Time Lord (NES) Playthrough
192A playthrough of Milton Bradley's 1990 action game for the NES, Time Lord.
In 2999, an alien race attacked Earth using their recently developed time travel technology. To fight back, human scientists have sent you - the Time Lord, a dimension-leaping privateer - into the past, as well as a selection of modern weapons. Your mission is to find and collect the time orbs that have been stashed across four historical periods, and to defeat the enemy leaders. The clock in your time is always ticking, and you have exactly one year to get the job done. If you haven't succeeded by January 1, 3000, it's curtains for humanity.
As a puzzle-heavy, 2.5D platformer/beat 'em up, Time Lord was one of Rare's many gameplay experiments on the NES. Each time period is host to five orbs that are revealed once you've performed specific actions, including things jumping in a particular spot, killing groups of enemies, and collecting bunches of an unspecified item.
It's a challenging game. Finding the orbs takes experimentation and patience, and the combat demands a lot of dexterity and a good sense of timing. The controls are awkward at first, but they feel pretty good once you've had some time to acclimate. You attack with a light press of the B button, and holding the button down puts you in a defensive stance. Since you don't take damage whenever you're attacking or guarding, the key to winning is to find a rhythm that balances offense with defense.
I enjoyed the process of working out how to get the orbs, the fighting is fast-paced without being mindless, and I thought that the premise, which made me think of the game as an odd mix of Time Cop and Star Trek Enterprise, was a neat way to diversify the selection of stages. The music was also great throughout. I think that the obtuse puzzle design and the general lack of meaningful feedback at some points might prove frustrating to some, but I liked it quite a bit.
It may barely last twenty minutes once you know it well, but it will take you many, many hours to get to that point. If you want an easy game, you'll hate this with a passion. However, if you enjoy games that are unabashedly "Nintendo hard", you'll enjoy Time Lord.
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