Master Higgins, to be proper. A video game hero who comes complete with trademark white hat, grass skirt, and no shirt. He proudly presents his ever-burgeoning belly to his many island foes, as he hops and bops his way through side-scrolling levels to save his kidnapped girlfriend. Adventure Island is one of Hudson's classic games, a basic run-and-jump platforming quest with a tropical setting, and plenty of Vitamin C.
Displayed at the top of the screen in Adventure Island is the fruit gauge, a meter that both serves as an indicator of Higgin's health and a countdown clock spurring you on to finish each level. The bars it contains disappear at a rate of one every few seconds, and if the gauge completely drains then Higgins will lose a life. To avoid this fate, you'll need to feed – grabbing floating bunches of bananas, or apples, or other rich-in-citrus produce will replenish the meter bit by bit.
But, unfortunately, that gauge is one of the few unique and innovative things that Adventure Island introduced. It's all very basic other than that, with Higgins hustling constantly to the right side of the screen, jumping over obstacles. You can equip him with a handful of different items, like skateboards, flying stone axes and flaming bolas, which gives you a little something more to do besides hopping platforms – but there's never much more depth to the game than what you'll find in the very first level.
The end-area boss battles are even repetitive, as each world's big, main foe is simply the same as the last, with a different head sprite pasted on top of the same old body. That's a graphical shortcoming that speaks for the rest of the game, overall, as there isn't much impressive visual flare anywhere on this Island.
Adventure Island isn't without its own old-school charm, of course, and prior players of the title from the '80s 8-bit era will be encouraged to know that the game's inherent goofiness and wacky appeal is still in place – and that's an important factor, as it was an appeal that launched this one game into an entire franchise series for Hudson back in those days. Adventure Islands II through IV also came to the NES, and expanded greatly upon the foundation laid down here – and the series continued further even beyond that, to a couple of titles on the SNES and TurboGrafx as well.
