New Adventure Island

New Adventure Island from 1992 brings back Master Higgins, the familiar hero of Hudson Soft's Adventure Island series. This time he runs, jumps and throws hammers on the PC Engine console, with development handled by Now Production – and the result is one of the briskest incarnations of the whole series.

The recipe stays true to tradition: a side-view platformer for one player, tropical islands, fruit to collect and a constantly draining energy bar that turns every stage into a race against time. Add the classic skateboard rides that count among the series' trademarks. Adventure Island was always built on clean, immediate playability with nothing extraneous, and the stronger PC Engine hardware allowed more colour, smoother motion and bigger sprites.

The series has a famously tangled history – it began in the eighties as a reworking of Wonder Boy and gradually grew into its own family of titles across Nintendo's and NEC's consoles. New Adventure Island stands among its last purely two-dimensional representatives of the classic era.

The PC Engine is a machine worth knowing on its own terms. Among the most successful consoles in Japan at the end of the eighties, it was barely sold in Europe, so its catalogue stayed unknown to most players here. Its games shipped on thin HuCards, a format collectors still prize.

If you want to learn why Master Higgins kept such a loyal audience, it could not be easier: OldGame.cz runs New Adventure Island right in the browser, so you can hop on the skateboard immediately.