The 3-D Battles of Worldrunner

I’m not actually sure what to make of 3-D Worldrunner. It’s a little game made by Squaresoft before they got into the whole super-complicated RPG thing, but it’s nothing like those games… other than it’s completely inexplicable.

What I do know is that you take control of some guy clad in green who is inexplicably driven forward and must overcome obstacles to reach the boss of the planet. Once there he somehow gains the ability to fly and shoot fireballs. Beat the boss and it’s off to the next planet.

The cool thing, though, is that this game is presented in this quasi-3D perspective, and you’re always running toward the horizon. The only things you can really do are crash into things, jump, and, if you grab the magic potion, shoot fireballs. But, primarily it’s the jumping around and trying to figure out how to use your fantastic leaping ability to cross ridiculously huge chasms.

The other fantastically awesome thing about this game is that it used red/blue separation to make the image appear in actual 3D. On the original NES! And although my copy was used and didn’t come with a box or a manual or a little plastic dust cover, it did come with a pair of glasses. But, I couldn’t actually ever get the colors on my ancient console television to match the colors of the tinted film in the glasses, so it just made the game look kind of fuzzy.

Okay, so that part wasn’t as exciting as it could have been.

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