The Classic Arcade and Console Era (1972-1989) - Aztec Adventure (a.k.a. Nazca ’88 – The Golden Road to Paradise)
Be sure to try this Zelda-style overhead action game with adorable characters and a unique setting.
RELEASE DATE: 1988
DEVELOPER / PUBLISHER: Sega
BEST VERSIONS: Sega Master System
PLAYABILITY TODAY: Highly playable
I’m not sure what was going on at Sega in the 1980s, but someone in the marketing department came up with some truly terrible titles for some otherwise excellent games. Aztec Adventure is one such casualty because it not only misrepresents what the game is about but isn’t even clever about it. The original Japanese title, Nazca ’88 – The Golden Road to Paradise, provides a pretty strong giveaway that the game’s aesthetic is modeled after the artwork and culture of the people of Peru who lived an entire continent away from the Aztecs in Mexico. The game’s manual indicates that the adventure takes place in Central America – again, not the region where the Aztecs were active – and the art design more closely resembles Peruvian artifacts than Aztec art. And the clincher is that the end of the game showcases a room full of Nazca line drawings, a famous feature of Peru. Given that the main character is a boy named Niño, why didn’t they just call it Nazca: Niño’s Adventure?
Such discussion may seem pointless, but then again, Aztec Adventure is an obscure game from the Sega Master System that really deserves to be better known. It’s an overhead maze-style adventure that plays a bit like The Legend of Zelda, but it’s divided into levels rather than featuring a continuous overworld. As an action game, it’s just OK, but what makes Aztec Adventure so memorable is its incredible presentation, which features adorable anime-style cartoon characters, cheerfully distinct music and awesome-looking environments. It’s hard to believe that a game that looks and sounds this good came out on an 8-bit game console in the late 80s, and it’s a testament to what the Sega Master System was capable of above and beyond the Nintendo Entertainment System’s more meager capabilities.
The premise of Aztec Adventure is that you’re a boy named Niño searching for Paradise, and your adventure takes you across the treacherous wilds to battle demon guardians and recruit allies along the way with carefully-tossed bribes. As the game explains in the opening screen, three enemies will switch sides and follow you if you pelt them with bags of cash – the goose-headed Papi will join you for one, the catty Pupe will join you for two, and the dog-faced Poh will join you for four. While these allies can be very helpful and essentially follow you around and mirror your actions, you have to be careful not to get them stuck in the scenery or killed, because they’ll abandon you without remorse.
On each map, Niño is given a list of some demons to destroy, and these range between fire-breathing flowers to giant bats to watery men to masked rabbits to stone lions. All of them have a weakness to your ever-ready sword and one of the consumable special weapons you can pick up along the way. These special weapons are dropped by enemies and include things like fireballs, iron balls, spears, tornadoes, lightning or dynamite. While these special weapons can be hard to come by, enemies respawn the moment you leave a section of the screen, and as a result, it can be pretty easy to farm special items until you reach the maximum of eight of each in your inventory.
Most of the game’s enemies are fairly simple to defeat with a few slashes of your sword, and Niño has a generous life bar that can be recharged when he tosses money into a wishing well. Even so, the game can be challenging if you rush through it, and Niño’s limited lives and lack of continues make it tough to beat without taking some time to learn the levels or utilizing an emulator feature such as saved states.
Niño’s adventure takes him across five different areas that all eventually repeat one time before he’s whisked away by the goddess to a misty, mystical place where you rebattle all of the bosses and tame a Nazca bird so that Niño can finally enter Paradise and the game can provide the player with a cryptic message about how the real paradise exists within our dreams. Still, it’s a nice and tidy conclusion to a fun action adventure, and the animated cutscene of Niño’s face turning from perplexed confusion to a radiant smile adds a little extra charm.
Since Sega has yet to re-release Aztec Adventure in any form, playing it today is going to require you to either track down the original cartridge and hardware or to fire up your favorite emulator with a game ROM. Fortunately, it’s an inexpensive game to buy and a fairly easy one to track down, and its fun theme, great presentation and catchy soundtrack make it well worth the effort.
As Our Series Continues…
It’s time to move on to console and arcade gaming in the 1970s and 80s, and we’re going to cover it all with an exploration into hundreds more games you’ve probably never played but definitely ought to check out. Come for amazingly great early 1980s games like Warlords, Super Locomotive, Shark! Shark!, Acrobatic Dog-Fight, Mysterious Stones: Dr. John’s Adventure and Intrepid and stick around for mid-to-late 1980s greats like Peter Pack-Rat, Penguin-kun Wars, Momoko 120%, UFO Robot Dangar, Wonder Momo, Raimais, Last Alert, The Legend of Valkyrie and the arcade version of Twin Eagle: Revenge Joe’s Brother, complete with a rockin’ soundtrack with wonderfully inscrutable lyrics.
If you’ve never heard of any of those games, you’re in for a treat as we explore them one by one. And If those games are all old hat to you, don’t worry; they’re just the tip of the iceberg for what we’ll be discussing!
If you missed my series on the hundreds of 1980s PC games you probably never played, you can find the entire archive at https://greatestgames.substack.com.
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I love the vibrant, pastel colour pallet of the Master System. There's something to be said about these older consoles and how their limited tech actually helped their libraries establish a unique visual and sonic identity.
This game really seems to lean into that look a lot, which is so cool. Great article - will have to track this one down.
Looks like a neat game. Title might seem like a silly mistake today, but I’m sure things seemed more nebulous when you couldn’t just go on Wikipedia and find the pertinent facts. This info would be far from common knowledge if you were not from the Americas.
OTOH, I guess a day or two of research wouldn’t have been a bad thing either.