Game:

Time Zone (1982)

Category:

Let's Play

Duration: 45:33

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3

This wacky 1991 sidescrolling platformer sticks out for its goofy humor and clean, cartoony graphics. Time Zone features the player character's bizarre orbiting baseball cap as a weapon. I'm not aware of any other video game weapon quite like it.

Like so many other Famicom games, the story features the player character rescuing a damsel in distress from a bad guy, who in this case is a time-travelling mad scientist who can bring inanimate objects to life somehow. What does he want with a random little girl?

Time Zone is not very long, and not particularly difficult, though the game compels the player to restart the entire world for each game over. The villain is a shameless bootleg Dr. Wily who makes no sense. But there's a cute ending, flying snails, an evil cactus driving a train, and an English translation patch by KingMike, so how much do those problems matter? I love finding weird things like this, and when it comes to old Famicom games, not being terrible is basically all you can ask for, those offensive Native American drummer enemies in the wild west level notwithstanding.

A lot of folks seem to think Time Zone resembles MOTHER. That is true insofar as the player character is a boy with a red baseball cap who often battles inanimate objects, and later there are aliens. But Time Zone totally lacks the emotional core and involved story that make MOTHER distinctive.

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