Hidden Gems: Volume One

Genre: Compilation / Arcade

Players: 1

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Review:

Hidden Gems: Volume One, elsewhere referred to by the more extended title, Imagine Presents Hidden Gems: Volume One, is a Compilation of four games originally released on the Commodore 64 platform, most of them fitting in some description of “Arcade-style game”. The games included are Gilligan’s Gold (originally released in 1984), Horace Goes Skiing (1983), Mutant Monty (1984), and N.O.M.A.D. (1985).

Here is what I thought of all of the games in this collection:

Game	Genre	# of Players	Score
Gilligan’s Gold	Arcade	1	D
tl;dr Gilligan’s Gold is a knockoff of another game that released a year prior to this, Bagman, and I can’t tell you if Bagman is any good, but this certainly isn’t. The game doesn’t explain its goal (you need to get the money bags to your wheelbarrow on multiple screens), but even when you know it, the game is far too difficult, with enemies that match your pace when unencumbered, quickly overtake you when you’re hauling bags, and that you have no way to fight save for hazards placed at specific spots around the stage… and fighting enemies only temporarily knocks them out. I cannot see anyone but the most masochistic players wanting to play this game.
Horace Goes Skiing	Arcade / Sports (Skiing)	1	D
tl;dr Horace Goes Skiing is an odd game that combines downhill slalom skiing with a Frogger-style game where you need to cross a busy street to get your skiis before you can even skii. It’s a bizarre concept, and it’s not helped by the fact that both games are terrible. The Frogger-esque traffic game has traffic that’s too fast and switches lanes without warning, and the skiing game has your character too close to the bottom of a screen that scrolls too quickly so you can’t see where you’re going. In more capable hands this could have been an interesting experiment of a pairing of two gameplay styles, but here it’s just a horrible mess.
Mutant Monty	Top-Down Arcade	1	D+
tl;dr Mutant Monty is a Top-Down Arcade-style game where you need to navigate your character to collect all the gold (I think it’s gold) in each level while avoiding hazards and then get to the level’s exit. The game functionally works, but the hazards don’t make much sense, the levels are convoluted in their design, your character has the odd trait of moving faster horizontally than they do vertically, and some levels feature a hazard that can kill you before you even register where your character is on-screen. Plus, the game’s terrible, repetitive chiptune soundtrack will make you instantly want to mute the game.
N.O.M.A.D.	Top-Down Action	1	D-
tl;dr N.O.M.A.D. is a Top-Down Action game that has you piloting some sort of vehicle (it’s difficulty to tell), unlocking doors, dodging enemy fire, and blasting away at… things. Yeah, the visuals in this game make it difficult to tell what anything is, make it hard to even tell what way you’re facing, and that’s on top of terrible loose controls that make it horribly difficult to control, plus hazards that lurk on the edge of the screen and can kill you before you can even register them. Ugh.

In short, while I have heard of none of these games prior to this, thus meeting the “hidden” descriptor in this bundle’s title, absolutely none of these games holds up at all by today’s standards. You can kinda’ make Mutant Monty tolerable if you mute the game while playing, but even then it’s far from anything worth seeking out.

Well, at the very least with four obscure games you might hope to see some rare supplemental materials… and that hope would be quickly dashed – all you get here are a few swappable control options, a few display options, and a brief description of each game (that doesn’t even tell you how to play).

I suppose the price of $7 isn’t horrible for four games that aren’t really available elsewhere on the modern market… or at least, it might be if the games were any good. But, again, they’re not.

In the end, Hidden Gems: Volume One is a pretty clear indication how little accuracy a game title needs to have. I don’t think any modern gamer would consider any of these games to be gems, and if these four games are Imagine Games’ best first step forward for this series, I hate to think what they’d scrounge up for a Volume Two. These are four terrible games that are not worth buying, playing, or even wasting any additional time thinking about after moving on from this review.

tl;dr – Hidden Gems: Volume One is a Compilation of four mostly Arcade-style games from the Commodore 64 platform: Gilligan’s Gold, Horace Goes Skiing, Mutant Monty, and N.O.M.A.D.. All four of these games are terrible and not worth your time or money. Don’t buy this Compilation.

Grade: D

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