The masked axe-slinger: Friday the 13th | NES Works 113
1,321A day early in celebration of the season, it's... the worst NES game ever!
...is what I'd say if that weren't a wildly off-base claim. Friday the 13th by Atlus and LJN certainly isn't a masterpiece, but like most of LJN's Japan-developed early releases, it attempts to do a whole lot of interesting things with a film license instead of just barfing out some quick, easy, low-effort churn. That Friday the 13th fails to deliver on pretty much all of these ambitions almost doesn't matter, because there are some forward-thinking ideas here that would become baked into the fabric of the medium years later, once other developers figured out how to make them good.
Friday the 13th sucks, but it sucks with style. And that's pretty cool.
Production notes:
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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 720 with xRGB Mini Framemeister.