“Friday Old Games” is a series of articles in which we review a game from the older generations of consoles, share why we picked it, and whether or not it holds up with time.

Rather than releasing a trilogy of Indiana Jones games like they did with Star Wars, Lucasarts and Factor 5 teamed up to make one game that spanned all three films. In Indiana Jones’ Greatest Adventures, you take on the roll of everyone’s favorite 1940′s action-serial throwback, Dr. Henry “Indiana” Jones, JR.

The core of Greatest Adventures is an action-platformer. You start each level with a single grenade and your fists. I’m not really sure why you start without your whip, because almost every level and checkpoint immediately gives it to you. It seemed like an unnecessary step. Maybe they figured kids love collection crap in games. You occasionally get a gun as well, but I found the whip to be a much more effective weapon. Not only does it do more damage, but there are special points throughout the game where you need it to swing across chasms that are otherwise to wide to jump.

The game starts you in Raiders of the Lost Ark, so after an initial platforming stage, there is the obligatory “running from the boulder” level. At least in GA you are Indiana Jones running from the boulder and not just some other character emulating this famous movie scene.

The levels provide a good mix of combat, exploration, and platforming. To keep things more interesting, they even throw you a few curveballs. On the first stage of Doom, there are cross-hairs chasing you down. As you progress through the level, you have to also hide behind tables and chairs to avoid being shot by the gangsters off-screen. In the Catacombs of Venice scene in Crusade, you have to quickly progress and get to safe areas where you can duck out of the way of giant walls of flame. These are both pretty good references to the films, abstracted into a video game context. I just think they would have been better had they not been one-hit kills.

There are even a few Mode 7 “vehicle” stages to change things up. Out of the game’s twenty-eight stages, there are only three of these, all of which play differently: the snow level in Temple of Doom where they ride down the mountain on a raft, the mine-cart, and the biplane from Last Crusade. The rafting level is pretty easy. You just have to dodge the trees and remember to jump when you see a cliff.

In the mine-cart, you control a cross-hair. Your job is to shoot the junk on the track that is in your way, the switches to make sure you don’t go down a closed or broken path, and the other guys shooting at you. This one can get really frustrating.

Then there is the biplane. This requires you to shoot down twenty enemy planes (a lot like the Mode 7 levels in Star Wars). The biggest problem with this one is how non-maneuverable your plane is vs. how much damage the enemies can do to you. It is a lot.

As with all video games based on movies, the bosses also have a strange level of abstraction to them. Major Arnold Toht jumps around like a mad man throwing Molotov cocktails in Marion’s bar while it is engulfed in flames. Belloq, dressed as one of the Jewish priests, shoots ghosts at you from the Ark of the Covenant while jumping around like a mad man.

Perhaps strangest of all is the final boss, Donovan. After drinking from the wrong grail he turns into a crazy skeleton creature, which proceeds to jump around like a mad man.

The sprite work in this game is amazing. Factor 5 did a great job on the SNES with bringing all of the exotic locales from the movie to life. They also did some great work with the cinematics. The still frames straight from the movies and digitized into the game came out looking great.

The sprite animation is top notch on all the major characters. They even threw in some fun little touches, like the monkeys in Cairo that throw “bad dates” at you.

The score comes straight from the films, recreated fantastically into 16-bit sound. They even threw in a few voice samples, like Sean Connery’s famous “I’ve lost him” quote on the Game Over screen.

Why did I pick this game?

I originally intended to include this along with our retrospective of the Super Star Wars games, but ran out of time.

LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues released this week and Greatest Adventures came out for virtual console (If you are interested in picking up a copy on VC, it will set you back 800 Wii Points). It only seemed appropriate to revisit the game now that we have a weekly segment.

While the game’s lack of a debug mode made me remember it less fondly than the Star Wars games, it is still one of those games of the 90′s we would play over and over again.

How does it hold up?

I was surprised to find that the platforming was tighter than in any of the Star Wars games. The levels were, on the whole, more forgiving (except the Mode 7 ones) and you don’t take damage from enemies you just killed exploding in your face.

Unlike the Star Wars games, this one is actually a little better than I remember it. It is still not one of the great classics by SNES standards, but I did have fun with it. There were some frustrating sections, like getting lost in the platforming section in the “Shanghai Streets” stage or when knife throwers in The Last Crusade would be across a jump and knock me into a pit over and over. This was no where near Ninja Gaiden levels of frustration, mind you, so I was able to look past those and enjoy the ride.

It does make the small list of Indiana Jones games that are actually fun and is worth checking out for that fact alone.

Tags: factor 5, Friday Old Games, Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures, licensed games, Lucasarts, Mode 7, platformer, SNES

This entry was posted on Friday, November 20th, 2009 at 5:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.