Taboo: The Sixth Sense is a tarot game for the NES, released in 1989. It was developed by Rare Coin-it, a sister company of Rare Ltd., and it is terrible.
The game purports to be a mystical authority–it calls itself THE TIME MACHINE ON NINTENDO!
Naturally, as with ‘real’ psychics, it’d be too much to ask for the game to divine your name, vital stats, or intent, so you get to input that yourself.
They neglected to include word wrapping, but that can be forgiven. Their true sin is in the game that follows–or I should say, the lack of game that follows. After this point, there is no interaction until the end.
The game shuffles the cards (in what I admit is a reasonably well animated sequence), then deals them and begins to read off your fortune. For some reason, the fortunes it provides are often rather poorly written. I’m fairly sure the game was written in English originally, so this can’t even be blamed on bad translation. It may be an attempt to increase the number of fortunes by shuffling around pieces of text, but that’s no excuse.
After this, the game becomes interactive again, to the extent that it was ever interactive, for a final time.
Yes, the final interactive segment is the game choosing ‘fortune numbers’ which is clearly a euphemism for lottery numbers.
The whole ‘game’ takes only a few minutes, which is the only thing in its favor. See the video below for a run through the game–just under three minutes, from the title screen to the end:
The bottom line is that the game isn’t even worth the three minutes it takes to complete. Rare Ltd. made some good stuff, like Donkey Kong Country, and apparently Rare Coin-it also made Battletoads, which was pretty good, but this game is an unmitigated disaster.
Too Much Free Time 