Adventure Island 3

Takahashi Meijin no Bōken Jima III, released overseas as Adventure Island 3, is a side-scrolling platformer developed by Now Production and published by Hudson Soft. It launched for Famicom in 1992, the third main entry of the Adventure Island series and widely regarded as the most polished installment on the console. During a vacation on tropical islands, Master Higgins’ girlfriend Tina is abducted by aliens in a flying saucer. With the help of friendly dinosaurs, Higgins travels across eight islands to hunt down the extraterrestrial kidnappers. It retains all dinosaur mounts from the second game and adds a brand-new triceratops that rolls into a spinning attack and traverses quicksand safely. The five dinosaurs each possess unique abilities: the red dino breathes fire for lava zones; the blue dino shoots lightning and avoids slipping on ice; the aquatic dino swims freely underwater; the pterosaur flies short distances over wide gaps; the triceratops rolls to smash rock barriers. The signature stamina system remains active, draining continuously; players collect fruits, milk and meat to replenish energy. The item roster expands with the boomerang, which breaks special rocks to unlock secret passages, plus protective crystals that block one hit of damage. There are 8 worlds containing 64 stages, with an overworld map for island selection. Hidden eggs and secret bonus routes are scattered throughout the game, and some secret paths let players skip stages. Environments cover jungles, glaciers, volcanoes, deserts, underwater caves and sky ruins. Each island has its own boss, and the final battle takes place against the alien mothership. Controls and pixel graphics are refined from Adventure Island 2. A famous stage-select cheat code is available, though there is no save function. It was widely included on Subor multicarts in China and ranks among the best Famicom platformers of all time.

These are the default keys. Click the gamepad icon 🎮 in the player’s bottom toolbar to rebind them. Gamepads are detected automatically. On phones you get on-screen buttons.

1P

2P

The NES was always two-player — 2P uses the numeric keypad, and NumLock does not matter. No numpad? Rebind 2P to other keys in the 🎮 panel.