Aldo's Adventure

The Good
The game is easy to pick up and play, short and the difficulty can be selected manipulating the number of barrels that can appear on screen at the same time. It's also one of those games that, if tackled in the right way, can become a challenge among friends.

The Bad
The physics of the game don't make any sense at all and this is the biggest and more recognizable (and upsetting) flaw of the game. The platforms behave differently depending on how you approach and from what height and the fire sometimes does burn you, sometimes it doesn't. The total absence of sound or of a minimum range of sound effects makes the game boring, even because the graphics, although it's 1987, are definitely not top-tier. In many, many occasions the game seems even more broken, like when Aldo can "erase" the background and/or the timer and his life count just by passing in front of it. The game has no real ending and after you beat the original 10 levels you replay them in a "negative" version (with dark background) but this time you have less time to complete every level: after playing it for years I can say it's very hard to play more than 24-25 levels (so two "cycles" and a half)

The Bottom Line
I have to be frank and the first times I played this game I was absolutely furious for the incredible amount of glitches that made the game almost unplayable. Then, moved by I don't know what kind of force, I played it more and more and I started to speedrun it and, although all of the flaws and glitches were of course still there, i felt like the devs left them in the game on purpose and built the game around them placing platforms, barrels, chests that change their behavior depending on the level you're in. This way, a sort of "hardcore player" would consider them as a challenge and would think that probably the game has been playtested more than what it appears at first glance. That's the reason why for months I kept discovering how to use the glitches to my advantage to the point of lowering the playtime to less than 3 minutes. Anyway all considered, you can't give it a 10/10 just because you had fun with it with some friends, although I'd love to get in touch with the Ibachs and talk about the game.