|
THE 3D BATTLES OF WORLD RUNNER
|
7.0 out of 10
| |
|
|
|
|
| Before Squaresoft became a juggernaut in the video game industry with its top-notch RPG games, it was a company struggling to stay afloat making games of various kinds. Rad Racer is probably the most famous and critically acclaimed of the pre-Final Fantasy games, but the 3D Battles of World Runner deserves some recognition in its own right. It’s a simplistic, yet fun, platforming game that is pretty easy at first, but can get frustratingly difficult by the end.
The concept of the game is pretty simple; move left to right on a 2d plane while the game automatically moves you forward in a three-dimensional world. Along the way, you’ll be avoiding obstacles and enemies while picking up power-ups when you see the opportunity to grab ‘em. At first, the levels are pretty easy to navigate and aside from learning how to time your jumps, most folks won’t have many problems. However, by the end of the game, the speed bumps up, jumps become a little more difficult to time, and enemies just coat the levels in almost overwhelming quantities. The game isn’t impossible to defeat, though. Almost everything in the levels seem to be patterned, so as long as you take the time to learn the pattern of each level, you’ll have a much easier time making it to the end...Which almost gives it that Contra feel in later levels where it feels impossible, but once you start to learn the pattern, you begin to feel like you can make some progress. |
 |
 
|
Within each level are pillars. Unlike most objects in the game, you actually WANT to bump into these things. Bumping into the pillars will reveal a variety of objects like a 1-up heart, a potion that allows you to get hit once without dying, or rockets that you can fire at the enemy. Sometimes, a mushroom will pop out, in which case, you should avoid them like the plague...Unless you’ve got the effects of the potion on you, it’s instant death. There are also stars to collect and occasionally you’ll come across a balloon that’ll take you to a sub-world of the level you’re on that is devoid of enemies and loaded with stars and pillars. Each stage also has four levels within it, and when you reach the end of the fourth level, you’ll find yourself with a battle against the stage boss. The first boss goes down easily...But they gradually get harder and by the time you fight the main boss, you’ll have to beat it six times in a row before it finally dies all while trying to destroy it before the time limit bar at the bottom of the screen disappears.
The controls are pretty solid. When you want to move, you’ll move. The B button is used to jump and the longer you hold the button down, the farther and higher your character will jump. Pushing the down button will slow you down, which can be helpful if you’ve mis-timed a jump and hope to save yourself by slowing things down a bit. The A button is used for attacking both when you discover a missile to use within a pillar and when you reach the end-level bosses. There are also neat skills and tricks to learn and discover in the game, like how to bounce atop fire pillar to fire pillar to get across gaps too large to jump across or using the hands in later levels that usually harm your progress to help stop a jump that is going way too far in its tracks, allowing you to land to safety. The controls are tight enough to make these little tricks fairly easy to learn with a little practice. Also, if you hit the Select button during a level, the game switches to 3D mode, allowing you to slap on a pair of 3D glasses and enjoy the novelty. |
| Graphically, the game looks alright. It’s nothing spectacular to look at, really. The backgrounds look pretty neat and all, but none of the enemies are particularly interesting looking...Not even the bosses, who are all essentially the same aside from their heads and color of their bodies. The animation of the background is smooth at times, but at other times it can seem a bit choppy...But overall, it’s passable. Whatever the game lacks in graphical power, it makes up for in the audio department. The 3D Battles of World Runner has some pretty neat music and it’s easy to see why; the soundtrack was composed by Nobuo Uematsu of Final Fantasy fame. The audio is of good quality and the music itself, as I previously stated, is pretty nice to listen to. The only downside is that there’s only one song that plays over and over in the whole game. The only time you’ll hear a different song is during a boss fight or after beating the game.
Overall, The 3D Battles of World Runner is a pretty good NES game, it’s got some flaws like boring graphics, repetitive (although pretty nice) audio, and somewhat repetitive gameplay since the stages are all the same, just with different obstacles and enemies in each stage. However, it makes up for it for just plain being fun. The difficulty constantly increases to seemingly near-impossible levels, and if you manage to beat the game, you’re rewarded with a code to play the game on an even harder difficulty level, which helps add a bit of replay value to it. There’s the nice little gimmick option of being able to play the game with 3D glasses, too, which can almost be considered a separate mode since playing it that way is entirely optional and offers a slightly different experience. In the end, this game will likely never be considered a classic, but it’s still fun enough to pull out and enjoy today. It’s a fun platformer, but despite its 3D graphics, it’s not likely to ‘pop out’ amongst other, more solid titles in the NES library. - Ape |
 
|
|
| | |
1987