Fortunately, you do have the option of either confronting Jason on the road/in the lake or in one of the cabins he’s currently stalking. You technically have to defeat Jason three times across the course of three in-game days to beat Friday the 13th. Of course, it’s hard to talk about unintentionally confusing Friday the 13th mechanics without getting around to the star of the show: Jason Voorhees, aka the apparent “Maven of Mayhem” and “the Sultan of Slash.” Part of the problem here is that the vast majority of the map consists of loops that are inherently difficult to navigate, but so far as I can tell, there’s no actual explanation for why the game works that way besides the most likely possibility that it’s simply broken. There’s a very good chance that most people who played this game at a young age will vividly remember the first time they tried walking right only to look at their map and discover that they’ve actually been moving to the left the entire time.
#LJN NES GAMES MANUAL#
See, some fans like to call Friday the 13th a “hard” game, but it’s far more accurate to describe it as “confusing.” The game’s instruction manual presents itself as a detailed description of the experience (it even tells you to press Start to start the game, in case you didn’t know), but all but the most in-depth modern guides will leave you woefully unprepared for even the game’s most basic progression elements. I know that’s not a lot of information to go off of, but in order to accurately recreate the experience of playing Friday the 13th, you first need to be deprived of as much basic information as possible. You’ve probably already guessed that your main goal is to defeat Jason, but the bulk of the game is actually spent wandering around the camp, fighting various minor enemies (wolves, zombies, crows, and bats), and trying to collect the supplies and weapons that you’re absolutely going to need if you want to put Jason down long enough to give someone the time they need to write a new screenplay that helps justify why the horniest youths in America are willing to return to this epicenter of violence and horror: New Jersey. Each counselor has their own unique stats and inventories, and if one of them dies, they’re gone forever. The game itself sees you swap between six camp counselors as they do all of the things that suck about being in a Friday the 13th film (running from Jason, trying to save the campers, and dying) and none of the things that seem to keep people coming back to Camp Crystal Lake (sex, drugs, and watching Crispin Glover dance). Atlus also developed an adaptation of The Karate Kid for NES, which was actually the first licensed video game that LJN published and a kind of harbinger of the titles that would eventually define that company’s legacy.
#LJN NES GAMES SERIES#
Friday the 13th is a 1989 NES game published by LJN (the notorious company at least partially responsible for some of the worst NES games ever made) but actually developed by Atlus: the studio that would go on to develop the Persona series and many other noteworthy games. What I found was a game that’s pretty far from good but is indeed far too intriguing to not at least be worthy of some kind of reappraisal. Utterly intrigued by that possibility, I decided to boot up Friday the 13th again for the first time in a long time and take another look at it. Was I just misremembering this game? Have the years somehow improved this much-maligned title? Is there a chance that there’s been a worthwhile retro Friday the 13th game waiting for me this whole time and that I’ve simply been dismissing it based on childhood memories and its reputation?
Some called it underrated, some called it ahead of its time, and some suggested that it might actually be kind of…good?Īs a lifelong fan of the Friday the 13th franchise and someone who grew up with the Friday the 13th NES game, I couldn’t believe that this infamous part of the series’ legacy was getting such love. The game’s sometimes overwhelmingly negative reputation made it that much more surprising to see so many people rush to our comments section to defend Friday the 13th and say that it doesn’t belong anywhere near the conversation about the worst NES games ever. More recently, I included Friday the 13th on our list of the 15 worst NES games ever made. GamePro once called it one of the ten worst games based on a film, EGM named it the eighth-worst console game of all-time in 1997, and even Nintendo Power (a publication that’s famous for rarely saying a bad word about any game on a Nintendo console) included Friday the 13th on their list of the worst games ever made. Since it was released for the NES in 1989, Friday the 13th has found itself on many “worst” lists.
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