Adventure Island: The Beginning (Wii) Playthrough
159A playthrough of Hudson Soft's 2009 platformer for the Nintendo Wii, Adventure Island: The Beginning.
In the years leading up to Konami's corporate takeover, Hudson Soft had focused a lot of their effort on giving 3D facelifts to popular franchises that the company had established back in the 1980s. When they weren't producing Mario Party games, they were updating classics like Bonk, Lode Runner, Star Soldier, and Adventure Island.
Like the Adventure Island game that appeared on the Gamecube and PS2 (https://youtu.be/UxU_MlOBDD8), the Wiiware-exclusive Adventure Island: New Beginnings (not to be confused with New Adventure Island on the TurboGrafx-16) wasn't a remake. New Beginnings is a new installment that appropriates elements in equal parts from both Adventure Island (https://youtu.be/vL3urZJBkQM) and New Adventure Island (https://youtu.be/vbAWLo5FIcs) while also adding in a few new additions of its own.
Tina has been kidnapped yet again, and Master Higgins, everyone's favorite overweight islander action hero, has to save her. The game play will instantly feel familiar to anyone that has played an Adventure Island game from the 8 or 16-bit era. You run through each stage avoiding things like frogs, foxes, snakes, and leaping octopuses, trying to reach the goal ahead of the timer.
The game features a hub world that connects each of the stages, as well an all-new store that allows Higgins to trade golden melons for improved weapons and platforming abilities. He can now learn to float, double jump, and hang from ledges, and he'll have to use all of these abilities in order to collect the 92 melons strewn throughout the action stages. The final eight melons are given as prizes in the motion-controlled mini-games.
The new graphics are nicely done. They're not as lavishly detailed as the previous game's, but they're less muddy and better defined, resulting in a game that's far easier to play. The music is good too, though I did find myself missing some of the more classic themes from the series.
The changes do a fine job of updating the core Adventure Island mechanics, though they do make the game substantially easier than the earlier titles in the series. With only twenty main stages, it's a much shorter game than you might expect, and all of the padding (the item collecting, feats, and especially the minigames) hurts the package more than it helps.
But overall, taking into account that this sold for $9 at release and was bound by the WiiWare service's limit of forty megabytes, it's a good effort. It's another fun retro throwback that will likely appeal to longtime fans. It never quite lives up to the legacy that it's derived from, but I thoroughly enjoyed it when it came out, and it's still an entertaining diversion all these years later.
No cheats were used in the recording of the main game. I did, however, use autofire to hit the 16 shots per second feat in the Rapid Fire Ruins minigame.