Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes of the Lance

Developer: US Gold
Year: 1990

This game has helped teach me an important lesson: if i start every post about a shitty game with, "Holy shit, this was a shitty game," the whole project is going to get pretty one-note pretty quickly.

So here's me focusing on the positive:

• there's naked midgets you can kill.
• one of your characters is a woman with a spear who dies if she gets hit once, which is funny.
• the song is catchy in that classic NES 45-second loop kind of way.
• if you run straight at the lizards, they moonwalk away from you.
  
• there's a character named Tasslehoff Burrfoot.
• there's a statue that disappears if you check it for traps.

Other than that, well, I'd be lying if I said that this was anything like a decent game. When you consider the year -- 1988 -- and the fact that the first final fantasy and the first dragon warrior were out at the same time on the same hardware, the shittiness really stands out.

By way of description, here's what you get: a side-scroller with 8 characters, of whom you control 1 at a time, a total of 8 screens that we found that you can walk through, a healing spell that seems to run out after about a million uses, and the aforementioned naked midgets. You can jump, but it's not clear why you'd want to. There's a compass, but it keeps changing orientation -- you'll often walk south to go through a door, but then east if you want to immediately go back. And at one point, Laura said, "I'd rather not pick that gem up than try to go through the menu again."

In closing, we didn't find the Disks of Mishikal in the Mines of Xak Taroth, and I hope that someday i'll be able to return to the mines to finish the quest, but only if the mines are in a different game and i get to look for them as Ratchet or possibly Simon. Or Daydreamin' Davey.

Rating: 2/10 Killing naked midgets has to be worth something.
Advice: The big bucket doesn't do anything. Don't try to get in it. You'll just fall off the ledge.
Best Moment: Realizing that, when you die, there's no soft reset -- you have to get up and walk over to the console to play the shitty thing again.