Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure (Lynx) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
88A plaything of Atari's 1991 license-based adventure game for the Atari Lynx, Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure.
I've always loved the Bill & Ted movies, but the games were hit-and-miss. The NES version was utter garbage, and the PC graphic adventure wasn't much better. The Gameboy game was a reasonably good title, but this game - the least known of the group on the least popular platform to receive a Bill & Ted game, takes home the dubious honor of being the best of the bunch.
That is not to say that it was by any means a classic, must-play title, but it was a good, albeit extremely difficult, adventure on a machine that really needed quality software. It fit the bill nicely, no pun intended.
Based more on the cartoon than the movies, this one features the stoner pair (you can play choose which in 1P mode, or have both played via the ComLynx cable with 2P) chasing after the historical princesses who have been kidnapped by Death. Scouring ancient Egypt, Rome, Europe (? apparently Rome isn't included as part of Europe), the Wild West, and future San Dimas, which for some reason now resembles Hell and is covered with lava.
Each period has certain tasks to fulfill as the behest of personages of (questionably) historical significance, and in order to jump to the next time or place, you have to find music notes and phone book pages, as well as address any potential time paradoxes that might happen as a result of your meddling.
NPCs do wander around and can be spoken to: most just say canned phrases, but some do give hints on accomplishing your objectives. The puzzles are well-done, but dear God. Could they have made them any more obtuse? I can honestly say it took me years to beat this one.
The only major letdown I found that made me want to completely hate this game was the ending "puzzle against death, which is little more than a massive room of sinking tiles that you have to run back-and-forth across over and over without getting killed. If you do it in the wrong order, you get stuck at a dead-end, and even if you do get it right, get ready to throw the Lynx when you have to redo,ten minutes of work because you accidentally mistimed a single step by a fraction of a second.
That, and I have to ask - especially in a game that centers the future's biggest band that fixes the world as we know it - how the hell did they get the graphics for the notes wrong? The icon is a pair of eighth notes. Simple, right? Then why are they backwards? Small gripe, but it annoyed me to no end.
The ending notwithstanding, this is a quality bit of Lynx soft. You can go at it two players with a link cable, the graphics are detailed and colorful (and the sprite scaling bits look really cool), and the music is about as good as any that the Pokey ever produced. I enjoyed it, and I think any other die-hard fans of the film will too as long as they can put the rancid NES title out of mind when trying it out!
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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