Q*bert

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There are just some games that you have to take with a grain of salt, and Q*Bert is one of those games. Featuring an orange creature that is placed in a puzzle world, you must go through and change the colored bricks to a particular color through several different paths in order to continue to the next stage. While this is a classic in the arcade, it makes a rather average stand on the Nintendo Entertainment System by faithfully recreating the arcade port, but without adding the slightest amount of changes! Seen by those of the classic community as a game that will be ageless, Q*Bert is for those die hard puzzle gamers who really don’t have much else to play with their NES and those who have nothing better to do. Given the age of the game and the addictive quality that it shows, there is something to be said for the sleepless nights you may have spending your time on this addictive, yet average puzzle game!

The game play revolves around taking your creature and moving him along the different paths that each stage features. Every stage is different, and to give the game plenty of credit, the stages are set up to be rather mind twisting in terms of the layout and just what you have to do in each one. The mission is to take Q*Bert and run him along the different colored blocks in order to change them all into one single color and therefore continue onto the next stage. However, there is plenty that is there to get in your way, in the likes of a coiled snake that seems to know just where you’re going and what you’re about to do as it jumps on you and kills you outright! The challenge of the game is just to avoid the snake and make your way through the stages without losing all of your lives in the process. You can avoid getting hammered by the snake by jumping onto the small disks that appear at various points of the stage and from there, you can start out without the snake for a few seconds. While avoiding the snake isn’t easy, you’ll find that some of the stages have a complex layout that requires plenty of thought and timing in order to complete, but that is the one quality that the game has, in which you’ll want to do it just to see what is thrown at you next!

Control is where the game gets a little screwy, in which you’re not moving in an up and down, left to right fashion. More or less, you have to use the directional pad in a diagonal fashion that requires some precision motion and overall some practice! Where you would expect to move up, you have to press up/left or up/right in order to move that way, but the problem here is that the game expects you to be able to control your character through the stages flawlessly. This isn’t the case, and there will be several instances of screwing up and jumping off a ledge or into the coiled snake, not realizing that it is that you’re doing until it has already happened! Veterans to the game will probably find that the NES control is stiff, while beginners will find that the control will take some time to get used to, with plenty of mistakes and frustration to go along with it.

Visually, the game is dated from the start, regardless of the age of the NES version. Sprited to the point of absurdity, you’ll find that watching the game takes almost as much practice and patience as learning how to control the little creep! The stages have all been reproduced from the arcade version, but have undergone a slight muting as most NES games due. The nostalgic value of the visuals is enough for most, but for me, I wasn’t very impressed with the way that the game was presented as a whole. With no real special effects to look at, and the same stupid character jumping up and down the different blocks, there isn’t much that anyone can find here without not ever have played the game before!

The music of the game is as limited as it gets in terms of what you have to listen to while you play. Most of what you’ll hear is the sound effects, which quickly become annoying enough to make you mute the television! You can only listen to something jump up and down on the blocks so many times with a weird ass squishing noise before it grates on your nerves enough to make you want to retch. If there is anything that could be tweaked and is so noticeable, it has to be this aspect of the game, because in my own personal experience, there is a need for something decent to listen to when playing any type of puzzle game! If you combine the fact that the music isn’t worth listening to and the sound effects are enough to drive a priest to commit murder, then you’ll find that something in the CD player would be within reason.

Q*Bert is a game that transcends time in terms of addictive quality with the game play. However, in this day and age, there isn’t any sort of room for a game as outdated as this, and even at the time, there wasn’t much that the game featured that you couldn’t find in the arcade! With muted visuals, horrid sound and whacked out control, you may find that this game has enough bad traits to warrant a skeet shoot match in the middle of the night. The average rating that it brings is that once you start playing the game, you really can’t put it down until you’re either sick of it or something else a little better comes along. Considering that this is one of the first puzzle games ever to be released in both the home and arcade markets {save for Tetris of course} this is a good way to see just what puzzle games were all about way back in the day! NES owners who are looking for a puzzle game need not look any further than this title while collectors might want to try their hand at a few other games that are out there on the used games circuit first.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/02/01, Updated 12/02/01