Everything on the
Quattro Adventure cart by Codemasters. Yes,
that Codemasters. Before they were making slick racing games they were making unlicensed NES games (and before that, 8-bit home computer games). There are several “Quattro” carts, each with a theme like Sports or Arcade games. The one I had was
Quattro Adventure which featured platformers, and to Codemaster’s credit they were each pretty distinct in theme and gameplay.
- Boomerang Kid is a somewhat fast-paced platformer in which you face off against the wildlife of the Outback in order to retrieve your boomerangs. As I recall you can use a limited number of boomerangs as weapons but they have an arc which can make effectively using them tricky. This is made even more difficult by the arc your character jumps and how fast the movement speed is. Just like the real Outback, everything wants to kill you and is very good at it. The soundtrack is also seizure-inducing.
- Treasure Island Dizzy is more of a puzzle platformer in which you play as Humpty Dumpty’s doppelgänger, Dizzy. It’s cute and more slowly-paced than Boomerang Kid but much like BK everything kills you, even environmental things you don’t expect and there are traps everywhere. That thing that looks like a fence? Kills you. The water? Kills you. Fell too far? You’re dead kiddo. The jumping action is very floaty and makes it feel as though Dizzy is on the moon, but somehow this doesn’t make the game easier.
- Super Robin Hood is a bit of an action platformer in which you play as the man in tights attempting to escape from a castle dungeon and rescue Marian. I’m not sure what comes after the dungeon because I don’t recall getting further than a handful of screens. You can fire arrows which... kinda helps, but so can some of the enemies. From off-screen, no less. Down hallways. In which you can’t avoid them. Fun?
- In Linus Spacehead you play as some monkey-looking alien guy stranded after a crash and must look for radio parts. I really don’t have any real memories of this one, and I’m not sure why. I think it would crash my NES for some reason.
Each one of the four were incredibly unforgiving. Within minutes of starting any of the games on this compilation you’d be required to nail jumps with superhuman timing and precision. In at least some of the games you had no mid-jump control over your character. You press the jump button, you’re fuckin’ committed. It was too much for my retarded child brain and inarticulate hands to handle, but it didn’t stop me from trying.
I should find a copy of this and give it another go, for old time’s sake.
ETA: I’ll echo the sentiments about Jak 2 being bullshit, but I beat that game several times. I really liked the story and gameplay in the Jak games and was willing to grind when I couldn’t finesse my way through. The single most rage inducing part of it for me was the shooting range challenges (or was that 3?) because they felt so
unfair and I had become a bit of a completionist at this time. Never resulted in a broken controller, though.
What did, however, was Need for Speed: Underground. That rubberbanding AI was bullshit the likes of which I had never dealt with before. I don’t recall which race it was exactly, but it was toward the end-game, a 6 lap race on the longest track in the game. I had a fully (or near fully) upgraded Skyline, and after several attempts was about to win. Final lap, I obsessively paused to check the position of my opponents and they were all several seconds comfortably behind me. On the final stretch I dump all my nitrous, car hits the speed cap of about 220mph, and I’m almost there! I can see the finish line! I just keep dumping NOS to stay at maximum overdrive warp speed Mach “Fuck You” and victory is in my grasp...
And then a puke green Subaru shoots past me at what must have been nearly 300mph, slams through a traffic box truck without missing a beat, and crosses the finish line two seconds before I do.
I fucking snapped.
