, this is a fairly straight forward arcade style game as far as the game mechanics are concerned. The typical obstacles you’ll face are bottomless pits, bonfires and enemies of various types. Other obstacles are crushing boulders, collapsing platforms and falling objects, but they’re relatively rare. Some of the traps are pretty unfair though, because they’re either impossible or hard to foresee, so you need to maintain a preparedness for anything as you play, especially in the few final islands.

You’re given three lives to beat each island. Each island consists of five sub-stages and a boss. If you lose all your lives, you can choose to continue the game which then takes you back to the first sub-stage of the island in which you died on. This means that you’ll have to replay a whole lot if you keep dying, but at least you can keep continuing for as long as you want. The game does not support saving or passwords however, so once you power the game off your progress is reset. There are plenty of opportunities to earn extra lives, however.
Each sub-stage is very short and fairly easy to memorize, so if you keep playing for a while you’ll eventually learn the stages by heart sooner than you might think.

Other than the axe you will be able to get the skateboard and four different dinosaurs to ride on from the eggs. The skateboard will give you greatly increased movement speed, but it’s also very risky because you won’t be able to stop it. The dinosaur mounts all have unique features such as flying abilities and fire-breathing.
When you’re skating or riding a dinosaur, you’ll merely lose your means of travel when you take a hit (instead of dying) so it’s always a huge help to find those extra eggs. Every once in a while you’ll also be able to find eggs that takes you to bonus stages where you can rake in some extra lives or other goodies, so there is a fair amount of secrets and bonuses discover.

There is an energy bar in the game but in reality, it functions more akin to a time limit; It does drain over time, but you can regain it by picking up fruits and other goodies such as milk bottles and flowers. So basically, for as long as you keep moving you will be able to find new fruits to pick up and thus keep feeding the energy bar. Most of the time you don’t have to worry about running out of energy, but typically when you hesitate over a tricky jump and need to run back to gain some speed you’ll be reminded that there certainly isn’t much time to waste.

You can save power-ups from that you’ve gotten from the eggs from one stage to another – between each stage you’re taken to a preparation screen where you can equip and store items you’ve found. This feature lets you save dinosaurs and even throwing axes to a later stage if you would want to. While this feature does give you some options to lay out strategies and fall back safety, it is hard, if not impossible to utilize it to any greater length.
After each stage you’ve also got the chance to win a prize from a lottery wheel of sorts. Basically you’ll see a bunch of eggs rotating in a circle and you are to pick one of them. The best prize you can get is one extra life. It’s completely random though, and even though it is a generous thing, it doesn’t exactly give you any meaningful choices.

As far as bugs and glitches go, there are some consistent hit detection problems going on in this game. There are occasions when your projectiles simply glide through enemies without it connecting or counting as a hit. Likewise there are enemies that can kill you without it actually touching you. While this sounds horrible, it’s not frequent enough to break the game, it’s just something that we happened to notice while playing.

Graphics

The graphics are pretty much what you’ve come to expect from a Game Boy title – even though the game is monochromatic, it manages to depict the various environments well. The charming style from its predecessors is intact and looks spot on.
There are some objects in the game that are abstract and hard to tell what they’re supposed to be, but for the most part the visuals and animations are clear and enjoyable. On a side note; the animation of Master Higgins running is weird, absurd and even funny.
There are some frame rate stuttering present in the game but we found that it typically does not cause any issues to the overall game experience.

Sound

The game has music and sound effects playing, and it’s all very charming. Sure, it’s pretty squeaky but it’s cute and cheery at the same time. And even though the sound effects consist mostly of basic beeps, they go well with the rest of the game. There are a few different songs in there to mix it up and most of it is very fitting and is sure to bring many smiles.

Summary

Adventure Island is a rather simple, but funny platform game. It’s hard to put down in the beginning, but once you’ve had enough there’s really no reason to look back at it other than for nostalgia.
As a portable Game Boy version of Hudson’s classic Adventure Island, it fills its shoes just perfectly and it will certainly honor any game collection that is lucky enough to include it.

Developed By: Hudson Soft
Published By: Hudson Soft
Version Reviewed: Game Boy
Genre: Platform
Players: 1
Also Available On: Nintendo Entertainment System, Nintendo 3DS (Virtual Console)
Released: 1992-04-23