As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #21, February 2006.

Although there have been many games based on the Indiana Jones films there is only one arcade game, based upon the ending of the second movie, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.  Of course the prime location for these machines were the lobby arcades of many movie theaters but if you wanted to play at home on the NES you'd have to wait until three years after the game first hit the arcade.  So in 1988 Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was released on the NES and since it was an Atari game the conversion would fall under the Tengen label.  Sadly the wait to relive the latest adventure of the famed archeologist would be met with disappointment.

Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was one of the most well designed arcade games of the mid 1980's with music and sound effects straight out of the movie.  It even featured voice clips, the first Atari System I arcade game to generate speech, further recreating the world of the original film.  The graphics were very detailed and well drawn and control was smooth and did a good job of staying true to the source material.  As with many Atari arcade games of the era the player was allowed to select a starting difficulty level and earn a bonus for completing the more difficult stages right out of the gate.  Easy mode featured three stages: rescuing captive children from mines, the mine car chase from the end of the film, and finally recovering a Sankara stone from the Temple of Doom.  These stages would loop three times becoming increasingly difficult until all three Sankara stones were recovered.  Then the game would progress to the medium difficulty setting where the three stages from the easy mode would be played again at a more difficult level.  After recovering the three Sankara stones new levels would begin:  the escape along a suspension bridge and ultimately a showdown with the evil Mola Ram himself.  After this the game would progress to the hard difficulty setting and begin again.

For having such a great game to build from one would expect the Tengen NES port to at least follow the same formula of the arcade game.  However instead of attempting to directly recreate the arcade experience, Tengen went a different route and attempted to add more standard adventure game aspects with mixed results.  Instead of progressing stages taken from the film the game is broken into twelve waves which incorporate bits and pieces from the arcade original.  The main objective of most of the waves is to rescue children from the ever changing mines as well as find a key that opens the exit to the next wave.  Along the way guns, knives and bombs can be picked up from the children after they are rescued as well as hidden passages, which begs the question why can't the kids just free themselves since they have knives and bombs?  The B button makes Indy jump, something added that was not present in the arcade and the A button uses the currently selected weapon.  Holding the Select button and pressing a direction on the directional pad selects your active weapon:  Up for bombs, Left for your gun, Down for the whip, Right for your knife.  In the arcade Indy only had his trusty whip and many will find holding Select + a D-pad direction is an awkward motion.  There are also other pick-up items such as arrows that indicate the presence of warps, map fragments which help to guide you later in the game, and jewels that can be picked up for points.

Instead of splitting different kinds of gameplay into separate levels they are incorporated, so you'll be riding mine carts in the same waves you have to free children.  The Sankara stones don't show up until wave nine and are all picked up at the same time.  However you then have to complete waves ten and eleven without dying or you lose the Sankara stones and have to backtrack and pick them up from wave nine again as they are needed to exit wave eleven.  It's a lot of bother honestly especially since there's no game save.  Wave twelve contains the rope bridge sequence and the escape to the confrontation with Mola Ram, which after all the work it takes to get there, is anti-climactic since all he does is disintegrate and disappear.

The graphics are rather bland all the way up until the end especially when compared to the beautiful visuals of the arcade original.  Sprites are still decent though and Indy has some nice animations.  The NES port holds up well enough in the audio department as the Indiana Jones theme plays during level intermissions and the background music is of the same style as it was in the arcade.  Sound effects are sparse but passable.  What kills the NES version in the end is how tedious it becomes after a few levels in, especially toward the end.  It's not NES Rygar or Deadly Towers hard but it can get rather frustrating.  Tengen took a quick reaction arcade game and attempted to craft it into a shallow run of the mill adventure game.  Honestly after the first couple waves it begins to feel less and less like the arcade game and more like a separate title based upon the Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom license.  This isn't what I nor many others that played Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in the arcade wanted to end up with on the NES.  Arguably this is one of the reasons why the Tengen port was so poorly received, it wasn't a direct arcade conversion like nearly all of the other Tengen NES games.  It's an average game on its own merits but not what was expected.

I should also mention that there are two versions of this game that are identical save for some copyright information.  After their legal battles with Nintendo, Tengen licensed the game to be legally published by Mindscape who was an official Nintendo licensee.  Why a company would step up and want this licensed under them instead of games like Super Sprint or Rolling Thunder is anyone's guess.  Find it in the arcade, play it and love it.  Leave the NES version far behind.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

BACK to RTM Archives