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Title: Goonies
Author:Konami
Rom Player: NESticle
Reviewer: Iron Maiden
Synopsis: Ahh, The Goonies, a movie about adventure, mystery and legend. What a masterpiece! Of course along with a successful movie come lunchboxes, jugs, collectable cards and a videogame. Unfortunately The Goonies videogame doesn't try, even by the least, to capture the feeling of the movie, but then again not even today's games can do that most of the times, but it simply borrows the title and the movie's settings and manages to become quite a nice platformer that's truly worth a shot.
The first thing one realizes when beginning to play the game is that the visuals aren't quite up the the standards of 1986. Sure they display the characters, enemies and backgrounds quite good but even for the NES the level of detail that can be achieved with three colors on a wall is greater than that of this title. But the thing that is most irritating about the graphics is the design. The characters and the enemies all look like they were designed in 15 minutes, truly not the best results one could get with a 16x16 pixel sprite as other games of the time proved. The animation is quite good. Most sprites have a two-frame animation with not very natural postures. An extra frame would do a world of good but it still looks good. The environments are quite nicely composed despite their simplicity and the levels get more complex as the game advances. From a visual point this game is pretty standard for it's day but at least it is not repulsive.
If you enjoyed the music of the movie and have the ability to alter sounds with your brain then you can turn the volume up, but if not, the set of bleeps, squeaks and creeps in this game will make your nerves twitch. The music is simplistic and offers nothing special but the sound effects is were the game really fails. Sure, this is no powerful machine but it can deliver more than a simple high frequency twirt as a sound for a mouse. Some sound effects aren't bad though, such as the water falls.
The gameplay is quite simple and stable, as expected. Mikey shows off his talent for martial arts -something not seen in the movie- and his arsenal includes a slingshot, bombs, a cross that offers the 'can't die for some time' effect and a few other non-important objects. It's quite simple and easy to guide Mikey through his quest of blowing up doors with the bombs to gather three keys, a Goonie and maybe some power ups. You'll never find yourselves yelling about the controls being buggy or anything but the levels, the mice, bats, boned creatures, pirate ghosts and this typical Mafia-looking guy, make your way to One-Eyed Willie's pirate ship a bit challenging.
To sum things up, this movie-inspired game -as with most games of this type- is not by a long shot any close to the movie experience but at least the Goonies is quite a nice experience as a video game. Maybe it doesn't score too high in the sound department and maybe it's graphics are outdated even for it's time but, it really is fun to play. Definitely a game not worth buying back in 1986 but truly worth the time to download it and play for the 25 minutes it will take to beat the whole thing.
Best Cheats: Nothing Entered
Game Play: 7
Graphics: 6
Music/Sound: 5
Originality: 3
Overall Rating: 6
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