A Nightmare on Elm Street (NES) Playthrough
457A playthrough of LJN's 1990 license-based action game for the NES, A Nightmare on Elm Street.
A Nightmare on Elm Street, developed by Rare and released a year after A Nightmare on Elm Street 5: The Dream Child's theatrical debut, was one of just two video games to ever be based on New Line Cinema's popular slasher series.
Freddy Krueger, a child molester who was burned to death by the parents of his victims, has once again returned from beyond the grave to haunt the dreams of a group of local teenagers. This NES platformer places you (and up to three friends if played with a multitap) in the shoes of one of these teens who have decided to fight back.
You explore several places along Elm Street - three random houses, a junk yard, a cemetery, and Freddy's own dilapidated abode - with the goal of gathering up all of Freddy's bones and burning them in the high school's furnace.
In each location, you'll search for the bones as you fight through throngs of skeletons, spiders, bats, and zombies, and you have to be quick. Coffee can only stave off sleep for so long, and if your energy gauge runs out, you'll find yourself being pulled into the Dream World.
In the Dream World, you can draw on the powers of the Dream Warriors. There's the acrobat, an agile javelin-chucker; the necromancer, a hovering magic-slinger; and the Shadow Warrior, a ninja armed with shuriken and a mean jump kick. These help to even up the odds, but if you hear the faint notes of "1, 2, Freddy's coming for you" creeping into the music, you'd best scramble to find a ghetto blaster to jar yourself back awake. If you remain asleep for too long, the screen will begin to dramatically flash "FREDDY'S COMING!" and the boogeyman will appear.
The linear nature of the stage design makes finding the bones easy, but the enemies - always eager to trap you in a corner or to knock you into a pit - put up a solid challenge in the moment, as do the bosses found at the end of each area. You take a few cheap hits from the constantly respawning flying enemies, but since extra lives are plentiful and you instantly reappear on the spot when you die, it's not too difficult to brute force your way through the entire game after a couple of tries.
The only real let-down is in the fights with Freddy himself. The game does a nice job building up to them, but Freddy turns out to be a total push-over. He's probably the easiest boss in the game, and this blunts the impact of his appearances after the first couple times.
Besides that, though, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a fun time with some good graphics and controls and an excellent soundtrack, and the casual-friendly gameplay lends itself well to the simultaneous four-player co-op mode.
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