Little Nemo: The Dream Master

By Spencer . September 30, 2005 . 1:29am

 

 

During the reign of the NES, was the reign of platform style gameplay. In this era, jumping on enemies was a way of defeating them and the challenge in a game came from playing a level over and over again to memorize the stage layout. While most people remember Mario, Sonic and a few others, it is rare that people remember Little Nemo: The Dream Master. Such a shame since Little Nemo is one of the best platformers on the NES. Call it bad timing (Little Nemo was released during the NES dying days), call it poor marketing, or even call it lack of availability. Little Nemo seemed to fall into to the realm of the underdog.

 

What made Little Nemo a good game was it had atmosphere. The charming, kiddy, storybook styled graphics flowed with the game’s story. The premise behind Little Nemo is based on a short story of the same name. There is this princess from the dream world who needs help ridding the world of nightmares. Nemo was chosen to endure this task that spans in eight themed levels. Nemo is armed with an unlimited supply of candy…? Candy will freeze your standard enemy in their tracks, but if you feed candy to special enemies Nemo will be able to change into them. This allows Nemo to gain abilities such as jumping really high from the frog costume, climbing trees from the gorilla costume or fitting through narrow areas from the lizard costume. You’ll need to make use of all of the "costume" on to acquire the six keys you need to unlock the next level. Capcom had some pretty clever level design, which made you use costumes in ways you would think of, and occasionally ways you wouldn’t think of.  In the first level there are some keys that are placed high up on a mushroom so naturally you would need the frog costume to jump up and grab the keys. However, in the same level the last key is acquired by using the lizard to walk vertically up hills that cannot be jumped over with the frog costume.

 

To beat this game you’ll need to play levels over and over again to first find the location of the six keys and you’ll need to play them some more to figure out how to get to the keys. One particularly frustrating level is the third level, where you are riding a train. This level has a lot of areas that have something that would instantly kill Nemo, such as spikes. To beat this level you will need to remember the path of the train, when to jump, when to duck, etc. etc. The only other qualm about this game is that  Nemo without a costume cannot attack enemies until the last level. You can stun them with candy, but you cannot eliminate the enemies by jumping, punching or attacking them unless you have a costume on. This can be a frustrating ordeal if you can’t find a costume or when you’re trying to switch out of a costume into a new one.

 

The graphics in this game are top notch. All the levels are packed with backgrounds, loads of on screen enemies that are colored within the limited palette and many platforms. All of this does come at a price. If too many objects are on screen you’ll notice slowdown, which is quite frequent in this game. Slowdown, in general, takes away from platform games and this game is no different. It always seems to come at the worst time like when you’re jumping to the next platform or trying to avoid an enemy attack. While this is annoying, Nintendo games are notorious for having slowdown. Heck, some games on the Gamecube still stuffer from slowdown. The music follows suit with the game. It sounds like music you would hear at a carnival, but it enhances the kiddy and dream like atmosphere the game has.

 

Control-wise the game is tight, just like all other Capcom games. Nemo is responsive as much as possible (except for the occasional case of slowdown). Controls are also simple to learn, one button is jump and one button is throw candy. So there is a pretty light learning curve.

 

Little Nemo features eight levels, eight types of costumes to choose from and some fun gameplay. However, after you beat the game that’s it. The key’s are in the same place and all the puzzles are the same. While its a fun play over there isn’t any else to find. In hindsight Capcom could have put the keys in random locations, which could have made the game more interesting. Overall, Little Nemo is a fun game for the NES, too bad it doesn’t hold in the memory the same place as Super Mario Brothers 3.

 

Hard to find?

This game was released along the same time as Mega Man six, which makes it a pretty rare find. If you get lucky you’ll see it a Gamestop or an EB. If not you can always snag a copy off of eBay for a reasonable price.

 

+ Pros: Innovative platform design, good level design, artistic graphics

 

- Cons: Easy to learn hard to master, no second challenge

 

Overall: Little Nemo is a game that should be a Capcom classic. It features atmosphere, lush graphics and some excellent level design from the good people of Capcom. Little Nemo never got its place in the sun since it was overshadowed by Mega Man and Capcom’s Disney games. Even though Little Nemo provides fun game play it is long forgotten in the massive amount of NES games.

 

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