Hudson's Adventure Island (Game Boy) Playthrough
174A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 1992 platformer for the Nintendo Game Boy, Hudson's Adventure Island.
Adventure Island for the Game Boy is somewhat misleadingly named. It's not a conversion of the original 1988 Adventure Island NES game (https://youtu.be/vL3urZJBkQM), but it is instead based on Hudson's Adventure Island II (https://youtu.be/ZISo83NM2Ug), which was released on the NES in 1991.
Just like in Adventure Island II, you play as Master Higgins, a portly prehistoric islander whose girlfriend, Tina, is kidnapped by a witch doctor. (Ever notice how Toki has the same exact plot?)
You run around eight islands, chucking stone axes and boomerangs at all manner of wildlife. You continuously eat fruit to sustain your energy gauge (which functions like a timer), you can ride on skateboards, and you ride piggyback on four different animal friends, all with different abilities.
It's a solid adaptation, and it's of similar quality to similar NES-to-Game Boy ports of the time from Capcom and Konami. That is to say, it is a reasonable approximation of the original, but it makes some heavy concessions to get there.
The NES game featured sixty-six stages and allowed you to choose which areas you'd visit on your way to the boss of each of the game's eight islands. The Game Boy version pares things down to forty stages, all of which were taken directly from the NES game, and the branching path system was axed.
The game is a fair bit easier than its console counterpart owing to its slower pace (probably an attempt to minimize screen ghosting), and it suffers from some heavy bouts of slowdown and a lower framerate, but it generally stays faithful to its roots. The dino sidekicks and inventory system are here, the graphics still look nice in spite of the lack of color, and the music made the leap reasonably intact, though it's much higher pitched on the handheld.
It's not a 1:1 match for the NES game - it feels like a studio's first attempt at developing a Game Boy game, and they clearly had some struggles coming to grips with the hardware - but in 1992, Adventure Island for the Game Boy was a fair facsimile that provided me a lot of entertainment way back. If you're in the mood for a simple but engaging game that recaptures the spirit of the 80s arcade platformer, you could certainly do worse than this handheld cart.
I recorded this video using the Super Game Boy to change things up a bit, and I'd like to ask you guys for some feedback. Do you like the Super Game Boy look, or would you rather see Game Boy games recorded with shaders that mimic the look of the green LCD screen (https://youtu.be/wIrJ61ekkdg, for example)?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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