The Goonies (Konami)

From TheAlmightyGuru
Revision as of 10:35, 2 July 2018 by TheAlmightyGuru (talk | contribs) (Review)
Jump to: navigation, search

The Goonies, known in Japan as グーニーズ [Gunizu], "Goonies", is a platform action game from Konami, released for the Famicom, X1, and PC-88 in 1986 and later ported to the Nintendo Vs. System and the Famicom Disk System. I'm quite curious why Konami never released the game in the US even though the game was written entirely in English and fully finished only a few months after the movie's release.

I first saw this game as the Vs. System in the arcade room of Lakeland Arena in the late 1980s. I didn't have any quarters to play the game, but I got to watch some older kids play it, and I thought it looked cool. Later, I rented The Goonies II for the NES and enjoyed it. Years later, thanks to emulation, I was able to play the Famicom version and found it to be the origin of many aspects of the sequel, but didn't put forth an effort to get good at it. Finally, I decided to hunker down and try to beat the game, which I did sometime around 2010.

Status

I don't not own this game, but I have beaten the Famicom version.

Review

  • Overall: 6/10
  • Best Version: Famicom

Good

  • The game is quite fun. The action keeps you on your toes, and, with practice, you can become good enough to beat it without too much difficulty.
  • Konami did a great job at introducing a large portion of the movie into the game: the Fratelli brothers, bats, booby traps, crazy pipes, a pirate ship complete with the ending sequence, even the octopus that was cut from the film shows up!
  • There are a lot of secret power-ups and bonus points to discover.
  • For a game without a save feature or password system, it is a good length. Not so long that you have to leave your system on for days, but not so short that you can finish it in under an hour.
  • I love the inclusion of the Cyndi Lauper song The Goonies 'R' Good Enough.

Bad

  • The black background is quite dull.
  • Some of the stuff in the game doesn't fit the movie like underground foxes, giant fish, and bone-throwing skeletons.

Ugly

  • Nothing.

Media

Documentation

Maps

Videos

Links