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Jeremy Parish
Jeremy Parish

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NES Works 146: Fester's Quest

It's the pumpkin spice latte of the YouTube world: Horror-themed commentary about old video games. In this case, the horror comes from the preposterous difficulty level of Fester's Quest. Like, what the actual hell, man? I used cheats to get to the end of this recording because I am An Old now, but even in my NES heyday of one-lifing Life Force and blitzling Battletoads, I could not have finished this game. Just unbelievable.

Still. Pretty weird and interesting little game. With a few tweaks and refinements, it honestly could have been an all-timer.

NES Works 146: Fester's Quest

Comments

Yeah, that's a good point about B&W sets back in the 80s. That'd be pretty rough indeed.

Nicholas A. Jalowick

Addams Family was a regular fixture of late afternoon weekday TV in my market when I was in elementary school, which is how I knew it, but by the time this came out I'm pretty sure it was only airing on weekends on some UHF channel. Certainly it had become scarce enough on the airwaves that this game left all of us bewildered at the time.

Jeremy Parish

Heck, we still had a black-and-white set in active use somewhere in our house in 1989.

Jeremy Parish

I really don't think we can dismiss the power of 60s TV repeats on the minds of Gen X kids. Even down here in Australia, Addams Family reruns in 1988 were running at 5pm before the news. And we would get a Gilligan's Island game later. What WAS stopping a Bewitched game from coming out, really? Even me, a 1991 born Millennial, was basically forced by the networks to watch Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie before Wheel of Fortune would come on

Rhys

Man, the whole "power up with blue, power down with red" system must have been terrible for kids with color blindness. A pity more developers don't take that disability into consideration when designing their games.

Nicholas A. Jalowick

Had it and beat it as a kid. My adult self needs turbo fire because the ol' thumbs just can't take the beating anymore. Agree with your sentiment - there's a lot of fun to be had but you have to get past the mind-boggling design choices they made.

Richard Beres

That's why Baby Jesus gave us VPNs

Jeremy Parish

My fucking clown shoes IT department has started blocking your videos for no discernible reason. This violates my civil rights.

Peter Bard

I didn't have Fester's Quest as a kid, but I assumed it was good because of the amount of coverage Nintendo Power gave it. Imagine my surprise when I finally played it!

Hugh Mckinney

I recall the Fester tie-in to be strange even at the time of the game's release, and a rental of it proved the gameplay to be impenetrable but with the amazing soundtrack I had come to expect from Sunsoft. This video explains a lot, thanks for the spooky retrospective.

Marcus Trapp

What were they think ?

Jennifer Dred


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