dailynewsnblog
Updated with Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. Enjoy!
Indiana Jones returned to cinemas in 2023 for one final crack of the whip. While rewatching the movies and whistling that John Williams theme awaiting Harrison Ford’s return in The Dial of Destiny, we found ourselves looking back over Indy’s video game library – and the release of Indiana Jones and the Great Circle on Xbox (and then PS5, and now Switch 2) only made us more curious to dig up the past.
By our count, there have been a total of 16 Indy games released on Nintendo systems (well, 15 really, but we’ll get to that in a moment), but which one is the best? That’s where you come in.
We’ve got our opinions, but similar to our other reader-ranked polls, we asked Nintendo Life readers to rate every Indy game they’ve played over the years, and here are the results — every Indiana Jones game on Nintendo systems, ranked from worst to best, by you.
Missed the ‘voting’ period, did you? Ah, but you didn’t. This ranking is created from User Ratings assigned to each game in our database and is subject to real-time change, even after publication. Registered Nintendo Life users can click on the stars below and rate the games out of 10, even as you read this.
If you’ve previously rated these games, thank you! If not, you can add your score to the game at any time, present or future, and it will still count and influence the order (though you’ll need to refresh the page to see any potential changes).
All set? Time to search for the grail…
Note. Keen Indy fans will have no doubt spied the interloper below. Yes, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis never got its own release on Nintendo platforms.
HOWEVER, it is available to play on Wii as an unlockable in Staff of Kings. The latter game is easy enough to find, and the former — a seminal Indy title which was given Wii pointer controls here — is easy to unlock, too.
NMS Software developed the Nintendo versions of this version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade with Ubisoft on publishing duties, and there’s another, earlier version published by Taito that’s entirely different.
A side-scrolling platformer, this one isn’t unimpressive (visually speaking) on Game Boy, but the NES game is essentially a straight port of the handheld version. Launching so late in the console’s lifecycle, anyone who picked this up over the better Taito game would be rightly miffed.
It’s games like this that gave licensed titles a bad name back in the day.
It’s clear that of the two versions of this game, it’s the Wii one you should investigate. Staff of Kings on the DS was filled with the familiar touchscreen control and microphone gameplay gimmicks, but failed to deliver anything approaching the sort of excitement you’d hope to find on an adventure with Henry Jones Jr.
Pointing and clicking (or tapping) was a joy on the DS, and would have been better served with an adventure game in the vein of Fate of Atlantis rather than crowbarring a full 3D game with frustrating fisticuffs and poor puzzling onto the console.
Two versions of this Atari-developed released on NES. One was published by TENGEN prior to a licensing disagreement and Tetris-related lawsuit from Nintendo that resulted in the removal of all its NES titles from store shelves. The other — the exact same game on the cart — had Mindscape taking over publishing duties.
Unfortunately, that detail is probably the most interesting aspect of this loose adaptation of the arcade game. You control Indy and wonkily work your way through various levels from a ‘diagonal-down’ perspective, swinging on your whip, recovering Sankara stones, saving children, riding in minecarts, and generally giving Thugees a thrashing with the items you find.
It’s got the music, of course, and that goes a long way to firing up the Jonesian spirit, but it’s not enough to transform a poor game into a good one.
Mixing in top-down areas and puzzles into its standard side-on platforming, this whip ’em up is far from the greatest game to feature the world’s most reckless archaeologist.
However, as an 8-bit adaptation of the third movie, Taito’s Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade covers all the main plot points and features varied gameplay in keeping with its theme, plus a decent chiptune rendition of the soundtrack.
Given the relative lack of competition in Indy’s gaming catalogue, this isn’t a bad time.
Despite being the DS version of the game, LEGO Indiana Jones 2: The Adventure Continues offers up fun level building and the same solid co-op gameplay to give Indy’s brick-building series a new life.
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull might take up most of the runtime, and we would have perhaps dropped the touchscreen controls and spread the love a little bit more among the films, but the new takes on the classic films and the level builder are decent fun.
If you have the first game, however, this one is probably worth a miss – or you should look at picking up the superior Wii version.
The Game Boy Color counterpart to Factor 5’s N64 title, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine certainly looks impressive for the hardware and features puzzler gameplay that could generously (very generously) be described as top-down Zelda-esque.
It’s let down by clunky controls and being a little too confusing, though. Still, HotGen offered up a fair portable puzzler with some Indy trappings that needn’t be cast into the infernal fires.
Expectations for Game Boy titles are generally lower given the tighter hardware restrictions, and while this version of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade won’t knock your socks off like the best system’s titles, the slightly awkward controls and irritating time limit on levels don’t grate like the NES version.
In fact, with the big sprites and decent facsimile of John Williams’ bounding Raiders March, we’ve got a bit of a soft spot for this GB rendition.
A side-scrolling action platformer from Jaleco and Chris Gray Enterprises, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles is absolute bog-standard 8-bit fare. There’s nothing to get upset over, but also very little to get excited about.
Based on the TV series which, as per the title, chronicled the adventures of a young Indy, you journey across the globe fighting bad guys and, at one point, taking down the Red Baron himself in a shmup stage. There’s some decent visual variety in the stages and the audio is listenable, but NES owners expected more by the time this launched in 1993.
