3-D Worldrunner

Factsheet

Story

Solar System #517 is being overrun by a race of Serpentbeasts led by the evil Grax. It's up to you with your amazing running and jumping abilities -- not to mention your laser cannon -- to run through the eight planets of System #517, leap over bottomless canyons, and destroy the alien beasts!

Overview

3-D Worldrunner (aka Tobidase Daisuken) is a concentration-heavy first person perspective game where the object is to dodge onscreen enemies. You automatically move forward at high speed, and though you can sometimes slow your character down, you cannot stop. Besides the enemies, vast chasms span the width of the playing field which require you to jump. At first, the chasms are simple one-at-a-time events but in later levels they require timing and quick thinking as you make two, three, or several jumps at once and each jump is of a different and unknown length. Release the button too early and you fall to your death; too late, and you overshoot into the next chasm.

There are eight levels in the game, corresponding to the eight "planets" you are attempting to save, followed by a large boss at the end which you shoot to destroy. Normally these points are the only sections of the game that allow you to shoot, but powerups are available that give you this ability for the duration of the level as well. Each level gets progressively harder, and if caution is used it is relatively simple to get to the fifth level, at which point the difficulty increases exponentially. You have three lives with the possibility of acquiring more, and you can continue if you hold Down and A while pressing Start (after game over).

3D Worldrunner came with a pair of 3D glasses. Choosing 3D mode and wearing these glasses made the game appear in three dimensions. The colors of each level were applied in such a way as to reduce the annoying color wash effect the red and blue lenses of 3D glasses give the real world, and the effect was gimmicky enough to make the game stick in players' minds long after the play value grew tired. Rad Racer, also by Square, was another game to use this effect.

When the player pauses the game, Worldrunner actually sits down and takes a cigarette break, hardly conducive to Worldrunner's eponymous activity, and something that apparently slipped past Nintendo's censors.

Screenshots

See Also

• List of NES games