When my brothers were very young, I would usually start them off playing video games with classic arcade titles.  One time I showed my brother Jeff the Taito Legends collection, and he gravitated toward The NewZealand Story, an arcade platformer where you play as a cute kiwi and fire arrows at baddies.  The game is notorious for being very challenging, but my brother Jeff was determined to beat it.  He got pretty far, way farther than I had patience for, so I admired his determination.  He got to a stage in the clouds and when he beat it, an angel said that he made it to heaven and can rest now.  And then the game ended!  Jeff was so mad that he got a ‘bad’ ending, but we also laughed about how the game essentially ‘trolled’ him.  We still joke about it to this day!  So I thought it was only appropriate for him to review The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure, an update to the arcade classic for the PC.  –Cary Woodham

Oh no! A giant seal (well, an average or maybe small seal when accounting for the size of the kiwis) has stolen all your kiwi friends! It is up to you to go through each stage and find the missing kiwis, avoiding snails, frogs, penguins that come out of portals riding swans, and much more!

The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure (I really thought NewZealand was two words in the original) is a fun but super-duper hard side-scrolling platformer sequel to the fun but super-duper hard arcade game from 1988. After a brief intro cutscene of the aforementioned thieving seal, you are thrown into the stage select screen, which is probably the biggest difference between this game and the original aside from the very cute 3D graphical upgrade. Upon starting the first level, you are immediately thrown into gameplay with no tutorial or instructions, which made it quite difficult to figure out how to move and shoot your bow and arrow at enemies. Gameplay is fast and chaotic as you fire at enemies, collect fruits and new weapons, and dodge the hail of projectiles and baddies that the game throws at you. You start with a limited number of lives, but, if you lose them all, it only means you go back to the stage select screen with 3 more lives. This makes it much easier to give tough levels another go, as well as explore already completed levels for secret warps to skip forward levels. Overall, The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure can be seen as a rather simple game, but is a very fun return to one of my favorite classic arcade titles.

Kid Factor:

For younger players, The NewZealand Story: Untold Adventure can definitely frustrate with its degree of difficulty, but the ability to try stages over again means determined kids can keep trying to rescue all those kiwi birds. Aside from the use of weaponry (bow and arrow, exploding bombs, fireball throwing wands) there is little that could be seen as not “kid-friendly”, as enemies just poof away when defeated.  –Jeff Orth

Tags: Reader Reviews!