Master Higgins, gaming's hungriest hero, is back in a tropical setting once again. He's questing, as always, to save his missing girlfriend -- and to do that he's got to run and jump his way through beaches, caves and even the sky. You help him out by directing him to grab power-ups like skateboards and throwing axes, and by getting him to gather floating pieces of fruit (which act as time extensions for each level's countdown clock).
New to this particular sequel are Master Higgins' dinosaur buddies, which he rides on top of in the tradition of the more well-known Mario and Yoshi partnership. Higgins gets four different dinos compared to Mario's one, though, with a tail-attacking Blue Camptosaurus, a fire-breathing Red Camptosaurus, a flying Pteranadon and a fast-swimming Elasmosaurus all able to be summoned if you come across their corresponding collectible icons in any stage.
The dinos add a fun new dynamic to the Adventure Island formula, but maybe more important is that they also grant you an extra hit -- lots of A.I. games feature one-hit deaths for our hero Higgins, but this one's a little more generous.
If you manage to clear an entire level with a dinosaur still alive or another power-up still active, too, you can take advantage of a novel new item-banking screen that lets you store up power-ups to access later on -- that becomes invaluable in the later levels, where you can draw on items and dinos you banked way back at the beginning of the quest to help you sail through to the ending credits.
Adventure Island from the Game Boy also features shorter, quicker-to-complete individual levels than some other installments in its same series, making it better suited to portable play. And the normal 3DS Virtual Console features make it more accessible than ever, too, especially in letting you save your progress in an old Game Boy game like this that never previously featured that ability -- you'd always have to run through these games in one sitting before, and all it took was one drained set of batteries to erase hours of invested time.
