Pole's Big Adventure (Chindōchū!! Pōru no Daibōken in Japan) is a WiiWare Japan-exclusive platformer game by Sega with an emphasis on gags, Super Mario and early video game cliches parody and surprisingly violent deaths.
Plot[]
The game stars a cowboy known as Pole who must rescue his beloved Sharon from a group of poachers. Pole laments that he won't let the poachers get away with hurting animals or kidnapping Sharon whilst ironically shooting his way through numerous wildlife(or people dressed as animals) to get to Sharon.
At the end of each level Pole rescues a (clearly) fake Sharon but doesn't seem to realise it's not the real one until the fake Sharon reveals herself to be an enemy in a paper thin disguise.
Gameplay[]
Pole can run, jump and shoot his shotgun, with the shotgun being able to be upgraded a few times to a more powerful weapon with a scattershot. Pole can also drink an energy drink to temporarily become invincible, and shoot question blocks to obtain additional power ups from them.
However, the actual gameplay is largely irrelevant to the game, where the main focus is coming across bizarre jokes and gags. For example, Pole will collect apples as his standard collectable item in a similar way to how Sonic will collect rings, Alex Kidd collects Baum bags, or Opa-Opa collects coins, but some apples will do unusual things as Pole continues on his quest such as:
- Rotting before he can collect them
- Being just apple cores
- Raining from the sky
- One apple being worth a million points and making all other points in the game basically meaningless
- One apple will act like a bumper, bouncing Pole off when he attempts to collect it
- A grey apple will turn out to be an alien egg and consuming it will cause an alien to rip out of Pole's chest after a while leading to a gruesome bloody death
- Pole landing after a huge jump and vomiting having devoured four apples midflight
There are several gags that parody Super Mario Bros. in particular with mushrooms, question blocks and pipes leading to jokes, including a pipe on the last level that will take Pole back to the beginning of the game with no way to return unless the player quits to the screen and reloads the last level. They will lose their extra lives and bonus points as they do so however.
Some gags are based off screwing with game mechanics such as having a tree that appears to be in the background actually be a deadly enemy in the foreground, having so many enemies and sprites on screen at once that the game bugs out, having Pole's sprite not load in correctly, a credit roll mid game, and a level that reuses art assets to a ludicrous degrees having ten Tokyo towers in the background at once.
Trivia[]
- One gag has Pole being picked up by a UFO Catcher that is literally a pink UFO. This is likely a reference to Sega's own wildly successful mach UFO Catchers which were also pink.
- Some of the gags are violent, crude or sexual in nature, which likely explains why Pole's Big Adventure never made it to the west.
- Due to the way WiiWare works, it is nearly impossible to obtain this game legimately anymore.
- There is a total of 74 gags in the game to be found on the first playthrough and over 100 if played through more than once.
Gallery[]
