Konami's Antarctic Adventure -Colecovision
Retro Gaming Review

Rating:

Primarily residing on the MSX, Coleco and Famicom systems, Antarctic Adventure is a mildly interesting race against time while avoiding obstacles. The game has quite a few nice features, but diversity isn't one of them. You begin to feel as though you're doing the same thing over and over.

As far as animals in video games goes, Penguins are pretty underrated. For all their cuteness and peculiarities, they don't comand center stage in too many video games.

As a player, you're always behind the penguin you control, so there isn't much to see of him, but they did a nice job animating his movements and putting some shading on him. He's a fine looking bird who reacts well and even skids a bit with impressive dexterity and control.

Antarctic Adventure Story Arc

Explore the icy Antarctic as you speed around the South Pole with an intrepid penguin explorer, racing against time as you try to raise flags of as many nations s possible at Antarctic ice stations. Leap icy crevasses, hop over ice puddles and dodge playful, curious seals on your exciting journey.

As a fearless explorer, you must be willing to travel and have a high tolerance for cold. You can have all the fish you can catch! Join a polar expedition as you help a penguin speed through ten Antarctic ice stations (game levels). Race against the clock to help him be the first penguin to circle the South Pole!

Antarctic Adventure Game Play

When the title screen appears you can chose your options or wait a minute and a practice run will begin. This lets you test your penguin's maneuverability before the real challenge is at hand.

Once you get going, you'll want to explore with the various speeds. Moving the joystick left & right moves him die to side, but the up and down control speed. Ignoring this makes the game unbearably slow and will help you beat the clock in higher levels when you have less time to eat fish and slap seals.

As you increase your speed, stuff comes at you quite a bit faster and it is harder to move laterally to snag fish and flags... not to mention that irritating seal that pops up unexpectedly. The issue I had at higher speeds was an inability to judge the penguin's jumps between obstacles. At slow speed, it's easy to jump in between multiple obstacles in a row. As you gain speed, you jump farther and I kept falling into the crevasses.

As you head for your first pit stop - the Australian Ice Station - you'll listen to a rampant repeat of the Skater's Waltz which can get on your nerves after a while.

Antarctic Adventure doesn't use the traditional "lives" scenario. You get one penguin who races to each ice station. He may become delayed or punched in the face by a seal, but he won't die. Even falling into a crevasse isn't fatal - he can wriggle out. You score points for eating fish, jumping obstacles and jumping the seals. Once you've reached the final (10th) Ice Station, the game repeats at greater difficulty.

There isn't a lot of diversity to mix things up, so you'll have to rely on going insanely fast to put some added enjoyment into this game. It looks nice, although Antarctica is scarce on landscaping, and plays quite well. It's a fun game to jump into now and then.

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