Flashback Tribute to Back to the Future Parts II and III Video Game for 8 Bit Nintendo Systems

Now this game was my ultimate favorite of all the favorites. I tend to enjoy puzzle types of games and I love variety. Back to the Future Parts II and III Video Game for NES gave me all that and more. The deal with this game is that you must find very obscure and often well hidden ways to travel between three different time periods using your flux capacitor and collected fuel points.

Even though the game is a scrolling style, you have free reign as a player to move back and forth from left to right and to enter doors that signal you are going to an upper or lower level. You have to somehow kill the correct animals (animals, which I might add have absolutely no connection with the Back to the Future movie as far as I can tell) in order to collect keys, which will allow you entrance into the fun and faster paced challenge rooms where you must solve some sort of puzzle or go through mazes, etc. in order to earn an object.

There are tons of these rooms in every level in every time period your player can travel within and the goal of all of them is to earn the designated mystery object belonging to that room. The tough part is once you collect them all you have to do even more rigorous searching in unlikely places to find which location in which time period the found objects really belong. In other words you have to sort of rescue these objects from their misplaced time zone location and figure out where to put them correctly in their designated and appropriate time zone.

Let me tell you this game gets crazy. I do admit I wasn't surprised when the same former friend and video game extraordinaire mentioned in "Ode to the Most Memorable Old School 8 Bit Nintendo Games" by Lori Voth giggled and said, "Oh sweetie everyone knows Back to the Future Parts II and III ended up in the discount bins like a week after it came out. It has always been known to suck." This guy also informed me that any magazine articles he had read related to the game discussed, above everything else, sheer frustration about how in the world to beat it.

And well, okay he was right. I mean I really thought that this one time when, determined to beat the game, I actually drew out a complicated map in attempts to follow the seemingly random distribution of up and down doors and get to the bottom of what had to have been many secret levels for certain moves I made to have possibly led me completely astray.

But oh did I try so hard with help of this skeptical friend, I must add. We were such troopers, we had the original NES console on 3 days straight with our map right in front of us as we navigated through the confusing maze that I'm still convinced was a major mistake in programming that the designer's boss somehow overlooked.

I mean let's face it the game is truly impossible to beat. Please for the record anyone reading this I beg you to show yourself off in the comment area and delight me with the fact that the game actually is beatable. I still feel subconsciously a bit defeated that I couldn't figure it out. I'm quite the overachiever in situations like this. But yeah we gave up when we pretty much had to step in to save our sanity. It was a sad moment. However give up or not, practical maze design or not, I still maintain that Back to the Future Parts II and III is one of the most entertaining and nail-bitingly exciting video games to play on the NES 8bit Nintendo Systems.

Sure, you probably won't beat it but there are so many fun puzzles to challenge yourself with once you find the hidden keys to unlock the mysterious doors, it will keep you busy for hours, weeks.