GAME CLEAR No. 188 -- Binary Land

Binary Land (1983, Multiplatform)

Developer: Hudson Soft
Publisher: Hudson Soft
Clear Version: Family Computer
Clear Platform: Family Computer
Clear Date: 8/9/24

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Why should I care?
Cute penguins and a fun control gimmick make this Famicom game that never saw an NES release worth a look.

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Penguin Land

Sometimes when I sit down to do these little posts, I like to do a little research. That’s especially true in a case like this when I’m writing about a fairly obscure game. I might have a chance to inform my audience about a pretty unknown game, so I want to get my facts straight!

But sometimes in the course of doing so, I encounter a post that sorta just says everything I’d want to say. In this case, that post is this from Hardcore Gaming 101. If you want to know a whole bunch about this game, honestly skip my piece and click on through. It’s a good one.

If you want to know a little about it, well, it’s a walkin’-around puzzle game. You control two penguins, sort of. They start on opposites sides of a wall in the middle of a maze. You control one of them directly, and the other one matches your up and down movements and mirrors your left and right movements. Fun! I’ve never played a puzzler quite like that. Anyway, you gotta get them to meet at the center of the top of a maze to unlock a cage that contains a little heart in it. You see, the penguins are in love! This makes sense somehow.

You don’t get to just wander around all willy-nilly, though. There are spiders out to get ya, and they’ll take you out in one hit. If either penguin gets hit, that’s a life lost and a round to restart. Fortunately, each penguin is armed with bugspray, so as long as you keep your wits about you and an eye on each penguin, you should be okay. The bugspray also gets rid of pesky spiderwebs scattered throughout each stage. These don’t harm the penguins directly, but they do immobilize them until the partner penguin comes to the rescue. The final tricky part is you also gotta get them to meet at the cage at precisely the same time. So sometimes you gotta be a bit clever about that and move one guy into a nook so you can move the other one around freely.

That’s about it, and it’s fun! It’s a nice little puzzle game concept with a just-right level of challenge. There are 16 unique mazes in the game, and once you clear them, the game loops forever arcade-style, adding more enemies and hazards until you run out of lives. One loop was enough for me.

The reason I have this game at all is that it was one that came up when I Googled “English-friendly games only released on Famicom” or something like that. Technically, it was also released on a bunch of Japanese home computers whose libraries I wish I knew more about, but I don’t have any of those. I have an AV Famicom because I won it in a charity raffle that I didn’t realize I had entered (I thought it was just a charity drive!), so I wanted to get some use out of it. This short and sweet game is the first I’ve finished on the hardware. It’s a nice device and for sure the most versatile way to play Nintendo’s 8-bit catalog. It’s got all the upsides of the original Famicom, such as the ability to play FC carts and connect to the Famicom Disk System, without downsides like hardwired controllers and RF-only TV connection. Grab an adapter for NES cartridges for a few bucks, and you’ve got a machine that can do it all. I highly recommend it to anyone looking to play games from that era on original hardware.

Binary Land was also a safe bet because the game was cheap, and even if I’d hated it, just look at this cartridge! A super cute pastel pink that looks great on the shelf. Can’t lose.

I’ve got a small stack of other Famicom titles to mess around with now, so maybe I’ll write about those on here soon. Playing it is also reminding me of just how great some of the games from those early days were, so it might get me to clean up some of my NES backlog too. We’ll find out together here on the Nixon Computer.