Now-a-days, games receive a lot of hype.
You’ll see commercials, blogs and videos online, all adding to the anticipation of
a game fans are looking forward to.
Backtrack 20 years with me, and you rarely had that at all.
In fact, besides hearing about a good game from a friend, or visiting a rental store,
the only way I remember knowing about games coming out was from Nintendo Power.
That’s where I saw this game and thought, “hey looks pretty cool, I think I’ll check
that out”....
Oh man...
it’s Robin Hood: Princes of Thieves for the Nintendo Entertainment System.
Released in 1991 by Virgin Games, this is an adaptation of the movie by the same title,
another thing very common to do today, make a game based off of a popular movie.
Now while Robin Hood didn’t live up to it’s hype in my opinion, it does fall victim to
the stereotype of games based on movies not being all that great.
So you start off in prison, much like the movie and you are introduced one of several
game-play modes, the Zelda top down perspective.
You move Robin around, pick up objects, and interact with the environment through a menu
system.
Searching, looking, and taking to progress through the game.
Combat is much like Zelda again, attacking with whatever weapon you have.
You’ll fight guards off, explore castles and forests and interact with NPC’s in this
mode.
It functions alright, not great.
Robin moves like he’s on ice and made out of rubber.
Which can be kind of frustrating when moving through narrow areas...
It’s not long before you encounter another game mode, this 2D side scrolling duel mode
where you and one enemy duke it out.
This mode comes up every now and then and it’s kind of a abrupt change.
Robin is much more mobile in this mode, but it still it’s not totally flushed out well.
Hit direction seems totally random and button mashing and cornering, if you can, is really
your only strategy since a lot of the time your opponents out reach you.
There’s a 3rd battle mode, that is supposed to represent large scale battles with all
of the merry men against some opposition, usually guards.
You’re now miniature versions of your party fighting miniature versions of the baddies.
It’s never really very difficult since everything dies in one hit.
You can switch between merry men, but again no real advantage to that.
One final mode, and probably least thought out, is the horse chase where your objective
is to run, jump blue rocks... that’s it.
I’m not even really sure why they added yet one more different mode of play and it’s
probably the worse one of all of them...
Graphically, Robin Hood, is pretty awful.
Everything is this brownish orange color the whole time and the portraits are meant to
look like the movie characters, maybe.
The sprites in the duel mode are half decent, but that’s about the best compliment I can
give.
This is a late NES title too, like released after the Super Nintendo came out late.
One of the reasons I thought this game would be good, is the mix of some RPG elements.
Each character has their own status page with inventory and equipment.
You can gain experience and level up as well.
But, and this is the reoccurring theme of the game, there’s no real substance to the
whole experience and that’s the problem with this game.
It tried to do too much.
Had the whole game been like Zelda and with some of the RPG elements maybe, it could have
been much better.
Honestly I don’t want to knock it that hard, at least it was trying some creative things
to switch it up, but unfortunately that can lead to some games that aren’t remembered
for how awesome and innovative they were, but that they were kind of a let down.