Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Platform: NES
Published by Seta
Review by Charlie Reneke

Adventures of Tom Sawyer is pretty standard NES 3rd party platform stuff. The production values are slightly better then average but the play control is busted. And man, Seta couldn’t have picked a license that children would care less about if they tried. A Mr. Rodgers game would have gone over better.

Graphics

Tom Sawyer features bright and colorful graphics stacked on top of static backgrounds. Actually, the first level looks really bad, until you get to the boss. Further levels at least make the game look like some effort was spent producing it.

Rating: ***

Sound

Tom Sawyer has a few different songs, none of which are particularly catchy, but nothing too bad either. The sound effects all pretty much suck, especially the ‘duhdudduh’ sound you hear when you die. And considering how often that happens, you’ll want to cut your ears off, it’ll grate on you that much.

Rating: **1/4

Play Control

This is where the game starts to fall apart. Tom jumps like he has a bag of sand tied to his feet. Although there’s not too many big gaps to jump over, you’ll occasionally want to jump over enemies and the various shit they shoot at you. Good luck with that. You launch rocks at enemies with the B button, but are given pretty much no control over what angle they fly at. They just kind of arc in at the enemies. If you have an NES Advantage, your best bet is just crank up the turbo and never let go of the B button. Except when you want to turn around, and even then sometimes the game just doesn’t want to make it easy for Tom to face the other direction. More problems are found in the overhead shooter section of the game. Yes, they actually put a poor attempt at doing Capcom’s 1942 in a Tom Sawyer game. In this case, you’re river-rafting down the Mississippi trying to avoid deadly frogs and stuff. Tom has to jump here too, and suddenly the jump controls have become ultra-floaty, and you can actually shoot the raft out from underneath you while attempting jumps. All complaints aside, Adventures of Tom Sawyer is far from the worst controlling game I’ve played, but it’s still broken.

Rating: *

Game Play

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is one of those classic old school games where every type of animal is out to kill you and if one thing hits you, you explode into a cloud of dust and die. You can fight back by throwing rocks at things. As previously stated, you throw Rocks in an arching manner, which is good because most of the enemies want to swoop in from above at you. So naturally, Seta decided that there should be an upgrade to your weapon, a slingshot. If you have the slingshot, your rocks fly in a straight line. Sounds good in theory but in practice it’s actually worthless because the rocks only fly in front of you. So taking care of those enemies that swoop in at you is actually harder when you have the ‘better weapon.’ It’s not like having the slingshot makes your rocks more powerful. Most of the enemies are killed with one shot anyway. And those that are not don’t see to die any faster when you have the slingshot.
Enemies also drop either “T” blocks of “Skull” blocks. If you gather twenty T blocks, you get a free life. If you pick up a skull block, you lose ten of the Ts. Yep. As previously mentioned, Tom jumps like he’s weighed down by cinderblocks so avoiding those skulls becomes a huge pain in the ass. So as to make the game as much like Super Mario Bros as possible, enemies also occasionally drop a heart block, which acts like a star-man. You flash, the ‘you’re super’ music plays and any enemy Tom touches dies. You’re bound to find at least one heart block a level, usually near the end.

Most of the levels are side-scrollers, with one exception being the second level, the 1942 rip-off mentioned previously. If you’re a fan of cheap deaths, this is the game for you. Enemies who move faster then the human eye can blink swoop in at you from out of nowhere, leading to you exploding in a tiny cloud of dust. Add this with the crappy controls and you’re looking at one hard game.

Rating: *

Legacy

What legacy? The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is all but forgotten today. And hopefully it doesn’t find it’s way onto the Virtual Console and ruin 500 perfectly good Wii Points.

Rating: DUD

Bottom Line: There’s really not a whole lot to love with the Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Besides some nice graphics (especially the boss fights), the game feels unfinished. The broken controls and super-steep difficulty will make sure that most people don’t play past the second level.

Overall Rating: *