Retro Game of the Day is a daily look back at some of the games we loved - and some that we didn't - during the formative years. Today's entry is Fester's Quest.
Retro Game of the Day! Fester's Quest
Fester's Quest by Sunsoft, and how dare you Wikipedia for not giving this game its own unique entry. I mean, really, this is quite shameful! The game was released for the NES in 1989.
Alright, so here we have quite a curiosity in many respects. Fester's Quest was based on a character from an old 1960's sitcom, long forgotten and out of the public eye. The Addams Family franchise did enjoy a fairly successful reboot attempt some years after this game released, but the two didn't appear to have anything to do with one another. This is how it was; sometimes things just "showed up" for the Nintendo.
The game was odd at best, and crappy at worst - they took the inferior elements of their earlier hit Blaster Master and made a whole game out of them, but removing what was fun from even that and coating the whole thing with a layer of ARGH WHY IS THIS SO HARD, I KEEP DYING WHY WHY WHY.
I have to admit, I was actually a pretty dedicated Blaster Master fan (and Sunsoft in general, they were up their with the likes of Capcom, Konami and Tecmo back in their day) so my interest in this game was there - but the pre-release materials clued me in that this would probably be a good game to skip. They were correct!
It's hard to go all cold on Fester however - there were a lot of games like this that just showed up, inexplicably, back in the day. They had a couple of decent gimmicks going for them, and if you actually bought it you needed to put in an honest effort (and unless the game was 100% garbage, you'd still be able to mine some enjoyment out of it).
Ultimately, I'll just chalk Fester's Quest up as one of the more random failed experiments out there. I really love old-school Sunsoft, so they are allowed to have a stain or two on their record. There's probably a few people out there who even remember this game fondly, for all of it's brutal challenge and incessant hammering of the player's stamina. You tough guys!
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