Ordered myself a Famicom Mini yesterday and today I played some Atlantis No Nazo!
GOODNESS this is a bad ol' time
I didn't even make it to the bits of the game that are so infamously indecipherable with horrible secrets. The game is just all around unfair and bad in a way so many 8-bit games are. It ticks all the boxes of bad 8-bit game design:
- Poor to no play control. You make a jump, that jump is HAPPENING.
- Enemies with unpredictable spawn patterns. If you're running at full tilt, you're probably fine and you can kinda predict it, but you basically can't do that becuase you die in ONE hit and there is tricky platforming. Many times you'll make a jump and two enemies will spawn instead of one, or the bats will spawn at a different height than you're hoping, and suddenly you're about to die and there's NOTHING you can do about it.
- Comically useless weapon. You have what are effectively grenades whose main purpose is to find secret doors and open closed ones, because they're absolutely useless for killing nearly every enemy in the game who is some combination of invulnerable to them (they fly), can shield, takes lots of hits, or is so mobile that trying to kill them is pointless.
- Timer for no reason. This game may as well be a runner like Adventure Island with how strict its time limits get so quickly (by like the 6th level or so), but it has tons of super narrow corridors packed with tricky platforming and enemies (who one-hit kill you!), so you need to take your time. Combine that with unpredictable enemy spawns, and you frequently need to get lucky to make it through a level without dying.
- Long length and NO continues. You have seven lives to make it through a game that is packed with super unfair enemies, very tricky platforming, and deliberately impossible secrets/puzzles. Good luck!
Yeah, this game is bad. Not completely unenjoyable, granted. I'm sure you could really get into a rhythm with the platforming and enemy out-maneuvering if you really started memorizing each level. I honestly nearly did at times. But it's just such a painfully mediocre and constantly unfair game that there is no reason to play it, let alone justify its presence on the Famicom Mini.
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While we're on the topic, let's talk about the Famicom Mini as well, because this thing has so may reasons it sucks for absolutely no reason.
For the sake of nostalgia faithful to the original design, there are several bits of horrible design that the original Famicom had compared to its successors or even the NES that are either faithfully recreated or made even worse! For starters, the controllers are hard-wired into the back, just like the original. Sure, it comes with two controllers, and the NES Classic didn't, but they're HARD WIRED INTO THE BACK
. The controller port on the front is fake as well from what I can tell, so you can't even get a 3rd-party controller to get around that like you could with the original Famicom Mini. The cables for the controllers are still SUPER short, I think maybe even shorter than the original Famicom's cables.
To top it all off, the controllers obviously need to slot into the sides. This IS a Famicom after all. However, that means they need to be small enough to fit into this mini Famicom! Mini Famicom; mini controllers! They're like half the size of a proper NES/Famicom controller and it makes the games SO much harder to play by just muscle memory. It makes hard games like Atlantis No Nazo or even Mega Man 2, a game I'm very familiar with and can usually get through with no problem, SO much harder. If my hands were even like 10% bigger (I'm like 5'8", so I'm super average height in America and like top-of-average height for Japan males), I basically couldn't use these things even close to comfortably.
And this thing has Atlantis No Nazo but DOESN'T have Punch Out OR Kid Icarus! At least it has River City Ransom and Solomon's Key, I suppose
I identify everyone via avatar, so if you change your avatar, I genuinely might completely forget who you are. -- Me
