Retro Roulette #50: The Great Waldo Search (NES, 1992)

Happy freaking new year, everybody.

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It is, remarkably, the second Waldo-based game on the NES, following 1991′s Where’s Waldo?. The screen above is accompanied by a truly ridiculous piece of title music, which I’m happy to report you can listen to right here. Seriously, you should listen to this. It’s like a weird, mercifully brief Vanilla Ice ripoff.

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The gameplay of The Great Waldo Search is not unlike the experience you get with the books – there’s a densely populated scene, in which you need to find Waldo, a strangely dressed man who only ever hides from his problems. In each level, you also need to find a small, white scroll, since just finding Waldo is apparently a bit too easy. For instance, he’s pretty easy to spot in this scene:

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Each level scrolls left and right, so there’s a decent amount of space to look through, but the process is always pretty much the same. You can also find Woof, Waldo’s poorly named dog, which gives you access to a brief, uninteresting bonus level in which he flies around on a carpet:

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Each level looks a little bit different (though that bonus level is always the same), and also an expert mode, in which everything is a little more hidden. In general, though, this is pretty much the whole game. There isn’t much else to it, beyond exploring the weird things in each level, such as this guy who randomly has 3 arms. Unless that’s…oh no:

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I’ll never be the same after seeing this. While the game repeats the same basic tasks, it repeats them remarkably few times. There are just four basic levels, followed by a fifth bonus level, which changes up the formula a bit:

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Uggghhh, burn in hell, Waldo game. There’s still a scroll, but this time you have to find the Waldo who’s missing a shoe. There are also no extra time pickups or whatever, so you have to work quickly. Thankfully, I was up to the task:

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Oh, they were for a wizard. Neat. 

This was a slightly enjoyable thing to do for about 15 minutes, but barring a true, undying love for finding Waldo, that’s really all that you can realistically get from this. I feel bad for all the parents out there who paid like $50 for this. Even at its current market price (around $13, as it’s a little uncommon), it’s pretty hard to recommend.

For reasons I’ll never understand, The Great Waldo Search was re-made in 2009 as the Wii/DS game Where’s Waldo: The Fantastic Journey. I guess the need for shovelware will outlive us all. If you’re dying to play it, just know you have options.

I’m thrilled to have made it to 50 entries of this blog, and have no intention to stop anytime soon. Next week’s game is another weird NES game, albeit one that’s a lot more complex. Happy 2019!