Game Review - the Adventures of Dr. Franken (SNES)

The Adventures of Dr. Franken is a game initially released for the Game Boy by Elite Systems and published by Kemco. It was later ported over to the Super Nintendo Entertainment System in 1993 after having experienced great success on the Game Boy platform.

In The Adventures of Dr. Franken, the plot isn't really presented to you. Like many other games of this type, the goal here is to go around and defeat or avoid enemies while surving the individual levels. While this lacks depth in terms of actual storyline viability, it doesn't detract from the amount of fun you can have from the game. Since The Adventures of Dr. Franken is a standardized platformer, it retains its edge despite having no plot (which isn't really necessary; after all, some of the Mario games don't have much of a plot).

The graphics in The Adventures of Dr. Franken are decent; I'd say they're average. The developers certainly could've invested a lot more time into the sprites and environment backgrounds, but given the budget and timeframe they were working with I would say they did a pretty fair job. The character sprite himself is rather pixelated and looks completely silly, but it's quite an upgrade from the GB version. Environments are also pixelated and pay no attention to details.

The audio in The Adventures of Dr. Franken is pretty average, too; the developers didn't attempt to make this anything noteworthy. Since this game is a sort-of generic platformer, there's simply nothing to speak of in terms of advantage in making a good sound track for it. That said, the music doesn't even take advantage of the stereo sound capabilities of the SNES! The main theme here is Moonlight Sonata, which isn't really ever altered significantly.

The Adventures of Dr. Franken is a rather easy game, with the control scheme being that of a standard platformer. While it's not overly simplistic by any means, there's no added depth or complexity of gameplay. Despite this, I rather enjoy Mario-style platformers, so I didn't dislike it.

In closing, I'd give The Adventures of Dr. Franken a reasonable 2.5 out of 5. While it's lackluster in terms of audio and graphics, it has decent game play and is reminiscent of many popular games like Mario. Seemingly, The Adventures of Dr. Franken is a stylized version of a classic game we've all played for years.