Fester's Quest (NES) Playthrough [PAL]
291A playthrough of Sunsoft's 1990 license-based action game for the NES, Fester's Quest.
This video shows the PAL version of the game. You can see the original 1989 North American NTSC version here: • Fester's Quest (NES) Playthrough [NTSC]
On the surface, the NTSC and PAL versions of Fester's Quest appear similar, but a couple of key changes made for the PAL release make for a very different experience.
Sunsoft put a fair amount of effort into optimizing the game for the 50Hz PAL standard. In the NES/SNES era, PAL games often had huge black screen borders and ran much slower than their NTSC counterparts, but that was not the case with Fester's Quest. The PAL version's image fills the screen (though with some garbage at the top and bottom edges that's not hidden in the overscan area), it runs at the same speed, and the music (including the digitized samples, most of the time) plays at the correct pitch.
But they didn't stop there. The core gameplay was tweaked: Fester's gun is now more powerful, and his shots travel through walls and obstacles. These two changes have a huge impact on the game's flow and difficulty balance, turning what was once a reasonably challenging game into a walk in the park. With an auto-fire controller, you can casually stroll through most areas without ever taking a hit, and the bosses can be torn through like a wet square of single-ply toilet paper.
There's also a new snail enemy that turns into a slime puddle, which I thought was a fairly strange thing to include, and you get a couple more seconds of echoing explosion noises when you kill a boss.
If you were someone who found the NTSC version impossibly difficult, you'll likely love the PAL version. If you enjoyed the challenge posed by the NTSC version, you'll probably dismiss the PAL version as an abomination that completely destroys the integrity of the gameplay.
I love Fester's Quest, and while I can't say that this is my preferred way to play it, I think it's nice that there's a version that makes it more accessible to those who prefer frictionless gaming.
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