Time Lord (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
814A playthrough of Milton Bradley's 1990 NES game, Time Lord.
Time Lord is a fantastic 2.5D platformer that gets derided quite a bit for its difficulty level, and it's a fair complaint. This is in no way a game for "casual" players. I always thought it was fun running around figuring out the puzzles to get the orbs and weapons - it reminds me in many ways of the opening level of Bart vs. the Space Mutants but with much better controls. The game looks great, with all sorts of fun tricks with perspective, detailed sprites, huge boss characters, a really nice use of color, and there is a huge variety in the stage designs thanks to the plot setup. The soundtrack is also pretty epic (did you expect any different from a Rare title?), and probably the best single feature in the game. The second stage music (the old English castle) is easily one of my all-time favorite tunes on the NES. I really need to stop playing Rare games before my man crush on David Wise progresses any further... Hahaha, who am I kidding? How could anyone refuse one of England's most prolific homegrown NES chiptune prodigies?
The action sequences alone will make your hands hurt for how much stuff the game throws at you - thankfully, you are completely invincible during your attack animation, and you won't get very far without exploiting this as much as humanly possible. This is especially true during the boss fights - they have a ton of health, and can kill you in just a couple of hits unless you are careful with the timing of attacks. However, the action isn't the most taxing part of the game: each stage requires that you collect the five orbs to move on, and many of them have tricks that you have to figure out to reach them. Sometimes they'll be in plain sight, hidden behind a building, or remain out of reach until you've killed a predetermined number of enemies. Other times, you'll have to hit them in order to make your character jump higher to reach them, to draw them toward you, or to stun their movement so you can swoop in and catch them. The entire game also runs on a global timer - if the date at the bottom of the screen reaches January 1, 3000, it's instant Game Over. I included a quick clip of what that looks like at the very end of the video.
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 completely.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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