Here we have a far more normal AVGN episode – in this case, a look at the NES game Bill & Ted’s Excellent adventure.
Amazingly, this episode is so straightforward there honestly isn’t too much to say about it. James of course addresses that it is based on the quite popular film but, like most games based on films, it was published by LJN and is, as one would expect, terrible.
Before you even get to the real game you have to do some crazy stuff involving looking up the phone number for the “historical dude” you’re trying to rescue, typing that number into the phone booth, and then via some batshit insane method you navigate the circuits of time to hopefully make it to the actual level!
It doesn’t get any better there, with the traditional feast of terrible controls, cryptic gameplay, nonsensical weapons (seriously, books and cassette tapes are your weapons) and just completely illogical gameplay. It gets so bad, in fact, that James consults Nintendo Power, only to find that it offers little in the way of help – that’s how terrible this particular game is!
As I said, there really isn’t much here to talk about — it’s a more traditional episode. In fact, it honestly feels like it should have been a shorter one, but James chose to cover more of the game than normal and thus it came out longer, as it does go somewhat in depth with the game. More than other similar episodes have, anyway.
It also contains the usual case of jokes based on quirks about the game in question, which works to the episodes advantage. In the end, however, James can’t take much more and quits playing, leading to another ending rant about how terrible LJN truly was for the NES.
Really that’s all there is to this episode — it serves to demonstrate one of the bottom-of-the-barrel examples of games published by that wretched company.
Final Rating: 3.0/5
This is a pretty average episode, on a whole. It’s longer than it probably should be, but it doesn’t get boring. It’s just this game is such a perfect combination of bad, yet bland, that there isn’t much that really stands out about it — it just stays one of those titles that just has nothing redeeming about it, at least from the perspective of the Nerd, and it almost feels like the character is being tortured the entire video by having to play it.