The Goonies

Movie to video game adaptations have always been a hit or miss affair, finding a good one can be as hard as finding buried treasure, but keep at it long enough and eventually you'll find it. This game is one of my favorate movie to video game adaptations and one of my favorate video games of all time.

"The Goonies" is one of my favorate films of all time so playing an actually good video game based on it was a dream come true for me. Like any good video game adaptaion it does some of it's own thing while at the same time remains faithful to the source materal.

The graphics are soild, really like the level designs of the caverns. Even the music is good which is basically the theme song to the film. And the gameplay is soild where your playing as Mikey or any other Goonie you can pretend to be or just pretend it's yourself. It's the basic running forward and back, a kick for attack. Enemy variety is decent as you are dealing with ghost pirates, walking skeletons, bats, Fratelis you can only stun or if possible kill if you can get them close enough to a pit, and of course those giant mutant rats which is strange since they were never a factor in the film but hey it's a video game it's better than no adversaries. You get a few power ups like a bomb to blow doors or even kill some enemies that come your way, a pirate cross which gives you momentary invinsibility, but the best power up is the sling shot which is cool as it's a strong weapon; you can dispatch certain enimes that take more than one hit or where a mere kick is useless.

However what makes this game standout is in it's non linar gameplay within it's linar format. It was a rare concept at the time, there weren't many games that used this kind of format except for "Motsuma's Revenge" for the Coleco Vision and "Pitfall 2" for Atari 2600. This game wasn't just the simple run to point A and B but one where you really needed to explore inbetween both points in order to get to B; this was also true to the film itself as it was about a group of kids exploring to get to the treasure.

This game you really needed to explore and memorize the pathways. I really like how in each section of the caverns it was always something totally different, you never really knew what you were going to run into or find. To advance to the next level you have to find three keys, hidden behind skull faced doors. However it's not that simple as each of the doors are place in all different places of the caverns and each door doesn't always contain a key sometimes a life portion or something else. Also the clock is ticking so don't take too much time exploring.

Those things to me just made the game all the more fun and just really made me feel like one of the Goonies or brought out the explorer/adventurer inside me; whenever I played though the game I wanted to know what's up ahead, what's up or down that latter, or what's behind that door.

It's true the only bad thing is this game has no continues, but that's because the game really isn't that long and is actually a bit easy ( well may'be not that easy) once you figured out all the right places to go. Also you can get extra lives sometimes so your pretty much covered.

Overall, if your a fan of the movie or even of platform action/non linar games then this game is a treasure worth digging up.

Rating: 4 stars