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Okay, have you ever made a mistake that is so blindingly obvious immediately thereafter, you try to pass it off as a mistake made while being rip-roaringly drunk? Either that, or tried to deny that it ever happened? Apparently, for both Nintendo and I, that mistake happened to be Taxan’s Mystery Quest. Nintendo, the one time I asked them about it, tried the "it never happened" method, except that it actually had the Nintendo seal on it showing they approved it. (As shown on the helpful box image.) Bet they still don’t know why. Personally, I tried the "I was really drunk" excuse, except that when you’re only around 10 years old, nobody buys it.
So what precisely makes this game so bad? Well, the story doesn’t help. You play as Hao, a wizard’s apprentice, and you’re being sent off to your final exam of sorts. You’re told that to become a real wizard, you have to invade four castles and steal seals from them. Because, as you know, studying spells and reading books makes too much sense. You’ve got to prove what a great apprentice you are by jumping around like an idiot in a bunch of castles while you try to steal things. I mean, we’re talking stupid for an era that made games like Amagon and King’s Knight (for the record, I owned both). It was the kind of story that makes you think, "You know, Soul Fighter really wasn’t all that bad. Nor is Battlefield Earth."
The game play and controls just heap onto the problems, though. For one, the game only allows you to run if you repeatedly press attack while moving. This made a bit of sense back in 1985, when Nintendo had a novel thought on how to make Mario move faster. Fast forward three years, though, and you get Mystery Quest doing the same trick when other designers had already figured out the double tap method which still serves games well. This is compounded by the fact that the game is incredibly unresponsive to the controller. You can’t always be guaranteed that you’ll actually fire your weapon or jump just because you press the button, especially as you run up to a pool of water or an enemy.
Honestly, though, it’s not like enemies are that serious of a threat, except for two problems. First, you can’t really aim your weapon - it fires out in a random pattern. Second, your health continually depletes. Yes, that’s right, the old "Wizard needs food - badly" jokes can be recycled here too. Enemies are generally pretty good about dropping health recovery items, but until you find a certain item late in the game, you’re going to spend a lot of time keeping tabs on where you can go to kill things for more energy. Because that’s a much more productive task than, say, figuring out how to beat this hellish torture.
Another problem is in your attacking powers. You start off by being able to throw magic bubbles, which are impressive in that they make an annoying sound which is apparently what kills foes. This is bothersome because, as I mentioned above, you really have no aim with the bubbles. Oh, but it gets better. Later on, you can get a scroll which turns your attack into a series of concentric arcs fired randomly, just like the bubbles. But the arcs don’t do anything the bubbles don’t do - they break bricks just like the bubbles and enemies take the same number of hits to go down. To top it off, the game later gives you back the bubbles, maybe because they’re apologizing for doing such a stupid switch to begin with. If only I got an apology for having to play such a stupid game.
Oh, but to top it all off, there is the problem with the pools of water. You may note that Hao, ever the fashionable lad, wears an outfit that may remind you of the guys summoned by Adam Sandler and Chris Farley in their one funny Saturday Night Live skit, "Schmitt’s Gay Beer".
However, despite the fact that he’s wearing, at most two pounds of clothing, Hao sinks like a stone in water. You can get one item, the SOS raft, which can save you from the water...once. And more often than not, due to the lousy controls, you’ll just wind up falling back into the water. Oh yeah, that really helps there, Taxan.
As you can expect, the graphics are also quite below par. I’m not talking just in terms of today’s games, as that would be patently unfair. But even for the time, the graphics were just clunky. I could excuse graphics like this in, say, 1983. Of course, I had just turned four then, and I just would have been dazzled by the pretty colors. But when this game was made, it was just terrible, like it came straight from the earliest days of colorization in games. I seriously saw better graphics on my old TI 99-4A. I can’t think of any trash-80 games off-hand with better graphics, but that’s just because you need to give me more time.
Why were they so bad? Because when I was 10, I was a gangly little geek with no visual art talent whatsoever, and I still could draw better pictures with my crayons than the graphic designers did in this game. I mean, would it have killed them to come up with more than two frames to animate everything? Maybe put some detail into things? While it admittedly made me feel much better about my own artistic talents, that’s not why I buy video games.
Oh, but the sound...the sound and music in that game is probably what pushed me over the edge. Did you ever sit there and think, "Hey, Yoko Ono needs to produce a video game soundtrack." No? I imagine that’s probably because you don’t like incoherent and screechy sounds made by Japanese people with no business in a recording studio. Hey, that also describes the sound engineers for this game! I mean, it’s not like I don’t listen to Japanese music and video game music all the time. (How many video game soundtracks do I own? Yes.) It’s just that when it’s that screechy, you might want to consider some line of work that doesn’t cause dogs to wail in pain. The effects, which are like listening to Macintosh sound effects on speakers built in the 1910’s, are just the grace notes to complete the cacophony.
Perhaps the worst part of it all, though, is the ending. After forcing yourself through four castles just to get this collection of seals, you’re told that you screwed it up and have to start all over again from the beginning. So let me get this straight, if I can: I just spent a couple hours, using your terrible controls and nonsensical attacks to get through your screechy, poorly drawn mess, killing a few dozen brain cells that could possibly have cured cancer on your stupid game, and you’re telling me that I didn’t do it right? What’s more, just because I like pain, I went through that Stygian ordeal again and got the same message. My thoughts? Get me the lead producer of the game, a dozen copies of the cartridge, some K-Y, and straps to hold the producer down as I shove those copies back where they obviously came from. Nobody is going to force me through two runs of repetitive nonsense without a payoff of some kind.
Truth is, I found out recently, you have to clear the game four times consecutively in order to get a real ending. My guess is that said ending is this...upon realizing how much you’ve played the game, your lungs shut themselves off in an effort to keep someone as hopeless as someone who’d sit through this four times from ever passing on genetic material. Personally, I found something more productive and less painful to do with my time...ripping my own toenails out.
Now, in the end, I suppose this game did have one good thing going for it. Because I got exposed to it at such a young age, I became immune to some of the horrible junk passing as entertainment that I’ve run across. I mean, after forcing yourself to play through this a couple of times, what’s another THQ or Acclaim game under your belt? Heck, I bet 95% of you haven’t ever heard of this game and you’re pitying me for having gone through it. But beyond training yourself for endurance and pain threshold, there is no reason to subject yourself to the same "dull spoon to the eyes" agony that I did in playing this game. Save yourself the time, the effort, and the tears, and just avoid this one at all costs.
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