Review | Talmit's Adventure / Marvel Land (SEGA Genesis / SEGA Mega Drive)

A hidden gem on an old school console perhaps?

Wanna hear my thoughts about Talmit's Adventure / Marvel Land?

This is not a new game by any means - this game is nearing on 30 years and I thought I would do an old-school review on it as well as play the game on my YouTube channel! Yes, that's right - I have started to do some playthrough's of games and this was my first choice.

See here for a link to the channel. Also feel free to comment, ask question, requests and general chitty chatty goodness!

Why you ask? Well I will tell you!

This game was one of the first ones I owned via my parents when I was a young one and I thought at the time it was hard as hell. Generally to me, platformers are the easiest of game for me to play nowadays with FPS games being the absolute bane of my existence. But back in time platform games were all the rage and this one was pretty tricky. It looks beautiful (for the time of course) and it played out like most games of that era - you move from left to right, jumping and avoiding enemies or jumping on them to beat them. Pretty simple right? In a way, it was but in a way, it wasn't.

This is the platforms I talk about - and these are the easy ones!

One the hardest thing in the game is the jumping. It is quite difficult to land perfectly on platforms, especially when you have to get on to the smallest of ones that are only as wide as you. Does not help when if you fall you die, you die you start from the earliest checkpoint (which is conveniently as far away as possible as these deadly difficult jumps) and have to do it all over again. While this is a pain in most levels they can do the exact OPPOSITE and make it ridiculously easy in other levels with use of certain powerups.

The powerup I am referring to is the Dragon Wings. While being a Dragon Prince, you would have the ability to fly at some point. When you get this power up your jump becomes high and by constantly tapping the button, you can fly for as long as the powerup is active which can be rather generous at times. So while on some levels you can spend lives upon lives trying to make one jump and get to the next checkpoint, you can spend about 10 seconds basically flying right over the level, avoiding anything and everything that can come as a danger. The only difficult part in this is trying to land on a platform when your wings run out which is actually easy if you can see one below when your wings start to fade.

Another powerup has many Talmit's follow you and you can swing them around to kill enemies of grab on to swings on some levels. These little buggers have an annoying habit of making you fly like the wind when you let go at a certain angle. If you miss it by a fraction then you have to hope in hell is near perfect enough to land on the platform you need.

Marvel Land itself. Filled with coasters, candy and monsters, oh my!

While I am bashing this game a bit and it is an old platform game where the game play mattered a lot more than the graphics or story (sorry to every game in this century but it is true) it was really fun to play. Now it did take me about an hour to complete the game on normal difficulty and I found it easier now than I did as a kid, it still was a good hour I spent. Some parts were a nightmare but I enjoyed playing the game and that is what really matters isn't it?

All in all, Talmit's Adventure (or Marvel Land for us non-Europeans) is a nice game to play to kill an hour or two and if you like to go back and get some platform game nostalgia. It may be a lot more difficult as a child playing but still was challenging. If it was to ever be remade (99.99% unlikely) I would like to see if have a more constant difficulty rather than being stupidly hard or hard but with the dragon wing powerup to just negate all the challenge on the actual level below where you fly past the level.

As I have stated way above up in the post, there is an embedded YouTube video to World 1 of the game. I'll upload the other 3 worlds (yes, only 4 worlds with 7/8 level's each) when I get the time to.

What other old classic SEGA console games do you remember fondly?

The British Gamer. Signing Off.