Game: Double Dare
Platform: NES
Year Released: 1990



Previously on Throwback Thursday, I tried to do something new and picked a game I had never played before for my weekly retro review. The game in question was Captain Planet, which I wanted to play based on my ridiculous love of the cartoon show of the same name. As a result, I ended up severely disappointed, because the game was pure garbage.

This week, I wanted to try the same formula again. I picked another NES game based on a television show from my childhood and played it for the first time. This time, I went with Double Dare, which any child of the eighties and nineties should know and love. For the uninformed, Double Dare was a game show for children (and later, entire families) in which they answered trivia questions and participated in ridiculous and often messy stunts for money and prizes.



Luckily, the Double Dare formula was a little harder to screw up, since most of the game is made up of the question-and-answer segment. It also helps that the makers of this game, Game Tek, also made the NES Jeopardy game, and stuck with the same simple formula. The rules remain the same as the television show: you participate in a game to determine which team gets control of the board, and then you answer questions to get points (which equal money). If you don’t know the answer to a question, you can dare the other team to answer, which doubles the value. If they don’t know, they’ll double dare you back, and if you’re still stumped, you take the physical challenge. Whoever came up with this formula, it must be said, is an absolute genius.

The trivia questions, based mostly on history and pop culture (and hilariously dated, since the game is almost twenty years old) work well when translated to video game. Unfortunately, the segments that really set Double Dare apart from other game shows, the wacky events, are really difficult to control. You’re often thrown into events with no instructions whatsoever, and before you even figure out how to make the controller do what you want it to, time has run out or the other team has won. It takes a little bit of time and frustration, but once you figure out how to use the controls, the physical challenges get a little better.



The obstacle course, which was always the best part of the show, is just silly in game form. I was really excited to see some familiar sights (the course remains very true to the show, complete with that hamster wheel players had to run up), but actually playing through it was kind of button-mashing tedium. To run, the player must constantly press the directional button on the D-pad, only breaking to jump up and grab a flag. What they should have done was turned the obstacle course into a platformer-like event; it would have been a lot more fun.



However, it’s hard to stay mad at an 8-bit game for coming up a bit short in the gameplay department. Despite the control flaws, there is still some fun to be had with this game. Playing with a friend would probably lead to all sorts of hilarity, and even while playing alone it’s nice to get the satisfaction of kicking the computer team’s ass. It’s not a classic like the television show, but it’s entertaining in its own right.

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