Title: Sydney Hunter Collection
System: Evercade
Price: $19.99
Release Date: Mid 2023
Prelude
This collection is a set of four games, just four! Three of which consist of three out of four Sydney Hunter titles, which is a series you may remember for being the one set for the doomed Coleco Chameleon. Thankfully, these games are very real! The fourth game is Jester, which has a rather interesting story behind it…
Presentation
We have our first Intellivision game here! It uses a handy open source emulator, which works pretty well and maps the controller to the evercade like a glove. Considering how simple the Sydney Hunter game is on Intellivision, that may not seem surprising, but trust me, later Intellivision games we’ll get to will shock you with how confusing they’d be on a real system.
NES is also new to the SFG review lineup, but Jester barely has any sound to begin with, and all of it is emulated well and the game looks crisp. Future NES games will be just as accurate, so not much to comment on here. It isn’t missing sound channels like certain other NES emulations.
SNES is back, with Sydney Hunter emulating as it should, janky transitions, inconsistent audio balance and weird bugs included. Not much to add here.
Master System is back too, and Sydney Hunter uses the FM audio and FM audio only. No PSG mode sadly, but it at least sounds rather decent.
Gameplay
You know the drill here; onto the four games!
Sydney Hunter and the Shrines of Peril (Intellivision)- This fun tribute to a classic Smurfs game is a simple scorechaser where Sydney moves from left to right, jumping over enemies and scoring points along the way. Reach the ancient heads in the shrine, and you get the treasure and do it again at an increased difficulty.
A very, very simple game, with not much to it besides what I just summed up. You can jump high, or jump low, and jumping low gets you more points, but some low jumps won’t clear certain obstacles. This is a pure scorechasing experience, and I got a decent bit of time trying to best my score. Even with the harder loops adding new obstacles though, the trickiest part of the game is some horrid hit detection on the final screen, where if you don’t jump perfectly onto the corner of the statue, you die. If it wasn’t for this quirk, the game would be a lot easier and rather slow to get going, but with it, it can range from infuriating to something that’s more or less as simple as a LCD game. Decent fun, but if you hate scorechasers you’ll loop this in three minutes and be done with it.
Sydney Hunter and the Caverns of Death (SNES)- This was one of the earliest SNES homebrews I became aware of, and you can definitely tell based on how this game feels. The goal here is to go from stage to stage, collecting treasure to use as keys to get to later parts of said stages, while avoiding enemies and rising lava along the way. You have a boomerang to help you out in a pinch, along with a torch for lighting up dark rooms, but otherwise this is a pretty typical action platformer.
However, the game is incredibly janky, with more than one instance of me hitting an enemy in a spot that should not hit me due to wonky hitboxes, or immediately dying because the part of the screen I transitioned to had an enemy placed there. Every screen transition also has this brief glitchy line effect to it, which just gets incredibly annoying the further you get into the game. There are only ten stages here, and while you do have two difficulty options, it just turns Caverns of Death from a one hit game to a two hit game.
There’s an “Extra” option here, but I couldn’t figure out what that does, and I ain’t replaying the entire game again to see if it added any extra stages. (and it didn’t seem to change the original stages much at all) Very competent for a first time SNES homebrew, but pales compared to more recent homebrew efforts, and is just too janky to be all that fun for long. Beat it once, and you’ll want to forget about it.
Sydney Hunter and the Sacred Tribe (Master System)- The true gem of this collection, but one you’ll definitely be abusing those save states for. This is a full blown Metroidvania on Sega Master System! Here you must traverse a giant labyrinth, collecting diamonds in order to progress deeper into the dungeon to find your way out. You don’t get fancy upgrades or anything besides the occasional invincibility powerup, but this is a rather fun time to just play and map out your path to try and nab those diamonds.
Play as originally intended though, and you’ll find that Sacred Tribe is unrelentingly brutal. You get three lives and only three lives, and unless you find a pineapple for an extra life you better make sure to not touch anything. Lose them all and back to the beginning of this adventure you go, which makes trying to clear this without stating pretty darn tough, and incredibly frustrating near the end of the game during those last few rooms. It also doesn’t help that the quicksand got buggy at one point for me, and I somehow glitched through the floor and crashed the game.
Still, when you’re able to take your own time via save states the game becomes way more fun, and even if you manage to memorize it, playing raw can be pretty decently enjoyable as well. For a homebrew SMS game, this is far more entertaining than the other Sydney Hunter games on the set, and the one you’ll spend the most time on, especially trying to beat it without saving. Just don’t expect much replay value besides a challenge run.
Jester (NES)– A tribute to an obscure Canadian thing called “Videoway”, which had several games on it, all of which are lost media including the game Fou du Roi, which this is a clone of. This is a Pac-Man clone where your main objective is to grab keys to open doors in other parts of the dungeon, get those items, and eventually clear out the dungeon to escape it. Do this a few times and you beat the game with no looping at all.
Control wise, the game feels fine. The main issue with Jester is from the complete lack of challenge until the final stage. Each level barely gets more difficult, and the only time before the final stage I felt like I had any trouble was when your torch energy runs out, as everything will become invisible save for items and enemies, making navigation way trickier. Otherwise until that last dungeon, you just run around, get keys, then get swords to beat up skull enemies until you escape.
Rinse and repeat, and you’ll eventually get to the last dungeon where the enemies are finally fast enough to be a threat to you, but by the time you figure out how to take care of them and clear that stage, the game just ends. Incredibly disappointing as the scorechasing potential would have been a lot higher here if the game looped and kept getting harder.
Conclusion
Originally I felt Sydney Hunter was a short, but very fun set of games, despite being one I fully beat in a few weeks. Revisiting it for this review though, and I found it incredibly lacking. Jester is just outright boring, Caverns of Death is too janky to keep my interest for long, and while I enjoy Shrines of Peril due to the scorechasing aspect, even I can’t excuse that final jump.
So that leaves Sacred Tribe, a tough, yet very fun metroidvania that manages to be really darn cool! But once you beat that, there’s little else to do besides play it again without the save states. Same for Caverns of Death, and Jester doesn’t even loop. That means you could easily fully beat the collection and have little to replay besides Shrines of Peril, which is definitely not a thing for everyone. I kinda wish the modern Curse of the Mayan came to this set as well, but the engine there is incompatible with Evercade, so I get why it was left out; that game is far more fleshed out than Tribe, and would have easily helped the package be more worth the price.
Sadly as it stands, this is really a cart of one and dones. If you like scorechasers and metroidvanias, 2/4 of the games are pretty decent, but the other two are just really rough games, and there are far better collections out there for the same price.
I give Sydney Hunter Collection a 5 out of 10.