The Randomizer is a D-Sub9 feature in which a randomly selected retro game is experienced for no more than twenty minutes. These are the stories.
Randomizer Selection #336 - Bubsy II (SNES)
Oh, damn it. This is not the game I was hoping to kick The Randomizer off with. Damn you, random number generator! I don't care who coded you, or what CPU instruction set inspired your malicious dictum of misery and woe, but I hate you forever and a day! I hope someone is overclocking your processor just so you can feel the heat of my fury!
Oh, right. Bubsy II...
In the epoch where the console gaming industry was painted in shades of red and blue, ill-fated Accolade wanted to get in on that sweet sweet "Fuzzy Video Game Mascot" cashola, and created Bubsy. Accolade, with little in the way of smash hits other than the Test Drive series, apparently had to go whole-hog on this line dance and tried attacking both the attitude of one acoustically-named hedgehog and the mirth of Brooklyn's finest pipe fitter. This unholy combination of mascots resulted in... a bloody mess, really. But we just call him Bubsy the Bobcat... I suppose.
Herein lies Bubsy II - a generic do-stuff platformer for the SNES that has absolutely no friggin' clue what a platformer is supposed to do. You know, to be. More importantly, it's broken an all-important rule that should never have had to be made in the first place - do not annoy the gamer to the point of chewing through the controller cord.
The title of terror breaks this rule in the first few seconds of turning the console on. In what I can only gather is an early 16-bit attempt at auto-tune, Accolade went the "digitized voice in telephone quality" route for its sound effects. As their logo appears, you hear a recorded and post-processed choir of tweaked out audio engineers singing in touched-up chorus:
"Bubsy bubsy bubsy bubsy bobcaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat"
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| Kill me. |
Meanwhile, a paw removes a portion of the Accolade slogan and replaces the portion with the lowest of lowbrow humor, resulting in "Games with purrsonality".
Yeah, it's like that. Normally, I'd give this a bye if they had done it only once, but this shit is endemic. We're talking apocalyptic, end-of-the-world saturation of horrible puns and "wakka-wakka-wakka"s from back to front. "Star Wreck", "Another swine mess!", "Dark Side of the Tomb", "Is there a doctor in the house?" and other text/recordings are repeated to me over and over again.
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| NERF PANCAKE IN THE FACE (I'm not having any fun) |
My first level is "Star Wreck". At least it's honest. "Wreck" is the best description I could give it. Controlling Bubsy is akin to handling Knuckles the Echidna in Sonic & Knuckles. He runs (quickly), jumps far too high, and has the ability to glide. This all seems standard fare up until the point where I realized that the map design in this game is horrendous bordering unnavigable. We're talking "break out the Ouija board" level desperation as arrows on the screen point you in directions that have no sense or meaning. Oh, the arrow points right. I go right and now I'm flying a spaceship in some rudimentary side-scrolling shooter because "LOL BUBSY". After I complete whatever this side-challenge is, I'm brought directly back to the point where I started. No fanfare, no bonuses. Move on.
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| What's to the left? Pain. |
Things fail to make sense in Bubsy II. Certain Tesla Coil-like orbs and towers hurt me but others don't, except for that time where I threw a switch in God knows what area, then only certain red ones did damage and others didn't. No rhyme or reason, I just muddle about looking for an escape-oh great I'm dead again. Bubsy just shouted "THAT'S IT!" during his death animation. Was I supposed to laugh, or agree?
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| If you can read this, you work for Accolade. |
I'm greeted with the "Continue?" screen. Fortunately the art department took the same ADHD medication that the level designers consumed, because apparently they have the ability to discern "grey" from "slightly less grey" when they spray cloud font on the screen. I'm not colorblind, and at first glance it was a serious stretch to be able to decipher what was font and what was battleship grey background. Maybe once I become a freaking guild navigator I can see in the un-colors that the artists conceive in.
Ok, restarting. I'm forced to go through the bobcaaaaaat chorus again. This time I'm picking another level - incidentally Bubsy asks me "Who wrote this stuff?" as I hit the level select screen, entering the level titled "Dark Side of the Tomb". I was prepared to actually chuckle for once, when Bubsy follows up with "I like it!" Ok, developers. Either you hate yourself for having to make this game, or you don't. Right now you're writing Bubsy to be completely bi-polar... which, I suppose, explains the space level.
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| Scenery or obstac-TOO LATE YOU DIE |
Now, I'm in Egypt, or some facsimile thereof. This level has a little more cohesion as I'm dashing left-to-right, down a floor, right-to-left, etc. I get a feeling of progression here... up until the point where I die without warning. Here's another Bubsy II sin - putting objects on the screen that I can't tell are obstacles or scenery. Some flaming torches hurt Bubsy, some don't. Some fire pits have a hitbox the size of the screen, requiring more jump space. Some don't. There's no consistency to anything. Requiring you to move slowly with a character programmed for speed-oh look I died again. "Continue?"
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| I DON'T WANNA! |
Ok, restarting. The egg timer on my desk apparently likes watching me suffer. Unskippable chorus again, back to the level select. Now I'm in "Hamalot" with three pig-like entities running through their looped animations in mid-air. The developers have clearly given up and are now just throwing shit to the wind.
Again, I'm hitting scenery that is actually an obstacle. It's to the point where the obstacle isn't actually an obstacle, but scenery. The level design serves no purpose whatsoever to prevent me from high-jumping in an open-air environment, but hey we gotta put those torches somewhere, right? I'm taking hits and I haven't seen a single mid-air-floating-business-hog or whatever it is the title screen offered.
Finally, I discovered the "Toy" button that the menu screen was talking about. Bubsy has a small array of items at his disposal to help him on his journey:
- Toy nerf gun - One-shot kills anything. Projectiles are slow and you have limited ammo.
- Diving suit - No freaking clue, but I move slowly and die in a hit, or from a fall greater than six inches.
- Portable hole - No idea. I tried using it against a wall with items on the other side, but Bubsy just flails the hole like it's made of sticky paper.
- Smart bomb - Clears the screen of enemies. Limited ammo.
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| Collect the spheres of ineffectivity! |
I want to drown this bobcat.
At this point in "Hamalot", I'm just jamming on the right d-pad button hoping for an end. The ol' Sonic the Hedgehog trick that served me well in the past. Well, several moments of dangerous background lawn gnomes later, and the trick works. Bubsy hits a ball that's actually his face, and a Flying Circus of balls erupts on the screen. I've succeeded... and I just don't care. The spheres don't seem to mean anything. The tried-and-true "collect one hundred things and get a 1UP" doesn't apply. They can't be turned in for anything. They don't reflect your help. These are nothing-balls. For what purpose do they serve? Too late. Bubsy cries "I WIN! I WIN!" and we're back to level select.
They're marbles, by the way. Not balls or spheres. Or so the game told me. Who bloody cares?
The egg timer taunts me with enough time for one more level. "The Hindenburger" - a level straight out of biplane Steampunkistan. It's a side-scrolling shooter level. We've now abandoned platforming entirely for what looks like a scrub-tier copy of Parodius or some shit. Bubsy's dropping pies like Skrillex drops beats and shooting Nerf balls at anything that stands in his way.
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| Nightmare fuel. |
This is it. I've descended into animal mascot platformer hell. It's a six-year-old's sugar-fueled fever dream and I'm just along for the ride.
"Keep it up! Just keep it up!" Bubsy encourages. I'm now flying Bubsy deliberately into solid objects in the hopes of ending his life forever. The music actually stopped for a good 30 seconds after one of my restarts and didn't kick back in until Bubsy got hurt. I welcomed the silence. It felt like setting Pandora to "Shit Radio" and finally hitting that "Are you still listening?" timeout... and I'm not going to click a damned thing.
Nothing I do makes sense anymore. Some tunnels warp me, some don't. Some poles can be collided with, some can't. Kangaroos are drop-kicking me when I'm in a plane. I'm flying headlong at blimps with pig faces on the bow. I'm still collecting these marbles without knowing why. Now there are men pedaling gyrocopters - who are these assholes? I shot them anyway. I hate them as much as they hate me.
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| Bubsy summons forth the Great Old Ones. |
My egg timer finally goes off. I'm deleting Bubsy II before Bubsy opens a portal into the Nether-realm and ends the world forever.
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