Bill & Ted: eras instead of levels

The games under the Bill & Ted name come from a film about two indifferent students who end up with a phone booth that travels through time. That premise carried into the games as structure: instead of a row of levels there are historical eras you switch between, and the job is to collect specific figures out of them. Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure is the home-computer version, where you move between periods, pick up objects and work out who each one is meant for — a figure will only come along once you have something that persuades them.

That release has two siblings in the catalogue, Bill & Ted's Excelent Adventure and Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure, filed from differently spelled editions of the same game.

The consoles read it their own way

Bill & Ted's Excellent Video Game Adventure took the booth literally: you punch numbers into its keypad to pick a destination in time, and where you end up depends entirely on what you typed. The catch is that the game does not hand you those numbers, the hints are scattered across the eras, and a large part of playing consists of writing down who said what and where. Play without notes and you wander.

A completely different direction is Bill & Ted's Excellent Game Boy Adventure: A Bogus Journey!, drawn from the second film and effectively dropping time travel altogether. It is side-on jumping action that runs left to right, with the eras reduced to scenery.

The home-computer Excellent Adventure is the one you can start in the browser here. The other four records — the two further filings of that game, the console version and the handheld follow-up — are catalogue profiles with descriptions and images.