Epic Default Productions

I have gone on a classic binge recently, and have decided to write about my misadventures in retro gaming.  First on the list:

Fester’s Quest is a top down free-roaming shooter, with occasional 3D elements, starring Uncle Fester. I loved this game as a child and decided, since I never could beat it then, even with a hyper controller, that it was definitely time for me to do so.  This was a bad judgment call on my part.  Fester’s Quest, like many NES games, is hard.  Very hard.  You start out on the street trying to stop an alien invasion.  Along the way you meet many frogs, bugs, and other alien monsters that seem to have your death as a top priority.  In your adventure, you pick up power ups for your gun, light bulbs for lighting the sewers (if you don’t know where the light bulbs get their power, go watch old Addams Family reruns), keys to unlock the houses where the rest of the family is (why they don’t open the doors, I’ll never know) and money to buy life nourishing hot dogs.  Unlike the free-roaming games of today, this game is rather limited in its expansive level design, mostly due to the limitations of the NES.  You only get a small town, filled with enemies, to roam around in.  The top-down levels are not difficult to master, since they tend towards the linear and the enemies are not terribly difficult to defeat if you follow their patterns of movement.  Despite the difficulty of the game and the system limitations place upon it, Fester’s Quest is a rather fun game to play around in.

The difficulty in the game comes from two parts.  The 3D elements of the game are simply mazes inside buildings with many, many twists and turns.  Unless you know exactly where you are going, it is very easy to get lost and end up back where you started.  To make matters worse, the later parts of the game have more difficult 3D mazes, meaning you can get lost for hours in these buildings with no way to tell which way is out.  These are the times in which you remember why having a notebook and pencil with you at all times while playing classic games was important.  Adding onto that, the final stage is a top down, expansive maze filled with enemies bent on your destruction.  While those areas are difficult, the most challenging parts of the game have to be the bosses.  It is not that they are super hard to defeat; more that they take an incredible amount of hits to destroy.  In some cases, you will spend most of the time in a level shooting the boss than you will actually navigating that same level.  The bosses all have fairly simple patterns that you can follow, and after 5 minutes or so of shooting these bad guys, you will defeat them, provided you don’t die.  Did I mention your starting health bar is only 2 slots, can get only upgraded once, and if you die, you start back at the beginning of the game?  Oh yeah, there’s that too.

All in all, Sunsoft made a fun game to play around with, but you will drive yourself crazy trying to beat it.  Especially if you do not have a hyper or turbo controller to use, since the gun is a one push, one shot weapon, and no enemy takes less than 3 shots to kill.  For anyone who is a fan of the Addams Family, old difficult NES games, or just a fun game to play around with but probably never beat, I highly recommend this game.  I really enjoyed picking it up again, and probably will once again, just because it is fun to slaughter the alien invasion.