#13 - AD&D: Pool of Radiance

Well friends, to the best of my knowledge, I have reached the end of the Dungeons and Dragons games on the NES, and boy, is my heart thankful. Playing Pool of Radiance this evening, I realized something: these games should have never ever been ported to the Nintendo. They should have stayed on the computer where they belonged, where they fit in. It's not like it's impossible to do a first-person dungeon crawler/adventure game on the NES. Look at Deja Vu or Uninvited: both solid first-person adventure games. But the problem with the D&D games, besides their general lack of quality, is that they try to do too much with too little. The NES just doesn't have the amount of processing beef needed to make these games work, hence their overall suckiness.

Pool of Radiance begins similar to Hillsfar. You have to make a character, choose a class, race, etc. After I had made my character (named D-Jiggles), the game takes you to a door which leads to the city of Phlan. A tour guide leads you through the city, which resembles a poorly-made Wolfenstein 3D level. EVERYTHING LOOKS THE SAME. The guide is trying to tell me where the city council is, where the three temples are, where the "back streets" are, and every stinking door looks like the one that preceded it. It doesn't help that the color palette is a "wide" range of stark gray and poop brown, painting everything that dull flavor that Nintendo D&D games are known for. Once my tour guide left me, I wandered around for awhile trying to figure out where to go before I just completely stopped. If a game is going to make itself incredibly difficult to even accomplish one's first task, it's not worth it. Can you imagine what the fools who made a FAQ for this over at GameFAQS had to go through? It would take a lot of mind manipulation to make yourself believe this game was even worth playing, let alone writing a long, tedious FAQ about it.

At any rate, I'm just so happy to have made it through this tired, played out, new-jack horse crap. If you obviously, blatantly can not push the boundaries of the NES anymore than you already have, why release the stinking game? D&D nerds already played it on the computer, and NES fans were merely waiting for more action or sports games to be released. To the one person that was bracing themselves for Pool of Radiance on the Nintendo, bought it, then had their heart ripped out of their chest, my condolences. For the rest of us, it was merely a green loogie in an already full spittoon... or something.

F