The Blues Brothers (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthough of Titus’s 1992 license-based platformer for the NES, The Blues Brothers. Based on the widely-loved 1980 film classic starring Dan Aykroyd and Jim Belushi, The Blues Brothers for the NES is an action-platformer that was developed and published by Titus. If you stopped there and said, “Oh,“ to yourself, I assume you’ve had some prior experience with their licensed works. You have my sympathies. While The Blues Brothers never plumbs the depths ruled by the infamous Superman 64, it never really manages to succeed much, in any way, either. You have to get Jake and/or Elwood to a concert, and so off we go, hopping and bopping through several set pieces that take a few *ahem* liberties with the film. It’s all fairly conventional stuff that has potential, but in following the grand tradition on 8-bit games based on movies, it doesn’t quite live up to expectations. Most of the stages are huge, fairly linear maze-style areas that you run through at breakneck pace, making precise jumps and avoiding all sorts of original and imposing enemies, such as “amorphous goo that floats“ and “ill-tempered dog.“ Those are standard things in many NES games, but the controls are a bit wonky and your character moves waaaaay to quickly to be able to avoid most of the hazards unless you take the stages at a snail’s pace. They’re accurate and the hit detection is generally good, but they’re a mismatch for the level designs, making The Blues Brothers way harder than it should’ve been. It also doesn’t help that you can’t kill most of your enemies and that there are tonnes of blind jumps, making the majority of the game feeling like an obstacle course. And speaking of design, how does The Blues Brothers not include a car chase scene? The one part of the movie that would’ve been perfectly suited to a video game is, for whatever reason, completely absent in the video game. The graphics and sound aren’t bad, but they are pretty underwhelming by 1992 standards. The backgrounds are fairly flat and lifeless - the PC game that the NES version was ported from was no work of art, but it was still a reasonably attractive game. Here, the stages’ near-monochromatic color schemes really underwhelm - I hope you like grey and blue! - as do the tiny sprites. They attempt to channel some of the movie’s humor in their animation, but they are too small to show any real detail, and oftentimes you’ll be left scratching your head, wondering what it is that you’re meant to be fighting. The music is an unexpected mixture of yay and nay. The tunes are all chiptune renditions of famous blues oldies: it includes the Peter Gunn tune (the one everybody knows from Spy Hunter), Everybody Needs Somebody, Shotgun Blues, and Almost. The problem is that none of them sound very good. Of course, we’re talking about the NES here, but a lot of the music is reduced to some plinky, high-pitched chirps accompanied by a loud, DPCM-based drum track. The soundtrack isn’t terrible, but it’s a sad that such iconic tracks weren’t adapted to the NES’s hardware with a bit more care, and that they’re such a mismatch for ther on-screen action. The DOS Adlib music sounded great, but the NES ones sound like someone merely converted the original PC game’s music data and called it good enough. Apparently the importance of the music on something called “The Blues Brothers“ was lost on whoever handled it here. It’s odd then, that with all of these issues, I can’t say that I hated The Blues Brothers on NES. Maybe it’s because I wanted to like it as much as I did, or maybe it’s just because NES movie adaptations tend to be so dire, but The Blues Brothers is a game I managed to have some fun with. Not a ton, mind you: it’s too hard, the controls are frustrating, and it pointedly ignores most of the things from the film than it might have benefitted from, but it isn’t totally devoid of merit. It’s wholly mediocre and relies on its license for any sort of appeal, and while that’s hardly a noble legacy, it doesn’t relegate The Blues Brothers to the bottom of the pile. It just means that the game is easily (and deservedly) lost in a vast sea of other equally mediocre NES titles. _ No cheats were used during the recording of this video. NintendoComplete () punches you in the face with in-depth reviews, screenshot archives, and music from classic 8-bit NES games! Visit for the latest updates!