Bubsy (Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind)

The story: The alien planet Rayon is inhabited by a race known as 'Woolies'. These creatures have a great penchant for yarn, and decided to steal Earth's supplies. Bubsy the bobcat's own yarn collection got sucked up while he was sleeping one day, and he got sucked up with them, but got kicked out of the spaceship. But now he's after those Woolies and travels through five worlds (and the Woolie spaceship) to kick their butt.

The style: Each world is divided into three levels, there are sixteen in all. Let me tell you, these levels are LONG, particularly if you like to wander around and explore everything. This is good and bad - good because it means the game lasts a long time and is good value, bad because you have a ten minute time limit and it's darn near impossible to finish some of those worlds in the given time. You have restart marks - not enough in the later levels! - which you truly need. The design theme here is YARN - from the restart marks, to the end-of-level goal, to the spaceship designs, to the main item to collect.

It's a typical platformer, you make your way from left to right, collecting yarn balls (which are more or less useless; 500 will get you an extra life but is it worth the effort?) and other goodies, and avoiding baddies. The controls are simple - there's jump, glide (stops you dying if you fall too far, lets you make longer jumps) and look. You can use various apparatus in the worlds for transportation, from roller coaster carts to waterfalls to bouncy cars to warp caves. The only way you can kill things is to jump on them. This might sound boring but I didn't find it so because I like any game where I can glide or fly. I like taking big gliding leaps. But that's not something you can do in later levels; it will lead to instant and numerous deaths.

The game is very difficult. Its difficulty seems to double with each world, in my opinion. The first world (the village) is quite tolerable, it's fun and easy enough. In the second world (the carnival), it's still doable but the lives will start dropping off. In the third world (the train/canyon), it becomes very hard and tedious and the lives go flying out the window. And as for the fourth world (the river)! Bah! The main problem is that one hit and you're dead. You jump up and oops - didn't realise there was a Woolie throwing eggs, an egg hits you and you're dead. You jump down and oops - you've touched water, or something spiky, you're dead. You have to take it so slowly and carefully in the later levels. The village is fun but after that...

The graphics are decent, so are sound effects. Bubsy delivers a one-liner voice clip before each level (which gets more annoying each time you hear it - if you have to hear it ten times in ten minutes you'll get quite irritated and start telling him to shut up. ^_^.). Some of these quips are kind of cute. Of the level entitled "Beavery Careful" he says "Hey, I didn't write this stuff." On a train level he says "Hey, it worked for Clint". On the first level he says "What could possibly go wrong?" and on the last he says "Wow, you still playing this thing?!"

Bubsy himself looks cool and is well animated, there are lots of cute touches. If you come off a waterfall, he stands there like a drowned rat, then shakes the water off, and his fur all puffs out. When you die, there are umpteen different animations - you can drown, putting on a Napolean hat and holding a little flag, saluting and sinking down... you can hit a spike and deflate like a balloon, flying around in circles through the air... you can shatter into little pieces, melt into a puddle, squash into a pancake and then walk off like a concertina, etc.

The music is not such a success. Some of it is good. Some, like the carnival music, is less good. Some, like the river music, is very very annoying. Five seconds into the river and we were just looking at each other like 'oh no...'

There is also a two-player mode, which is not very exciting. Basically, when one player dies or finishes a level, the other one plays.

The verdict: This game is HARD. I was watching my sister play it today. She needed the password for every level, because by the time she managed to finish a level she had usually lost at least eight lives. This is one game my sister actually likes, although she was getting understandably stressed with it today. It was one of the two very first Mega Drive games we ever played, along with World of Illusion. Maybe that's the main reason we like it - before then, we had just played Master System games, and this seemed like a masterpiece in comparison - it has voice clips, cute animations - we liked doing things like making Bubsy run into walls just so we could see him get all dazed.

Although I don't even enjoy playing most of the levels of Bubsy - I'm too impatient for the painstaking avoiding of perils - I persist in thinking of it as a really good game. Some of the music is bad and the difficulty ruins it, but you can still get some fun and enjoyment out of it, and Bubsy *is* a cool character. And I've talked way too much about this game compared with all the others. It's because I bought the game a few days ago and we had a Bubsy-fest today, whereas I haven't played the other games for at least a few days. ^_^.

Bubsy II

The story: I really don't remember and I can't be bothered looking it up. *thinks* You play the famous bobcat, Bubsy. Something about a place called the Amazatorium, where some pig dude called Oinker has kidnapped your niece and nephew, and you have to go through some wacky worlds in this Amazatorium (a music world, a fairytale world, an aeroplane world, a space world and an Egyptian world). When you beat the five worlds you can go and challenge Oinker. I think that's the gist of it.

The style: As with the original Bubsy, you can jump and glide. You can also shoot Nerf balls. The game is a little more elaborate - you can choose from three difficulty modes in the east or west wing, which means, theoretically, there are six different games you can play. Unfortunately they're all pretty uninspiring. I don't know why this is. The graphics are decent, the music is pretty good, you get the cute one-liners as in the first game, there's a lot of variety, the worlds are creative, the villains are diverse and 'wacky', you've got little bonus mini games and you don't die with one hit now. But somehow, despite all these advantages over its predecessor... it's just missing that undefinable 'something' that the first game had.

The bonus mini games are quite cute. In one, you guide an armadillo through the inside of a truck to try to get goodies and *not* get squished. In another, you don a scuba suit and try to get goodies underwater. In another, you catapult frogs and try to hit enemies. (Yeah, these are weird; I guess they go with the whole 'wacky' theme. I can't help trying to imagine the thought process these designers were going through to come up with this stuff.)

You can play two-player mode. Again I can't be stuffed going to check out all the modes but there is two player 'friends' and two player 'fiesty'. Basically what this means is you take it in turns to play Bubsy, while the other one plays Bubsy's nephew who flies around. On 'friends' version the nephew can shoot bananas at enemies to kill them, on 'fiesty' you can shoot bananas at Bubsy to make him slip over and hopefully plunge to some horrible death. ^_^.

The levels are considerably shorter than in the original Bubsy. Much shorter. You only have five levels to get through and some of them can be whirled through in a minute or two. My sister was playing the original Bubsy today and it took her more time to finish *one* level of Bubsy than it took me to finish the *entire game* of Bubsy II.

The verdict: I just didn't enjoy this game, I didn't find it engaging or fun at all. I don't know why, it just seemed pretty bland to me. Easy mode really is very easy and I finished the game in less than twenty minutes. Then, there are a few other modes, but when I tried it on Hard mode there were like six baddies on the *opening screen*, I could hardly move. I dunno. I never played all the levels or gave it a really good bash so I suppose I'm not qualified to judge, but the fact that I couldn't be bothered trying the different levels might tell you something about the game. I can't pinpoint anything that's really wrong with it, others may really enjoy it, it's worth a try. If nothing else, frogapult is fun. ^_^.

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