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Well well well! It's not every day that we manage to get our
hands on a genuine unreleased NES game. First off, thanks go out to
TheRedEye for getting this game released for all
of us to play. Through some legwork, TheRedEye came into contact with the original programmer
of this game, Chris Shrigley, who has also done Magician and James Bond Jr. for the NES, as well as
many 16-bit titles for various systems. At the time that this game was being programmed, Mr. Shrigley
was working for Gremlin Interactive, who had produced various ports of this game for several different
platforms. In late 1991, he left Gremlin Interactive, and despite all the work done on this game,
for unknown reasons it was never finished - and as far as I can tell, was never even announced for
the NES. However, Mr. Shrigley still had the original source code for the game. After a quick
compile and having an iNES header slapped onto it, thanks to Mr. Shrigley's generousaty, we all now
have a brand new NES game to play!
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Now, I'm sure at least most of the population of the emulation
community has at least dipped into the realm of pen-and-paper role playing games at least
once in their lives. This game is based off of the board game role playing game that was
rather popular among us geeks in the early Nineties. This particular version of the game, according
to Chris Shrigley, is based of the Atari 800 version of
the game. At the present time, I've not been able to track down a copy of the Atari 800
version, so I can't compare the two directly, but for a NES game, this one is pretty
advanced - even in the pre-release condition that it is currently in.
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The prototype was dated October 17th, 1991 - well before the NES
met its end in 1994. The game seems to be pretty far along in development - most of the
gameplay elements are present and the graphics seem pretty polished. However, this game is
maybe 65% completed at the most. There are some serious bugs that hamper gameplay that would
have needed to be ironed out before this game hit store shelves. You can head on over to
Page Two of this review for gameplay instructions as well as details on the bugs that plague
this otherwise decent game.
Continue to Page 2!
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This one could have been a contender. While the game may not
have appealed to the general public at large, the game is rather interesting and the gameplay
has the potential to have been great fun. The one thing that was not revealed about this
game is the reason that development was halted... While it could have been any of a large
number of factors, I'm going to have to speculate that the lackluster sales of the HeroQuest
board game and other computer ports could have led to the termination of this one. At least
we get to play it now!
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