The NES version of Rainbow Islands was developed and published by Taito (it was published by Ocean Software in Europe) in 1992. It is a decent enough port of the classic arcade game but does have some deficiencies compared to the original.

The main difference is that the game features a mixture of vertical scrolling, and ‘push-scrolling’, at certain points in the levels. What this means is that the game scrolls normally until an intersection is reached, at which point jumping upwards will initiate a push into the next sector. While I’m not entirely sure why Taito chose to do this, it was most likely due to the console’s memory limitations. This does cause some frustration when it happens because it makes it easy to miss items you might want to collect, but when entering a new sector it’s then not possible to go back downwards.

Another disappointment – from my point of view – is that the rainbows that are created by the player character are not properly curved and seem to have a slight peak. Most players probably won’t notice this, but I did and it left me wondering why the artists who worked on this port couldn’t get the shape of the rainbows right.

The NES version of Rainbow Islands also suffers a bit from a lack of colour. Again: this is a limitation of the console’s colour palette capabilities. Other conversions of this great game also suffer from similar palette problems, but it seems to stand out more in this version than in others, for some reason.

Overall, though, all three of the above gripes are fairly minor in the grand scheme of things and Rainbow Islands on the NES is at least playable and fun. It’s by no means a ‘must-have’ title on the NES, though. It exists, therefore it is.

More: Rainbow Islands on Wikipedia