 SNEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE Hey, check it out. It's yet another GOOD video game adaptation of a movie, or in this case three movies, with Indiana Jones' greatest adventures. This one's immediately going to draw comparisons to the Super Star Wars games, especially since they share the same publisher and JVC. And yeah, LucasArts did have a hand in the direction, design, artwork and sprite animation in Indiana Jones, but they also had help from the team of folks from Factor V. Ya know, the team behind the Turrican Games. and they had a significant part in the programming and developing the music and sound design. This game's structure is pretty interesting, it's a blend of all three Indiana Jones movies, well, the three that were around at the time, don't get me started on the god-awful fourth movie. You follow each movie as you play, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark, moving onto Temple of Doom, and then finishing with Last Crusade. Each movie, so to speak, is split up into four or five levels, which are in turn split up into two stages each, with one stage usually being your typical action platforming fare, and the other having Indiana either chasing something or being chased by something. And that can range between all sorts of stuff, there's some sections where you're sledding down a mountain, one where you're riding in a mine cart, heck there's even a stage where you're flying a biplane shooting at stuff, it's pretty dang impressive. Unfortunately the layout here always makes you start with Raiders of the Lost Ark, it would have been nice to have a menu where you could play the movies in any order, but there is at least a password system that lets you skip to whatever section you want, and even better is that it's only four characters long. You also get three lives and three continues to get through all three movies. Raiders of the Lost Ark helps get your feet wet with just a regular action platforming stage, so far so good, then you're chased by a giant boulder just like in the movie and ugh, this stage sucks. This is what I refer to as a pick up and die stage, where you can only progress by dying a whole bunch. That way you're able to see what obstacles pop up and when, and you memorize the sequence and hopefully you eventually get it right. Seriously though, this stage is freaking ridiculous, you've got stuff popping out of the ground, rocks falling from the ceiling, all with a giant boulder rolling after you and it just goes on and on and on. It's a matter of memorization and normally I'm actually okay with this kind of thing, especially since the checkpoints here are usually pretty reasonable, but geez Louise do not make it the second level of the game. Thankfully from there you go to the mountains of Nepal where you whip animals until they burst into flames, sure okay. You reach a cabin that's on fire where you have to race the flames up to the roof, all while enemies attack you and the floor collapses beneath you, geez this game is just relentless. But you know that's kind of what I like about this game, there's almost always a sense of urgency here and it definitely helps that the controls here are pretty dang good. It's the usual B to jump, Y to attack and you can use X to throw a grenade. Everything else is pretty intuitive, like using select to choose between the gun and the whip or holding down the Y button if you want to use the whip to swing from something. Unfortunately enemy respawning is an issue with this game, like for example, hey check it out it's that famous scene with the dude with the sword, oh there he is again and there he is again screw this I'm just gonna keep going. You've probably noticed by now from the footage here that the gun in this game is really freaking weak, I mean come on I gotta shoot this guy eight times before he goes down, what is he wearing Kevlar? Then later on you fight this dude in a runaway cart only you've got no whip you just sit here and punch his balls for like 30 seconds, why does Indy hate this guy's groin so much? Overall this game is reasonably polished and fun to play, the controls are immediate and easy to get the hang of, the graphics and sound are fantastic and really do a great job representing the source material, and I really dig how the game slowly introduces other game modes like the airplane stage toward the end of Last Crusade, I was not expecting that so that was a nice surprise. The one big flaw in Indiana Jones Adventures has got to be the difficulty, not so much that it's a difficult game overall, it's just that there are these seemingly random difficulty spikes, I already talked about one already with the boulder but there's a few other spots in this game that are really tough to manage and you survive that and then the game just kind of goes back to how it was, it's kind of off-putting but I wouldn't call it game breaking or anything. So yeah let's put this talking point to bed when it comes to games based off of movies, there's plenty of good ones out there especially on the Super Nintendo, there's the Super Star Wars games, there's stuff like True Lies, even stuff like Alien 3, Stargate and Judge Dredd is pretty good and Indiana Jones Greatest Adventures is definitely right there with all those games, if not a step above. The controls have a certain polish and immediacy to them, the structure works well, and the graphics and music all make it very clear within a quick glance at the screen that yes this is an Indiana Jones game, definitely check this game out any way you can. And all right I want to thank you for watching and I hope you have a great rest of your day.