Review of the Adventures of Rad Gravity (NES)

The Adventures of Rad Gravity is a plat former action game released on the Nintendo Entertainment System in 1990 and developed by Interplay. This is a mostly unknown title with a few quirky things to offer to those curious for some obscure games. Let's go over it.

Story : Rad Gravity's gotta fight some evil guy to save the universe. However, this game has tons of personality. It's comedic and light hearted and even looking at the main character gives you sense of that. Rad fights evil by repairing computers for some reason, so off you go and the game starts.

Graphics : For 1990, the graphics are quite good. Rad himself looks rad, so to speak. He's well drawn, well animated, and generally looks hilarious doing all his actions. The enemies also look great and are animated well. The backgrounds lack detail but are appropriate enough. This game is full of very nice touches graphically that you don't see in other games of this era. The opening cinematic has the most convincing teleporter type scene on the NES. Overall, very solid graphics.

Sound : The introductory music in this game is hilariously bad. Luckily, the rest of the game's music is really neat. There's a good variety of songs here, good arrangements, good compositions, playful melodies. In other words, the music fits well and doesn't annoy outside of the intro music. The sound effects are good enough, nothing here that makes your head hurt.

Game play: The game takes a turn for the worse here. The controls are very flimsy. You'll find yourself undershooting jumps and attacks because you didn't press buttons properly. There's a learning curve here, for sure. It'll take some practice to get down but then you'll be good.

The enemies have patterns you must learn, even the ones at the start of the game. You'll have to approach each enemy with a strategy, so this isn't the type of game where you can just play and expect to kill many things quickly. The difficulty in this game is quite hard, due to the controls. The stages as you advance get quite tricky and the unforgiving controls don't help much. You'll most likely either need cheats or a ton of patience to make it through this one.

Re playability : The game has a great ending, but other than that you've seen it all on one play through and most likely will never have the urge to play this game again.

Overall : 4/10. The game is presented well, but the odd controls and high difficulty make it a pass.