 Turbodrunk Every popular game is always gonna spawn a number of imitators, even going as far back as The Legend of Zelda. Here's one example. Take one glance at Newtopia for Turbographic 16. Does this remind you of anything? It's got the same viewpoint, the same tile-based movement, the same style of map, the same kind of weapons, the same kind of enemies, and you even find secrets the same way. Okay, so this is very obviously a Zelda rip-off, but what kind of rip-off is it? Is this Amazon basic Zelda, or is this signature select Zelda? Well, it's a little bit of both, really. Newtopia was released in April 1990 and developed by Hudson Soft, so this is a first-party title for the Turbographics, so it must be at least kinda good, right? Uh, well, I guess it's kinda good-ish, maybe? You start out with a blander-than-bland story. You play as a dude named Jezeda, and he has to rescue the kidnapped princess Aurora from the clutches of the evil Emperor Durth. And to do that, you have to find eight gold medallions, and you find those by completing dungeons. So, yeah, the story has the depth of a wet paper towel. So you go off on your quest fighting blobs, bats, and lobsters with your sword, which is permanently tethered to the 1 button, or the A button if you're used to the NES controller, with the 2 button being reserved for various items you collect that you can switch between. You find and talk to people who don't even bother with clues, they just tell you where to go, and give you lots of items like bombs and potions, and here we finally get our first minor difference between Newtopia and Zelda. See, in this game, instead of bombing cracks in the wall, you bomb these little statue things. How about that? And this guy tells you that you need a key to enter the first dungeon. Wow, thanks for the insight, Dr. Phil. I do want to mention the translation right away because it's really well done. People actually speak in full sentences, and everything makes sense. In fact, the translation might be too good because, like I said, people don't speak cryptically, or even hint at things. Instead, they just tell you exactly what you need to do, and unfortunately, that kind of takes away what makes top-down adventure games like this fun. That's the main thing that keeps Newtopia firmly in the store brand category. It isn't just because it so blatantly rips off Zelda, it's that it doesn't rip off the right things. For example, you might expect a game like this to have an open world where you can wander around anywhere you want, and if you're lucky, maybe you could even find a sequence break, or at least, you know, get rewarded for exploring. But, Newtopia is stubbornly linear. Instead of one big overworld, you have four separate small overworlds that have two dungeons each. You crank through the four worlds in order, finding a gold medallion in each dungeon, and that unlocks the fifth and final world. The game is very much on rails and doesn't really encourage exploring, mostly because there just isn't that much to explore. Even finding out where you're supposed to go is super easy because the game flat-out tells you with the compass and the menu screen. Sheesh, this game doesn't just hold your hand, it locks it in a death grip. You do find stuff here and there because, again, just like Zelda, take a drink every time you hear me say that in this video, you can use the fire magic you eventually get to burn down shrubbery, revealing staircases that are housing old guys like Rob Reiner here. Some folks will give you extra items or extend your health meter, which is nice, but since the map is smaller and locked down, all you'll end up doing is just setting as much stuff on fire as you can, and that gets pretty old after a while, unless your name is Beavis. The combat is okay overall, but the sword can be a bit of a pain to use. It's one of those melee weapons where you're always at risk to do damage to yourself because your range is so short. Sometimes you'll take damage from enemies that are just above or below you, so they can hit you, but you can't hit them. That's really annoying, but thankfully once you get the fire rod early on in the game, you can just keep that equipped and use that instead, and that brings me to the one major thing that Newtopia does differently. Normally you'd have a magic meter, but instead your magic's power is tied to your health. If you have full health, you can do cool stuff like this. If you don't, your magic is a lot weaker, but even then it's still a lot more reliable than the sword. If you die in this game, you lose half your gold and start back at the main hub, so yeah, you may find yourself grinding for money so you can afford more potions, and that's always annoying. Also annoying is the password system. This is one of those TurboGrafx games where you needed the super CD-ROMET on to save, otherwise you're stuck with some truly painful passwords, the kind that have uppercase, lowercase, numbers, special characters. It's a nightmare. Thankfully, the best way to play this one today is on the TurboGrafx Mini, so you can just use save states and spare yourself the agony. So yeah, it's always fun to look at games like Newtopia if only because it's the perfect example of the meme, we already have Zelda at home. Ah, this is Zelda at home, alright, but it's not like it's bad. The music is pretty good, and it's definitely a graphical upgrade over Zelda and Zelda 2. But still, Newtopia comes across as some kind of Zelda rom-hack or a fan-made game. This isn't Kirkland Zelda, but it's not Walmart Zelda either. It's somewhere in the middle, like Aldi Zelda. Newtopia is fine as long as you keep your expectations low. But Hudson Soft wasn't done yet, they went on to make Newtopia 2, released in August 1992, only this time you start the game getting killed by a giant squid. Ah, but it's all a dream. You actually play as Jazeeda's son, and you have to rescue dad. Newtopia 2 manages to be both better and worse than the first game. For example, in the sequel, you can walk and attack in eight different directions, and you can use your sword while moving. It's nice, but it doesn't really work with other game mechanics, since this is the exact same grid-based format, so combat may be more user-friendly, but doing something like pushing blocks is annoying, because you have to line up just right, and that's especially aggravating when you get to rooms like this. And you have to try and push every block to see what moves, and that's what constitutes a puzzle in this game. Another improvement is that they ditched the four separate overworlds for one huge overworld, hooray! But, uh, you still have to complete each dungeon in order, and there still just isn't much going on in the overworld, and not much to find. The dungeons are a little more involved, and introduce stuff like conveyor belts and teleporters, but the puzzles are still as basic as it gets, you're just pushing blocks around. Real simple stuff. The graphics and sound are still good, like this Medusa head that shows visible damage, or these huge moths that make this kinda look like a top-down Mega Man game. The first boss jumps around like the sandworms and linked to the past, which would come out a few months after this. There is some nice stuff here, but it feels so much like the first game, for better or for worse. They slightly improve the graphics and sound, but the dungeon design, the enemy design, the puzzles, the real guts of the game, are just like the original, and the small improvements they did make just add to more aggravation. Well, at least the music is pretty good. I wish I had more to say about Newtopia 2, but it really is just more of the first game by and large, it's just as bland and boring, and the whole time you're playing it, you start thinking about playing Link to the Past instead. Or Brain Lord, or Sort of Vermillion, or Twisted Tales of Spike McFang, you get the idea. The Newtopia games are fine, harmless time-killing works of banality. I mean, if you ended up with a TurboGrafx as a kid instead of an NES, then yeah, these games could have been perceived as good enough. Playing them now, though, not so much. They're competently made games, it's not like they're a janky, broken mess, they're just dull as dishwater. Again, if you really want to check these games out, it's best to keep your expectations low. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.