Taboo: The Sixth Sense (NES) Playthrough
182A playthrough of Tradewest's 1989 simulation/software toy for the NES, Taboo: The Sixth Sense.
The readings are short, so in this video, I asked three questions. Then, at 14:30 I leave the title sequence run to show the different major arcana card illustrations. I wonder how Rare and Tradewest managed to get some of these images past Nintendo's censorship board.
Taboo: The Sixth Sense is not your average NES game. In fact, it's not a game at all. It's a digital tarot card reader that purports to be "your personal link to the future, your window into the unknown." According to the manual, "the future that TABOO sees is yours to reveal."
After you provide it your name, birthday, gender, and a question that you'd like some light shed on, Taboo will shuffle the deck and deal ten cards in a celtic cross spread.
Once the trippy light show finishes, Taboo will reveal the cards one-by-one and offer an interpretation of each. It'll also provide you with a set of "lucky numbers" if you feel inclined to use it as a lotto number generator.
And that's it. Taboo: The Sixth Sense is often misjudged and maligned by the internet's peanut gallery, but the people that claim it's a terrible game simply don't know what they're talking about. Comparing Taboo to your typical NES cartridge would be like comparing a ouija board to Monopoly - they're inherently different products with different aims.
It was marketed as a novelty aimed primarily at adults - the sort of thing you put on if you had a few friends over for drinks one evening - and to that end, it's pretty neat.
The card illustrations and the music do an excellent job of creating a "mystical" mood and it's easy to imagine a group of 20-somethings circa 1988 having a laugh as they stand around the living room TV debating the meaning of the cards being drawn.
If that sort of experience sounds appealing to you, you'll probably enjoy Taboo: The Sixth Sense.
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