Friday The 13th is an excellent slasher series that has influenced pop culture ever since its debut. One way it affected pop culture was when it was turned into a horrible game. To be honest, I don’t hate the game as much as others do, and I even find some joy in it. Its not a good game but it does have some good points. So why does it get hated so much?
The problem with Friday the 13th is twofold in nature. The first major aspect is that it can be confusing where to go., and while this may not seem like that big an issue given that many modern games have that issue, this game was a different level of confusing. There was no real way to track where you needed to go and unless you had a perfect memory, you were in trouble. The game randomized things constantly threw you for a loop, to keep things different. This led to many getting stuck on their playthrough but this would not have been so bad if not for time limits and bad combat.
The combat in the game is the second part of the issue. To put things bluntly, the combat is atrocious, even for the usual standards of cash in movie games. Moving and attacking was impossible due to needing to throw your weapon in an arch for instance, this meaning you had to have extreme precision and timing just to hit a common enemy. Fighting Jason was much more difficult than it needed to be, due not to enemy difficulty, but rather due to the controls being unresponsive and extremely sluggish. I have heard that the the designers thought that the player should feel helpless so made this part intentionally play much worse, but that was never confirmed.
That being said, I did find good about the game. For one, the music was actually pretty good as far as I am concerned. It wasn’t as good as a Nightmare on Elm Street, but still decent. I also just like the kooky nature of the game, where it seemed to revel in its nonsensical nature. I would almost say it was self aware, but not quite.
Friday the 13th was not a good game, but one could find a tiny bit of joy with it. Ironically enough, I feel that A Nightmare on Elm Street which also gets maligned, is actually a very good game, especially for the time. Still this is one worth playing just to see what the issues are if you can find it at a decent price. Fortunately, Friday the 13th would get much better games later on as the years went by. If anything, this is a game that is screaming out for the homebrew scene to mess around with and fix issues via a romhack
In addition, I would like to add that there is an active Nintendo retrogaming Facebook community group you can join at www.facebook.com/groups/nintendoretrogamers.
For more, visit Retro Gamers Hub (www.retrogamershub.com) for their extensive collection of retrogaming interest groups to choose from.