Where's Waldo? (NES) Playthrough

A playthrough of THQ's 1991 license-based puzzle/hidden object game for the NES, Where's Waldo?

This video shows the game completed on all three difficulty levels:

0:12 Easy
3:56 Medium
9:06 Hard

Where’s Waldo?, the beloved series of children’s books by British illustrator Martin Handford, challenges adventurous readers to find the eponymous traveler - a guy who has the bad habit of getting lost amongst giant throngs of people - in a multitude of (often hilarious) situations, each depicted in a lavishly detailed, two-page spread.

The NES game, made by Bethesda and published by THQ, attempts to recreate that experience as an 8-bit video game, and I'm of two minds when it comes to judging the end product.

On the one hand, the idea is patently absurd. Compacting a Waldo book down into a 256K game that's designed to run on a machine that displays twenty-five colors simultaneously works out about as well as you'd expect.

On the other hand, I actually liked it. My parents grabbed it as a Christmas Eve gift for my sister and I in 1991, and we had a lot of fun with it. It looks awful and it can be finished in under five minutes, but it's far from being the worst NES game I've ever played. The map screen, the minigames, and the trip to the moon are nifty in a quaint sort of way, the scene layouts change every time you play, the music is catchy, and it's over before you can get bored with it.

It certainly isn't a replacement for the real McCoy, but for an NES game that sold for about the same price as one of the books did, I didn't think it was nearly as bad as the magazine reviews made it out to be. (I don't remember Nintendo Power ever giving another game ratings as low as the ones they slapped on this one!)

For whatever it's worth, between the two games Bethesda developed for the NES, Where's Waldo? is the clear winner in my book.

Then again, even a microwaved mug of vomit is more appealing than the Home Alone NES game (   • Home Alone (NES) Playthrough  ), so that's probably not a great point of comparison.

Whatever. I like Where's Waldo, and I really, really hate Home Alone. That's all I'm saying.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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