Hook

If you were growing up in the 90's the chances are you saw Hook, the tale of a grown up Peter Pan returning to Neverland to face off once more with Hook. It was a great movie, one many of us link to our childhood. Now with any decent movie a licensed game was created in its image. Hook on the NES is one of those titles which is known for being really crap, give it a search on youtube and you will see what I mean. Now I did what I'm sure 90% of those reviewers didn't. I bought the game for my NES, I downloaded the manual for the game, and I read it. So many of those reviewers were complaining about not knowing what this or that does. Well I know what they do, does it make the game any more enjoyable? Is this a game that will never grow old or does it now have droopy hairy balls? Read on to find out.


Gameplay (4.5 out of 10)
The gameplay is a basic platformer with the extremely boring 'collect to finish' rule, you have to collect a certain amount of items per level in order to be able to finish. Different levels have different items that you must collect from cupcakes to pearls, it all really has nothing to do with the movie, kind of annoying but oh well.

The controls are the main problem with the game you jump really high, which is kind of acceptable because after all your meant to be peter pan, but the most annoying aspect is without a doubt your main attack, which is a tiny little sword, its really 50/50 as to if you will hit your enemy first or if they will get you first, it is without a doubt the dumbest ***** I have ever seen in a game and a massive flaw which wrecks the experience, the game could have been so much better if they made your 'sword' (More like a butter knife, not even a good butter knife) just a few pixels longer. The one slight saving grace is that you can use tinker bell as a weapon by collecting thimbles as ammo, yea that's right the little **** wont follow you if you don't have any thimbles, what a *****!

Now its a Peter Pan game so you would guess you can fly through out the level, well your wrong! There are level dedicated to flying, which get boring really fast as you try to dodge TNT and lighting clouds all the while collecting marbles, but while ingame the only form of flying is by collecting marbles which then enable you to 'bounce' off the various sections of fairy dust. The biggest problem with this is that if you run out of fairy dust but missed something on the other side of the fairy dust, or the exit is at the other side, your screwed, you need to commit suicide.

There are some interesting gameplay aspects in the game, such as the underwater levels where you need to swim around with a health bar that gets lower and lower until you can find a air pocket. There are also some light puzzle aspects to the game as it goes on such as having to collect fire then moving a barrel of gunpowder to the right spot then having to jump on the gunpowder to be blasted up.

The last thing I will talk about is the enemy's so many of them are just random, there's a guru who floats around, there's a fire breathing dragon and heaps of other random stuff that you just have to ask yourself if they even watched the movie before making the game. The boss fight with Rufio is the biggest homoerotic scene I have ever seen in a video game its the first one to take the other ones shirt off, oh yea! Remember in the movie when Robin Williams had a knife on Rufio and made him take his shirt off? Yeah that was a hot scene.


Graphics (6.5 out of 10)
The backgrounds look really decent for a NES game, as do the enemy's and everything is quite large in size which is a nice change. You can always tell what things are meant to be. The biggest graphical flaw is in Peter himself, the character we see for the entire game is the ugliest thing on screen. He looks more like Link than Peter Pan, if Link was and Albino, for some stupid reason his skin is completely white. I don't know why they decided to do this, the pirates and other the guru's have the normal tan coloured skin, but for whatever reason Peter Pan is now whiter than Micheal Jackson, Yea you knew a Jacko reference was coming. The characters sprite actually reminds me of Jackson from the South Park episode 'The Jeffersons'.

The graphics bar Peter are really top notch for a NES game, the score would have been higher but Peter really makes the rest of the screen look like garbage, which is a shame, yet again the developers had the ability to make it a worth while platformer, but it doesn't just play average it looks average because of something that could have been fixed in a matter of minutes.


Sound (3.5 out of 10)
The background music is something that really ****s me up the wall, its all high pitched and just really annoying. In the movie Hook there is a beautiful arrange of original music, why on gods green earth couldn't they make some 8-bit versions of that, it would have been awesome. But no we are stuck with this annoying repetitive music. I don't even want to go any more
into it.


Replay Value (4 out of 10)
Once you finish this game (if you don't get bored by the fact the level design and game mechanics start to feel very repetitive) I highly doubt you will want to pick it up and play again, you can finish the game in one sitting, which of course you have to because there no save feature, however when a game has a map system somewhat similar to the later Mario games, why it doesn't support saving system of some sort is beyond me, the game would be so much better if you could save, no one feels like going through all that item collecting bull**** again, but if you want to finish the game and run out
of continues, then that's just what you get to do, start the whole thing off again.


Overall (4.625 out of 10)
The game is nothing amazing, actually I would say its below average. It had the chance to be a somewhat enjoyable game, but a bunch of little things in the gameplay mechanics really messed up the game. It has close to nothing to do with the movie which is a massive let down as it was a really great movie, I watched it again the day before I played Hook again for this review and I still thing its a class movie. All in all its better than most reviewers give credit for, however that's not really saying too much, its still pretty ****ty.

A fairly poor NES platformer, only worth picking up if you find it for under $2 and want to add to your NES collection.