NES RATING #9 - Felix The Cat

....Felix The Cat....

Produced by:  Hudson Soft

Distributed by: Hudson Soft

Released:  1992

Felix the Cat is a fun and basic platformer that, while lacking in overall originality and challenge, incorporates a fun power-up system and smooth play control.  This game is vastly underrated due to both the release date of the game (1992, as Nintendo focused on marketing the Super Nintendo) as well as the obscurity of the character.  With many children and older gamers alike not so eager to play a Felix the Cat game, they missed out on a good time.

Your job, as Felix the Cat, is to rescue your main girl Kitty Cat from the evil Professor, who wants Felix's magical Bag of Tricks.  Pretty generic plot there.

I thought the difficulty was well-set to allow for plenty of "cruising" and figuring out the game's controls and objects while at the same time throwing in plenty of surprises to kill of Felix when you least expected it.  After a few continues, you'll be able to avoid these surprise enemies and pitfalls.

"Powering up" is a fun process, as you increase your attacks from the punching glove (which needs to be close-by) to a type of ship (which has a short range firing attack) to a tank (which fires long-range bouncing balls) by collecting power ups.  You have a magic meter that depletes, but not too quickly, and there's a fair amount of power ups to collect to keep the magic going.  Good stuff.  The power-up system is the game's best feature, and as you're hopping through unique levels you'll be after those bottles of milk (heh) to refill the magic meter.

Overall, the game's difficulty could be much more difficult.  If you play it for any great deal of time, you'll find yourself getting through it fairly quickly.  So while replay value isn't high, I find it's a fun, good-looking, and well-controlled platformer that is recommended for a go around.

Check it out.  It's from Hudson Soft, the masters of "cutesy" games that are usually solid and fun times.

Rating:  C+