Karnov/Walkthrough

You will control Karnov throughout the game, in his quest to obtain all nine pieces of the treasure map. In order to collect the pieces, he must explore nine stages and defeat the boss that awaits him at the end. After each boss is defeated, a piece of the map falls from the sky, and Karnov advances to the next stage after viewing the combined portions of the map that he has collected so far. Karnov will only have the complete map by defeating the dark wizard at the end of the ninth stage, and only then will he be able to locate the secret treasure that he is searching for.

Karnov begins the game with two lives. Extra lives can be obtained by collecting 50 K marks. When all of his lives are lost, the game is over. The player can then choose to continue by inserting more credits. When a player continues, he begins at the beginning of the stage in which he was defeated.

Karnov must not take too long to complete each stage. He begins with 200 time units, and will lose his life if the clock reaches 0. Furthermore, if Karnov occupies one portion of the stage for too long, plant seed begin to fall from the sky. These seeds grow into poisonous plants. While the plants themselves are harmless to Karnov, the trio of projectiles they fire are quite dangerous. Karnov can neither destroy the seeds or the plants, he can only run away.

NES differences
While no story is present in the North American NES version of Karnov, the story behind the game is quite a bit different in the Japanese Famicom version of Karnov. In the Famicom version, Karnov is a bad man who has died and is commanded by a god to return to Earth and redeem himself by saving the world from the danger presented by the dragon Alakatai. There is no treasure hunting aspect of the story.

Further differences involve the fact that Karnov can sustain two hits before he dies instead of only one. The first hit turns Karnov blue. If Karnov is blue when he is hit again, he will die. However, if you collect a Red Orb while blue, you will turn red again. Two of the power-up tiles have changed; the super flame becomes the Clapper, and the trolley is replaced by the shield. And lastly, while most stages are faithful representations of the originals,  and  are entirely different from the arcade.

As stated above, the NES and Famicom versions of the game differ in that the Famicom version has a story with interludes between each stage and more of an epilogue to the ending. In addition, the NES version allows for unlimited continues, while the Famicom version only permits two continues through the use of a secret code. To continue your game, hold while pressing. The quality of ending that you receive on the Famicom is determined by the number of times you needed to continue.