Playability of Quattro NES games?

[Rickstilwell1]

On the topic of the lockout features of the Nes, why do many of the title screens appear jumbled, yet the rest of the game plays fine? Is this just a dirty cart or has anyone else has this issue with Camerica cart title screens?

Most of the time that is a dirty cartridge but I also found out about another problem with Quattro Adventure from a member of a CRT group on facebook:

He said Some unlicensed titles such as Quattro Adventure use a lower value for black that is actually darker than the licensed NES standard for black. While most older televisions don't see any problem with this, newer ones (such as my flat Toshiba tube TV) misinterpret those values as a pulse signal and many rooms in the game will have a jumpy screen so bad that you can't see what you're doing. Quattro Adventure is the only one I have where I have experienced this yet. I thought I got a bad cartridge but I tried it on an older TV where it worked fine so I didn't have to send it back.

This guy also told me The Immortal for NES is an actual licensed game that has a similar problem with graphics and is often mistakenly sold as not working when it is really the newer TVs being incapable of displaying it correctly.


Anyway, my favorite Code Masters / Camerica games for NES are The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy and Big Nose the Caveman. The Fantastic Adventures of Dizzy had some changes made when they updated it for the Aladdin Deck Enhancer re-release. I like both versions though. The original gold NES cart is a little more challenging regardless of its lower number of stars, partially due to the slower walking speed also keeping the length of your jump to a minimum. Many item locations are different too, but I don't think the alternate placement of items make anything that much more difficult. If you start with one version or the other, you'll just experience the different areas in a different order because of it. Getting flippers for swimming can be very early in the original version, but will take a long time in the Aladdin version.


While Big Nose the Caveman was very fun for me, I found its sequel Big Nose Freaks Out to not be anywhere near as good. While the skateboard idea is funny, there's no level music which makes it boring, the sprites are smaller and the constant skateboarding make it more difficult to control than the simple sidescrolling of the first game. The first game had pretty catchy music so the lack of music in Big Nose Freaks Out was a huge disappointment to me. This is NES, not Atari 2600.


Oh, and Treasure Island Dizzy was recently re-released for Atari Jaguar on Atariage.com - it was ported from the Atari ST remake of the game. It's still not the best Dizzy game but it looks much better than this NES port on Quattro Adventure.