Hook review updated

Less Richard Simmons, more coherent content.

By Joseph Shaffer · January 28, 2017

My review of the film-inspired brawler Hook received an overhaul, mostly to weed out a lot of the prattle and bring it closer to my current standard of writing. How about some trivia?

-The earliest version of this review went live at GameFAQs well over a decade ago. I originally scored it a 9/10 and I think it was maybe four paragraphs long.

-I rewrote it there around 2009, bumping the score down to 8/10.

-A year or so later, I submitted a newer version of that review here with the score of 7/10.

-The new score is 6/10. Maybe with the passage of a couple more decades, I can safely admit that this game is actually crap (well, it isn't actually).

Comments 3

honestgamer Staff Jan 28, 2017

I don't think Hook was a great movie, but I liked it well enough as a kid and now have it on blu-ray. So it did what it set out to do, I suppose. I also rented the SNES game as a kid, and thought that it was actually quite decent. Other people seem to feel the same way, and now I find that there's an arcade game that seems to be rather different but still very good. Given how many great movies have inspired terrible games over the years, I am left to believe that Hook fared better than it deserved.

jerec Jan 28, 2017

I never knew about the Hook brawler, but I did get frustrated with Hook: The Adventure Game. Didn't make it very far.

JoeTheDestroyer Blogger Jan 29, 2017

Jason:
I was never a huge fan of the movie, but I liked the arcade game well enough. I remember being really young and still not giving a damn when Rufio bit the dust. I think it was the first time I recognized something as a cliche, though I didn't know the word.

Jerec:
I never played the adventure game, but I did check out a couple of Hook platformers. The SNES one that Jason talked about was okay, but I recall playing one on NES that was frustrating. I couldn't cleanly beat the game, but was able to get through most of it with Game Genie. I just don't think the Peter Pan concept translates to video games very well.