NES RATING #8 - A Nightmare on Elm Street

....A Nightmare on Elm Street....

Produced by:  LJN

Distributed by: LJN Ltd.

Released:  October 1990

Sometime in the summer of 1990, during the days of Freddy Kruger changing from horror slasher to anti-hero pop culture icon, I saw a preview page in Nintendo Power for A Nightmare on Elm Street on the NES.  My imagination ran wild with what a video game based on my favorite horror series would deliver!  Would that hot nurse from Dream Warriors have a cameo?  How much blood would there be?  Who would the main character be - Nancy, Kristen, or Alice?

Then the game came out. 




The dream of an awesome "Freddy game" turned into a true nightmare. 

Your goal is to take some generic nameless character (looks sort of like A.C. Slater) and travel through a number of creepy houses on Elm Street, collect Freddy Kruger's bones, and burn them in a boiler room before fighting Freddy in the final battle.  No Dream Warriors, no Nancy, no Dokken, no Johnny Depp, no nothing. 

A Nightmare on Elm Street is compatible with the NES Four Score, a device that connects up to 4 controllers at once.  I recall playing this game at a friend's way back when (1991?) and actually using the device when it was fairly new, and yes, having four characters on the screen at once on the Nintendo was pretty neat.  This was a fairly boring game, though, so the novelty wore off pretty quickly.  Still, as a kid, having Freddy Kruger trying to slash up you and three friends at the same time, and seeing who would survive was a neat concept

The game isn't all bad, though. Along with the 4-player fun, for it's time, the concept of a "Dream World" (where the game gets harder and "scarier" when a meter expires) worked well.  Finding a radio to wake yourself up was a nice idea, and more in line with what the Elm Street franchise is all about.

The "boss" battles with various incarnations of Freddy are incredibly disappointing and fairly repetitive.  Flying claw, claw-on-a-chain,  yeah...we get it, you're afraid of the claw!  Freddy himself has a limited attack ("slash... jump... slash... jump") in a pattern and is easily defeated.  The game is just terribly uninteresting and never really slows a hint ofwhat could have been.  That was LJN for you.  License it, ship it out, make a quick buck, and move on to the next franchise.

Play control is so-so, with a slight delay in the reaction for your big attack button (punch).  I would hope with such a limited attack design, they could have ar least gotten that right.  The sound is also very dull, with looped music and a few different tunes (during the fight with Freddy, when you collect a stereo to exit the Dream World) but overall it's as plain and repetitive as the game.

If you're a fan of the A Nightmare on Elm Street series of films, you've likely already tried this game and been disappointed.  If you haven't, check out the game's title screen and then turn it off.

Nothing to see here.

Rating:  D