Gaming - News
The NES Game That Takes The Shortest Time To Beat
By ERIK PETROVICH
Games from the first few console generations are rarely long, in large part because of the limited storage available on cartridges. Some NES games can take a long time to beat, while others can be finished in less than an hour — and the one that reigns supreme as the shortest NES game of all time can take mere minutes if players know what they're doing.
It takes skilled players under 10 minutes to complete “Where's Waldo?” for the NES. Instead of Waldo's location being exactly the same every time, as it is in the books that the game is based on, the settings would be randomized each time the game loaded. However, “Where's Waldo?” is easy for the sharp-eyed, and the bitmap pixelated graphics didn't make it harder.
Three out of the eight stages in “Where's Waldo?” don't involve finding him at all, as players just walk to the exit in a cave, go through a maze, and play a matching game at the end. The game’s graphics were also abysmal and panned by critics, and the simplicity made it easy to spot Waldo in each setting — even on the hardest difficulty level, Waldo was not hard to find.
