Holy crap, I’ve now done 20 of these! Thanks to everyone who has read one or more of these articles this year. Now to sit back, relax, and check out what certainly not-terrible game I get to play this week.
Damn. Alright, whatever.
Before we get into this week’s game, we should talk a bit about its creator, LJN – a company so dumb and terrible that their logo will make you genuinely hate rainbows:
God, what a dumb looking rainbow. Founded in the 1970s as a toy company, LJN began publishing video games in the mid-80s after being sold to electronics conglomerate, MCA, and then sold again to the larger publisher Acclaim. They’re responsible for a *ton* of the really bad NES games based on licensed properties, including X-Men, Back to the Future, and a handful of bad wrestling games.
All of that is pretty bad, of course, but it actually gets much worse – during this time, LJN also released a line of toy water guns called Entertech, which were designed to resemble real guns. You’ll never guess how that turned out.
There have been numerous awful video game companies over the years, but LJN is probably the only one who also got a bunch of kids killed. Keep your chin up, Color Dreams!
Anyway, I guess I’m supposed to be reviewing a game in this post, so this week’s game is LJN’s Friday the 13th – an adaptation of the film of the same name. Its reputation is not great – it’s often cited as one of the worst game in the NES library, though I’d not tried it out myself before this week. For better or worse, it was not what I expected.
You play as one of a group of camp counselors, who have varying strengths and weaknesses. You’ll need to make your way around Camp Crystal Lake, with the help of the map above in pursuit of the killer Jason Voorhees. You can collect weapon upgrades and other items to help you in your quest to do this. You can switch between the counselors fairly easily if the situation calls for it, which is a feature not often seen in 8-bit games.
Every once in a while, a countdown will appear on the screen indicating Jason is getting close to killing someone. His location will appear on the map if you want to try and fight him, but you can also just ignore him and carry on with wandering about looking for weapons or the like. Any time the clock runs out, Jason kills either one of the counselors you aren’t using, or generic “children” as noted in the game’s GUI. If you run out of either, the game ends.
You’ll also occasionally run into Jason himself and have no choice but to fight him. As you’d expect, he’s a pretty big pain, and you can’t just run from him. I found that some of the counselors’ weaknesses made them virtually useless against Jason (and elsewhere, really).
There are a few different environments to navigate, including the inside of cabins, forests, caves, and Crystal Lake itself. Throughout the game there are other enemies to deal with as well, including noted Friday the 13th mainstays like wolves and birds. The strongest weapon, a torch, can be acquired by painstakingly lighting a bunch of fireplaces, though the game can be beaten without doing any of that – another unusual and interesting characteristic for an NES game to have.
Despite the unique aspects of Friday the 13th, there are a number of bad things, too. As previously mentioned, a few of the playable characters are just awful. The forest and cave environments are very difficult to navigate due to their screens all being similar and the map not offering any hints when inside them. That sort of variety is welcome, in some sense, but when at comes at the expense of enjoyability, it’s hard to be happy about it.
I honestly really like the concept behind this game – it aims to be something different from the standard NES fare, it mixes a few types of gameplay together, and it has a decent amount of tension. The execution doesn’t quite work, though – despite the cool ideas, it just isn’t that great. Friday the 13th is a game I enjoyed a bit more than I probably should – it’s not all that good, it probably deserves a bit more credit than it gets. If you’re into the film franchise or want to check out something weird, you could do worse than this.
LJN managed to hang on for over a decade making more of the same licensed shovelware until finally folding in 1995. For some reason, Acclaim slapped the company’s name and logo on the Dreamcast racing game, Spirit of Speed 1937, despite the company being gone for years (spoiler alert: it’s also terrible). That was, thankfully, the last anyone has heard of them.
Next week’s game is on a console I’ve surprisingly yet to play for Retro Roulette, and covers a series I’ve always been skeptical of, despite a lot of solid reviews. I look forward to telling you all about it.