Total Recall isn’t the worst NES game despite its efforts

destructoid.com:

I have a history with Total Recall on NES. Not only has it been frequently trashed by everyone I’ve ever looked up to, but it also soured my early retro gaming experience. We had an NES growing up, but my family sold it for an SNES while I was still too young to care. I reacquired one when I was a teenager and it came with potentially the worst assortment of games I could have started with: Kid Icarus, Castlevania 2, and Total Recall. It would be years later that Punch-Out!! and River City Ransom would teach me that not every game on the system would make me feel like peeling my skin off.

I’m not very familiar with the movie, Total Recall. I’ve seen glimpses of it, but mostly I just know that there’s a woman in it with three tits. The fact that I know this and still haven’t watched it makes me question my priorities.

Like many NES games, the 8-bit adaptation of Total Recall has no bare tits. It’s entirely deficient in tits. You may think I don’t have a point here, but I do: the developers had the opportunity to make Total Recall essential playing, but they didn’t take it. Instead, we’re left wandering a wasteland bereft of tits. They could have also maybe had good gameplay, but alas.

I can say with confidence that Total Recall is without nipples because I went to the effort of actually beating it. I would appreciate your admiration for this, but otherwise, I accept your pity. I had never seen past the Subway level. It’s not that Total Recall is difficult, it just requires a certain amount of willpower to put up with it. It constantly finds new and effective ways to frustrate, and since there are no continues, that makes the prospect of starting over enough times to learn the game about as enticing as a pillowcase made of