Back to the Future Part III (Genesis) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
520A playthrough of Arena's 1991 license-based action game for the Sega Genesis, Back to the Future Part III.
Like Back to the Future Part II on the Master System, Part III began life as a computer game by Imageworks for a huge array of platforms, including console ports to both the Genesis and the 8-bit Master System.
Part III is a much better game than Part II, mainly because the controls are much better, but it's still left wanting a whole lot.
There are four stages, and each of the feature a different type of gameplay:
Stage 1 has Doc Brown chasing after Clara on horseback, hoping to prevent her from becoming ravine pizza. He has to avoid tomahawks, birds, bullets, boulders, and a single wayward hatbox in an action segment that scrolls way too fast to be much fun. It's nowhere near as hard as people claim it is, though. If you can pass the first speeder bike level in Battletoads, you can easily do this, but it requires a lot of brain numbing repetition as you commit large chunks of the level to memory.
Stage 2 has Marty impressing the gun salesman at the town social by shooting at targets with a cursor. It's simple and easy, buy did they really have to invert the Y-axis controls? I mean, come on!
Stage 3 has Marty then going over to the pie tin stand (remember the split-second reference to Frisbee in the movie?) to launch discus-turned-missiles at Mad Dog Tannen's men with a seriously cockeyed control scheme. And finally...
Stage 4 has Marty running across the train looking for Doc's homemade Presto Logs as he's assailed by railroad signposts, bandits, and neon clouds of exhaust. He also has to collect them in order - if you accidentally miss one, you have to backtrack for it before you can reach the end.
And all of this takes roughly ten minutes. Five if your really good. It's very light on any sort of substance, even for a computer game that cost far less than the full retail price this version originally sold for. And especially when you consider that this the console versions were somewhat cut down...ouch.
Those portraits are hilarious, though. Marty's face in the first one makes me think he just accidentally opened a Lemon Party link that someone floated in an IRC channel circa 2006, and my favorite bit had to be after Clara plunges to her death. The level restarts with Doc shouting, "Oh no Marty, there she goes again!" I laughed pretty hard at that.
Under most circumstances, this would be pretty dire, but it's far from the bottom of the Back to the Future game barrel. Not that that means much of anything.
This video includes two separate playthroughs. The first has been patched to fix the color palette related bug that makes the game's graphics display far darker than was intended. You can find the patch at https://greg-kennedy.com/wordpress/2019/11/12/back-to-the-future-part-iii-color-fix-patch/
The second playthrough, beginning at 9:34, shows the game in its original, unpatched form.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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