Hydlide (NES) - Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN)

- SHIT...! -♫ It will take you back to the past ♫ ♫ To play shitty

game

s that suck ass ♫ ♫ I'd rather have a buffalo ♫ ♫ Give it a squirt of diarrhea in its ear ♫ ♫ I'd rather eat rotten ass ♫ ♫ From a roadkill skunk and drinking it with beer ♫ ♫ He's the angriest

game

r you've ever heard ♫ ♫ He's the

angry

Nintendo

nerd

♫ ♫ He's the

angry

Atari/Sega

nerd

♫ ♫ He's the angry

video

game nerd ♫ Ugh! Hydlide! Just saying the name gives you a gag reflex, like you're about to throw up! Hydlide! It sounds so miserable and disgusting! Maybe it's pronounced "HID-lide," but who knows? And who even knows what the fuck it means?

It's a typical adventure game, where you play as a guy with a sword, who has to explore a fantasy world, fight monsters, collect treasures and rescue a princess. Playing a game like this in itself is like embarking on an adventure. You could stick to the familiar NES classics or you could be a brave explorer and seek the unknown. You might discover a piece of jewelry or a vomit-covered turd. And this is the shit covered in vomit. While the concept isn't very unique, the first thing you see is a dragon shooting fire at a princess, making her explode into three fairies.

I've never seen that happen. As soon as you start playing, the first thing that comes to mind is Legend of Zelda. Now, get ready, we'll be making a lot of Zelda references. It seems like Hydlide would have copied Zelda, but in reality, Hydlide came first, on the PC-88, which was a home computer in Japan. It came out on NES later, following in the footsteps of Zelda. Imagine buying this game based on its cover, expecting something as good as Zelda, and then coming home, playing it, and finding out it sucks. If there's one thing this game really took off, it's the music.

It's just a variation on the Indiana Jones theme! And it never stops! It's like winding a music box and letting it play for an eternity. Except for the last screen, which also sounds like Indiana Jones! Let's go to the game. Attacking...it's a joke. You're supposed to hold down the A button and run towards the monsters. In Zelda, you actually see the sword come out. But there is nothing here! Did they forget to animate it? Am I supposed to use my imagination like a fucking board game? When you kill something, it just disappears. No problem. They don't explode, produce the sound effect, or do anything that makes you feel the satisfaction of killing an enemy.

There is no skill involved. You will never know if you are hitting a monster or if the monster is hitting you. It's as random as rolling the dice or playing the lottery. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. But I guess it's better than doing drugs or alcohol, because with drugs and alcohol, especially drugs, you always lose... If you're lucky, your experience will increase. But it only goes up one pixel at a time. If you want to level up, you must fill the entire bar! This is what it looks like at high speed. But can you imagine how long it takes to do this?

You can't, unless you've played it. You can also perform a magic attack by pressing the B button, but it's really confusing. You have to scroll through your different magic spells and when you get to the spell you want, press the A button to be in attack mode and then press B to cast the spell. By the time you do all that, you'll already be dead! And what the hell is this? Am I fighting a rock? Every time you die, guess what happens. You go back to the beginning. Yes, it's one of those games: no extra lives, no continues, you don't go crazy.

There is a password system, but it's the most baffling, dumb, and unorthodox password usage I've ever seen in a game. First, open the menu and go to save. That sounds simple enough, right? You simply save the game. But not. That's not how it works at all. All it saves is giving you a password. But it doesn't SHOW you the password and you won't even know it's there until you get down to the password. And there you have it. Now you have to write the damn thing! The time it takes to type it and then re-enter it is about the same as it takes to start the game over.

What were they thinking? Couldn't you think of a better way? How about you give me the password after I die? How about extra lives? How about a continue option? Or better yet, how about a battery backup like in Zelda and making "save" actually SAVE the game? "Burden"? When would you want to load a game from within the game? If you died, you would do so from the main menu screen with the password option, as opposed to the in-game menu password option, which gives you the password you got from the save option. "Speed"? Do I really care what that does? "Game"?!

Does that allow me to choose a different game? Because that would be a fucking good idea! Even if you get used to this whole password fiasco, figuring out how to play is a puzzle in itself. There are treasure chests, some you can open and some you can't. Sometimes you go into dark caves, but this is suicide, because you will simply crash into the walls and the fireballs will kill you. And sometimes, you just die completely randomly. There's probably something in the dark killing me, like a rat or some kind of trap. Who knows? You can't see it unless you have a flashlight.

To get the lantern, you must kill a vampire. How do you kill the vampire? Ah, the cross. Of course. Oh wait. What the hell? Oh, you have to hit him from behind. Ugh... Anyway, I have the flashlight. Now I'm going back to that dark cave to find out what the fuck was killing me. I see nothing! So that just concludes that there was NOTHING. That's a trap if I ever saw one! The game kills you for NOTHING! Anyway, you make it through this maze and get a stronger sword, you type the password, you die, you type the password, you continue where you left off, you go a few more steps, you type the next password, you die, you come back. enter the password and repeat.

You collect a pot, a jewel, and fairies from random trees, then cross a desert to the castle, which transports you to the water, and swim to the island with the two wizards, hitting them with wave magic at the same time , obviously. The three fairies fly you to the island. Burn the bush, grab the tombstone, kill the dragon, get the jewel, return to the castle, kill the last man... ...and you win. I feel fulfilled? No. I feel like this game wasted my fucking time, forcing me to figure out all this cryptic shit. That's not to say Zelda didn't have her own cryptic shit.

You have to burn a bush to reveal a ladder. And there are thousands of bushes where she could have been. There is a lake, where you have to use a flute, a statue that you have to push, and a specific rock where you are supposed to place a bomb. I'm just posing the question: what do we love about all the puzzle solving that happens in Zelda? Maybe it wasn't that difficult to understand. Maybe there were more clues inside the game and people discussed this game a lot more, sharing all the secrets. But I have to admit that the first time I played Zelda I was also very perplexed.

Maybe it all comes down to the fact that it's a much better designed and fun game, so you enjoy playing and trying to figure it all out. Hydlide just doesn't have the same satisfaction. It's a mediocre adventure game, with some serious flaws. And that's what you get for reaching into the dark depths of the NES library. You might as well be sticking your hand up a dog's ass... ...because all you'll find is shit.