Treasure Master

One bad dude's one bad game

Here's a fun fact: Treasure Master was made for an MTV contest.  The two grand prize winners got their choice of a bunch of stupid crap or ten thousand dollars.   I've played Treasure Master and there's one thing I can say for sure about the contest: MTV did not want to let go of that money.  People make smug remarks about "Nintendo hard" games of the era all the time.  Games like Castlevania, Zelda 2, you know.  Treasure Master is not Nintendo hard.  Treasure Master is "stay the hell away from my money" hard.  Let's dive right in...to treasure!

Treasure Master is a pretty standard side scroller.  It controls very well actually, much like if Mega Man could jump half the height of the screen.  The only issue with the controls are the fact that Joe Treasure has an extreme aversion to ropes.  Press whatever you want in front of a rope.  He'll grab it if he feels like it.  The main way to kill enemies is by kicking them with your Radium-Plated Boots.  It's not reliable.  Given your character is basically a caricature of radicalness he just kind of extends his foot a little.  In a game where you die in a few hits, lives are limited, and continues are zero, this is a problem.  It's best to avoid combat whenever you can.  There are also items scattered about which amount to disguised keys.  You need a bomb to blow up a wall to get the bow and arrow to get across a chasm and so on.  It's kind of got a Dizzy feel to it.  If you don't know about the Dizzy series, I envy you.

He's so cool.

The graphics and sound are actually pretty good.  The game looks very bright and colorful.  Everything is well drawn and animated.  When I think one-off piece of crap contest games I usually think of graphics that were thrown together as quickly as possible.  That is not the case here.  The music similarly is just as tubular as the main character, having been composed by Tim Follin.  Expect plenty of synth woodwinds and arpeggiated chords.  One bizarre thing to mention is that the theme of Treasure Master is a remixed Starsky and Hutch theme.  It's different enough that you wouldn't recognize it without knowing about the connection.  For all I know all the music is from 80s TV shows.  It sounds like it.

Now for the fun part.  I have never made it past the first level.  Why?  Because this game is a real bummer.  Once you run out of lives you're going back to the beginning, and you will run out of lives.  Treasure Master is laid out in such a way that without knowing what to do in advance you're extremely likely to have to backtrack.  Didn't get the hard hat which requires the air tank which requires the scissors which require the bomb?  Say goodbye to a life when you rocket into some ceiling spikes.  Didn't get the bow and arrow which you got by blowing up a secret wall you could only access by moving the submarine and then getting into the submarine and going backwards?  You missed one of the game's very few extra lives permanently.  It's like a maze you can only see a fraction of at a time.

My bomb blew up just before I reached that tile.  Back to the very start I go!

All this would be fine if not for the crushingly punishing everything else.  All enemies are dangerous.  Get hit just five times and you're minus one life.  Lose three lives and you might as well whip the cartridge out the window like a discus because your game is over, man.  It's not easy to dodge enemies either.  McTreasure has the floatiest jump in the world and his hitbox is roughly ten billion times the size of the universe.  There's a life or three hidden in each level but until I watched a playthrough I had no idea they existed.  And to top it all off there are, of course, tons of instant death traps.  I mentioned rocketing into spikes earlier.  Said spikes are spread across the ceiling over a deep pit with a spring at the bottom.  You don't know there's a spring there until you've fallen into it, which you do after traversing a series of very small platforms.  If you fall off those platforms, you die.  If you jump either too far or not far enough off the end, you die.  If you bounce of the spring...you die.  Unless, of course, you have the hidden item.  Yeah, it's that kind of game.

I can't really give a verdict on whether or not to buy this because, well, you can't buy it.  Not officially.  What I can say is whether or not you should play it.  I'd...not.  Don't get me wrong, I don't mind hard games.  I've beaten many of the games that everyone pats themselves on the back over playing, but there's a fundamental difference here.  Those games, while challenging, were challenging in a fun way.  Difficult does not mean fun or interesting.  Sanding through a brick is difficult.  Navigating the Minotaur's labyrinth is difficult.  If you're looking for a way to test your mettle there are hundreds of games that require just as much thought but aren't frustratingly obfuscated.  That or cheat yourself infinite lives.  Then it would be fine.