"If you Just Wanna Have Fun, this game is Good Enough"

Having seen the movie that spawned this game after playing the game itself, I walked away with a favorable impression of both. Obviously it's hard to express the humor of the movie too much in the game, which is limited to you kicking guys in suits that pass for the Fratellis, who fall on their butts and wiggle their feet in the air. The game, in fact, has more branching paths than the movie, but the movie exerts its unfair advantages in showing us, say, Data's items more cleverly--and they do appear and have use in the game. The game seems to break up the plot in the right places. In the movie, it's not Mikey who goes chasing after the rest of the Goonies, and there are a lot more rats wandering around in the game.

The game itself is a Super Mario-style platformer, but with a lot more stairlike structures and multi-directional scrolling, and consists of five(?) levels with time limits, followed by a ship scene where treasures--or a girl, who is probably Andy--are behind each door. On each level before the last, the object is to find three keys, buried behind safes, and then the gate that leads to the next level. By pushing the kick button in certain areas, you can also uncover secret items(they appear in bags over your head) that correlate roughly to Data's creations--flame suit to run through flame jets, headphones to block out the Fratellis' singing, and others. Safes may also hold jugs to give you strength back(strength is lost proportionate to the time you're touching an opponent,) and slingshots(good for fifty shots, but once you have them, they cannot be conserved by kicking opponents.) You can pick up an invincibility cross if you kick the white mice that pop up randomly, and each mouse you kick leaves a bomb, which is useful for blowing open safes, which reveal keys or Goonies. You can also continue where you left off, and you'll probably need to.

Controls are slightly frustrating, as I don't know of another game where I've seen as many double-kills(i.e. you kick something, but they kill you,) and not being able to conserve your slingshot is annoying. Still, you use buttons to jump or kick or combine the two, and a little practice will allow you to surprise most monsters. To set a bomb you push down and kick. You can also crouch, which is useful to avoid the Fratellis' guns or the junk coming out of the water pipes. However, the game deserves credit for pausing you a bit when you fall.

As for the levels: the first one is a house. It looks more like the Walshes' than the Fratellis' hideout where the ''serious'' action begins, but the four safes you need to blow open are pretty obvious, and curiosity may lead you to the first ''special'' item. You find three keys and one Goony and it's on to level two, where you may find a slingshot in a safe or, depressingly, food, which is almost never worth the healing it gives. From levels two to five there are usually three different segments, alike in flavor: a center one, with skulls you walk through that ''warp'' you to other parts of the level. There's usually one key in each part, but each part may scroll vertically, with stairs at the top leading to the bottom of a new screen, giving you one more outside map piece to remember. As the levels go on there are vertical flame jets which fire periodically, boulders that crash up and down rhythmically, water pipes that shoot something toxic out every so often, and even One-Eyed Willy the Pirate who can only be killed with a slingshot. There's also the danger of falling down a hole, and on later levels the waterfalls are a nuisance. The fish that fly out from the bottom on the final level are the only things that are really unfair in themselves. However, I found that, after I had gotten killed, I was bumped down to a spot where water had shot out of a pipe, and at the start of my next life I immediately lost strength. Not cool. It can also be a nuisance to wait halfway up a ladder for a mouse to stop bouncing randomly around, and I am disappointed that if you bomb a safe and get killed, the safe is closed when you start your next life. Also, sometimes One-Eyed Willie will appear randomly and trap you in a place where it is hard to run away, i.e. a place with low clearance so you can't jump. So each level seems to have its own fault, but that's not the only way they are unique.

The graphics are mediocre for you and your enemies(everyone's quite small, and the best of the lot is when a Fratelli shoots a gun) but stronger for the backgrounds. The pipes or vines that you climb up or avoid are neat, and I love the skull-shaped cave mouths and boulder traps. The waterfalls are also good to experience. As for the sound, they basically took Cyndi Lauper's ''Good Enough'' and twiddled it a bit. There seem to be two separate parts that loop over each other and alternate every other level. It sounds better in the game than in the movie, but maybe that's because the lyrics are not Lauper's best.

Seeing the Goonies helps you to understand the game a bit, but it's still involved enough to stand on its own. Although it is not easy to find where the secret items or diamonds are, none are necessary to win the game. The game captures a lot of the movie's excitements with its platforms and warps through skulls--there is so much to explore, and like the kids in the movie, you need to use your head to watch for potential blind alleys and track down where the remaining safes could be. However, the end part is a letdown, as you will wind up getting killed unfairly a lot.

Obligatory Cyndi Lauper Pun: some bugs in the gameplay(as unfair as your house getting torn down for some stupid country club, if you ask me) may leave you frustrated Time After Time, but you probably won't need to play All Through the Night to solve the game--although with its caverns it might keep you occupied that long.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 05/10/01, Updated 05/10/01