Time Zone is one of those seemingly hallucinogenically inspired japanese platform games that never saw the light of day in western markets. You take on the role of some little kid who’s girlfriend is kidnapped by the evil Professor Time (Oooooh!), for reasons not quite mentioned. Is he a perverted kidnapper? A lonely old man looking for a surrogate granddaughter? Perhaps the world will never know, but his ass needs kicked regardless. Unfortunatly, Dr. Time has a habit of dropping large rocks on your head and jumping into different time periods, which of course you end up going to as well. To help you defeat the legions of walking traffic signs, dinosaurs, and depictions of native americans that would make even Archie Bunker say “Damn!”, you’re armed with your lucky red hat. Yes, a hat, but not your every day, run of the mill hat, by god! This one has the magical ability to come back to you like a boomerang, with physics that remind me heavily of the Windmill Shuriken from Ninja Gaiden. Also dispersed throughout the game are little trivia levels, which from what I see amount to counting crap that flies by on the screen. But wait, there’s more! If you collect enough little bells and make the smiley alarm clock on the status screen hit midnight, you’ll turn into an invincible skateboarder, which I guess is because skate boarding is “totally radical, dude!”, or something. Overall, this is a pretty fun little platformer, with pretty solid controls, decent music, and whacky ass enemies to kill.

Well, the game’s complete, and very very nice. So yay!

The patch has been updated and now includes a translation of the credits sequence.

• GoodNES TimeZone (J), or no-intro ROM
• ROM CRC32: 0xe305202e
• ROM MD5: 0xc582486614fba0f434c8b59e2d9eb575