I just realized that I have not written a video game post in a looong time. So I wanted to write about one that I used to sit on my floor and play as an 8-year-old girl. With coke bottle glasses and a lot of love for video games.
Did I mention that I love this game? It opens with a cinematic slideshow. Ummm.....can you say awesome for 1988? Even then cinematics were used to set the mood.
The story begins with a boy named Jason who has a pet frog. His frog jumps out of his bowl one day and touches a radioactive chest (just like that huh?) and he grows to be gigantic. He tumbles into a hole in the earth, along with the chest. Jason ventures into the hole and finds an armoured vehicle, his steed if you will, awaiting him. The vehicle's name? Sophia the Third. Damn. That is freaking amazingness right there.
Jason then uses his newfound vehicle to try and rescue Fred, meanwhile killing all the mutants along the way. Until you get to this final boss guy:
Just your ordinary run-of-the-mill Plutonium boss. And doesn't Jason look so cute in his little suit? Almost looks like Hello Kitty from behind.
I remember this game being hard at times, but also really fun. I also remember that there was a huge glitch in the system that allowed for killing bosses the pussy way (excuse my language ladies and gentleman), but hey, sometimes you want to get through a boss quickly, or hop down a pipe and skip a bunch of levels. We all have our days. Of course now, as an adult, one wouldn't even dream of doing it that way. But anyway, what you did was you would launch a grenade at the boss and wait for it to just start exploding. Once that happened you would pause the game for 15 seconds and voila, the scene would pause but the grenade would keep on killing. I love that grenade killing action.
The gameplay in this side-scrolling, overhead action RPG was one of a kind for it's time. Although marketing was bad for the game, it still managed to become a cult classic with gamers. The attention to detail on every level was uncharacteristic for the time, and this in turn helped to create a huge underground world in which to explore and become lost in.
The music is pretty fantastic as well. If you have never played this game before, I strongly urge you to do so if you can. Pull out your NES and dust it off, blow in the game slot until you are light-headed, and go order this game off of Ebay or something. Or, an easier option would be to download onto your Wii virtual console if it is available.
So have a crazy awesome time playing this game that Nintendo Power ranked as the 63rd Greatest Nintendo game of all time! Peace out!
