Bubsy: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind

Introduction

Cats love yarnballs and Bubsy is a bobcat, so he’s got to as well. A fabric loving alien race known as the woolies have come to earth and taken all of our planet’s yarn! Help Bubsy get his yarn hoard back and save the fabric of the world itself. Run, jump, glide, and get dead repeatedly to help Bubsy reach his enemies and destroy them. (Not that you would know the things about aliens or the plot without the manual.)

Development

Bubsy was published by the Accolade company. Accolade started in 1984 making games for systems like the Commodore 64, Apple 2, Amiga, PC, the Atari 400, and the Atari 800. Accolade is most well known for Star Control II. A game, which today, is considered a classic. They have a very diverse library of games, from science fiction to sports games. Bubsy, Star Control II, and Test Drive 4 are probably their greates hits. In 1996 however, the company began producing less than stellar games until the release of the Test Drive series. In 1999 Accolade was purchased by Infogrames.

Funny story, Sonic the Hedgehog was created when Yuji Naka when he played through the opening level of Super Mario Brothers until he was able to go through it as quickly as possible. Bubsy was developed by Michael Berlyn. At the time he had only worked on adventure games so Bubsy was a completely new beast to him. After burning out on adventure games he played Sonic the Hedgehog for 14 hours a day for a week in order to find the right way to make it his own.

Bubsy was released in May of 1992 for the Super Nintendo, Sega Genesis, and PC. It went up against Wolfenstein 3D, Ultima Underworld: The Stygian Abyss, and Kirby’s Dreamland.

You’re standard level for Bubsy. (BTW that gumball machine can kill you)

Nostalgia

I loved this game when I was younger. I purchased it solely because there was a cat on the box. I adore cats, I play as a cat in the game, this sounds like the best game my 9 year old head can wrap itself around. It was so hard, but I figured that I started the game with nine lives and so it would be easy (I did think the nine lives joke was pretty funny). But how wrong I was. The big issue is that everything kills Bubsy in one hit, enemies, thumbtacks (which cause him to pop like a balloon and fly around the screen), water (But not water slides. The game is filled with water slides that lead Bubsy to new places and sometimes death. I always really liked going down water slides until I hit a few dead ends and then I didn’t trust them enough to take them again), and falling (But more on that later).

Bubsy can pick up speed and start running ridiculously fast. But the adventure will probably get brought to a screetching halt by running into a wall, which have Bubsy seeing birds (which he will then try to grab and eat) or into something that will kill him. The fact that everything that can hurt Bubsy kills him in one hit (except ice cream, just gives him a brain freeze. I was so shocked that I wasn’t dead that I kept running into it just to see Bubsy get a headache again and again) didn’t really hit me as a bizarre mechanic for this kind of game. In addition to running, Bubsy can glide. Boy can he glide, he glides as fast as he was when he was running. But there’s not delay in changing directions so sometimes after jumping over an enemy that gets in the way I’ll try gliding back to where I was to jump on it and destroy it but I’ll glide so fast that I can’t control my descent. I thought it was so fun to get as high up as I could and see how far I could glide.

I was pretty impressed with the areas of the game. There was a carnival zones that didn’t have any creepy clowns in it (Blasphemy in old videogames) and a Wild West area with killer tumble weeds and land sharks. I never beat this game when I was a kid. I would get to the 4^th chapter, Canada (seriously. A super racially insensitive version of Canada. Filled to the brim with beavers and plaid.) and would run out of lives. I could never remember the passwords and even when I did I always felt shortchanged because the game starts off on that stage with nine lives. Not how ever many lives I had been able to get, but just nine. So I’d end up playing through the game every time to get more lives to see if I could get through Canada.

Doesn’t this image just amp you up to play the game?

The Gush

When I was 22 I decided that I couldn’t let Bubsy go unconquered. I had to beat it, I needed to know what was after Canada. The answer was overall disappointment. I got really frustrated with dying all the time. I didn’t have the muscle memory and area memory I had of the game when I was playing it constantly. So instead of struggling against game overs I decided to cheat a little. I got an emulator for the game and used the emulators ability to save in any location to keep the game going. I did only use them at game check points, so I was basically playing with infinite lives. It was still frustrating as hell but there was no way I would get pushed back to the beginning of the game. It didn’t help much.

The reason Sonic the Hedgehog is the better of the two games is simpley because nothing kills Sonic in one hit. As long as he has rings then they just pop out of his body and he’s able to continue and take more hits if he gets more rings, not the case with Bubsy. I think it was a very bad design decision. The game has powerups to protect Bubsy in the form of shirts. (Speaking of shirts, my college roommate and I played the game and wondered why Bubsy could glide, or talk and run on two legs for that matter. We thought that it would make more sense if Bubsy’s shirt was mechanical. There are worse game plots out there). The dark shirt makes Bubsy invincible and the invincible shirt also makes Bubsy invincible, but the game has different themes for the effects.

If Bubsy falls too far the he dies, but he can glide to prevent the death. The issue is that the gliding controls can be really slippery if Bubsy was going really fast so I usually end up dying anyway. I just don’t understand what the design decision or benefit of falling damage did to the game. Add another way to die? To crush the player’s spirit?

The games have secret passages in sewers and other underground areas. But some of them just lead to pools of water that result in instant death bor our dear bobcat. So there’s no incentive to search them because they might bring the game to a grinding halt. I never found anything good enough down them to justify the risk.

I did end up beating the game and Canada was by far the hardest level. The game takes Bubsy to a jungle and the to the Woolie space ship in space and Canada is the hardest area. The game ends with the whole thing being a film that they’re making. But then the limo driver is a Woolie and I have no idea what’s supposed to be happening now. I thought it would set me up for Bubsy II but that’s not the case.

The water slides were still fun as hell though.

The Verdict

I may have loved this game as a kid but I guess I didn’t know any better. The unfairness of its secret areas, fall damage, and the instant lethality of every object or enemy really turned me off to the game. I cherish the memories I had with the game but I have no idea why they formed. The only thing this game has brought me at this age is the knowledge that I did eventually beat it. I was able to face its difficulty (even if I did have to cheat a little).

Next week: Super Mario Brothers 2

Secret of Mana

Introduction

Secret of Mana is an adventure RPG for the Super Nintendo in which *dun dun dun* (voiceover): Long ago, Mana was a powerful force on the planet. Humans harnessed its power and made the Mana Fortress, a great machine to harvest Mana more easily than they had been able to previously. Mana, however, is a finite thing, so in Mana’s desperation, it summoned the Mana Beast to destroy the Fortress and purge the world. A hero wielding the Mana Sword destroyed the fortress and the beast. Mana seemed to disappear and so did the sword. But these events will occur again, but differently! This time the hero and his allies, a young and feisty girl, an amnesiac sprite, and the eight spirits of Mana must restore the Mana Sword and prepare to save what they hold most dear and eventually the world! (Mana appears so many times in this introduction it barely registers as a word any more.)

  

I’m sure this pristine moment will last forever… forever… yup.

Development

Secret of Mana was developed by Squaresoft and designed by Koichi Ishii. It was the sequel to Final Fantasy Adventure for the Game Boy, which was also designed by Koichi Ishii. Koichi Ishii has designed all the games in the “Mana” series and is responsible for the Chocobo and Moogle creatures. It was originally planned to be released for the Super Nintendo’s CD add on platform but when that project fell through they had to try and cram the game onto a cartridge.

The game was localized in only 30 days. It is suspected that this happened because Squaresoft wanted to release it for the holiday season. Compared to Earthbound’s year of localization, it’s plain to see why translator Ted Woolsey had his hands full with the project. The translation is marred by its censorship and strange word choice. The changes had to be made due to the size limitations of the cartridge and the strange font choice for the American version, which only allows 2 lines of text in each text box. That’s enough room for one sentence, or two very short ones. This means the conversations in the English version are cut to their bare bones as translators try to cram sentences into as few words as possible. (These days, this issue can be fixed with a patch of the ROM file if you’re using a SNES emulator. It’s called the FUSOYA enhanced version, so named for the internet personality that made it. If you play this game then I highly recommend that you use this enhanced version. The emulator and the ROM file are legal if you own a copy of the cartridge, so keep that in mind.)

It was scored by Hiroki Kikuta (the first game that he ever scored) and he felt at odds with the technology, trying to overcome the limitations of the Super Nintendo. He wanted to make a soundtrack “which would be neither pop music nor standard game music,” so instead of using pre-made MIDI samples, he made his own so that he would know exactly what they would sound like on the SNES. The title track, “Fear of the Heavens”, and the whale calls preceding it, were meant to  try to “more deeply connect” with the player. Its music was so good that it released a soundtrack later that year.

The game released against Sonic and Knuckles, Warcraft, Donkey Kong Country, and King’s Quest VII. It sold very well in Japan but when it was released in the US, rushed and translated hastily, it wasn’t advertised or hyped to the American audience which lead to great reviews but less than stellar sales.

Nostalgia

My aunt owned this game, I still don’t know why she owned it (One of life’s little mysteries). I remember that I would always want to go and see her so that I’d have a chance to play it. It’s a two player game—three player with the multitap—so we’d both be able to play. It was a sort of revelation for me at the time, the first game that I’d ever played that allowed two players to play cooperatively. There were so many sports game, fighting games, and games where two players took turns, but none where both players were playing at the same time. I liked playing the sprite because he was the smallest and had all of attack magic. I’d give him the spear because I liked seeing the smallest guy with the biggest weapon.

My aunt usually didn’t want to play it because she wanted to do something with her nephew besides playing videogames, so I asked her if I could borrow it. It took a lot of convincing and a little growing up before she trusted me with it, but I finally took it home when I was about ten-years-old. She also had the strategy guide with full color pages for the bosses and I’d look at them and think, “I want to fight that.” I didn’t have many friends growing up, and none that wanted to play the game anyway, so I usually played it alone. I’d try to make sense of the translation, curse my AI companions, and die a lot.

This translation is really bad, but I know it’s not Woolsey’s fault. I knew just enough of where I needed to go and barely knew what I needed to do when I got there. The companion AI is usually pretty good but sometimes they’ll get caught on walls and the terrain. There are tricks to get them unstuck, but it took me a long frustrating while to figure them out. When I didn’t know what equipment was, or how to use it, I got knocked around. (I remember going to all of the lower leveled areas and grinding magic levels on the weak monsters and seeing the ridiculous amounts of damage add up.)

When I was a kid, a lot of the bosses scared me. There are giant monsters that take up most of the screen, casting dangerous spells and unleashing attacks [that could cover the screen]. But I was able to push through them. I fought zombies, vampires, walls trying to crush me to death, giant razor taloned chickens, plain giants, lightning giants, oozes, and finally I met the second to last boss.

There are scarier bosses out there but not many.

I’d seen his entry in the strategy guide, but when his music hit I froze up. And I didn’t think I was going to make it—and sure enough I didn’t. Then I had to go back, and fight through the enemies just for another chance to fight this guy. I looked through his entry in the guide and it said he had “??????” health, so I just knew that I had to keep whaling on him until the fight was over. When I beat him I was so stoked, I was convinced that it was done. Alas, there’s a twist…which I won’t reveal because I’d hate to deprive anyone of such a heart string puller.

I eventually returned it to my aunt, but every once in a while, I’d borrow it again. When I got older though, I realized that the game’s ending wasn’t so happy. In the end, Mana is destroyed, as described in the legend at the beginning of the game. It’s such a sad ending. No longer would the people of the world know about the magical places and beings of the world. I imagined the Hero in a tavern, deep in his cups, where someone would say, “Didn’t you save the world? You’re a hero!” and the hero would start crying.

When I got into college I played through it with my girlfriend at the time—I played the hero and she played the sprite. She had so much fun blasting enemies with spells. When I got to the end I went to explain why the ending was so sad, but I realized that I forgot more pieces to the story. I forgot that at the end of the legend, Mana returned to the land; I just thought that the people in that story would have to use Mana more responsibly that time around.

The Gush

I love this game, I love it to death. There are three characters and eight weapons, it’s all about what weapons the player wants to use for which character. I really like the monster design and was always waiting to see what the next enemy was. Playing the game with the bare-bones plot kept me going but when I got the expanded script, I was able to see parts of the story that were only hinted at.

The poor translation can really sour the game.When the game begins there’s a knight in town for some reason and he’s very helpful. The continued translation informs the player that he was looking for the Mana Sword and now he feels like he should help you because you have it. Without that added information, his presence in the village makes no sense in the story. The badness doubles down in the AI control menu. It took me a long while to figure out how it was supposed to work and I doubt that the word choice made that better. (The menu icon is named ACT. That obviously means AI control.)

The music in this game is phenomenal. It completely deserved to have its own soundtrack. The music can be pulse-poundingly terrifying, moody and atmospheric, inquisitive and playful, or can highlight the blissful and happy townsfolk. The music does whatever is best for the actions it accompanies. I was humming and whistling these tunes for years, and still do sometimes. When I went to piano lessons, it was music from this game that I wanted to learn.

I will say thought that I feel like I’m done with the game. Unless a friend wants me to play it with them, I don’t think I’ll be taking this title for a whirl. There’s only so much a guy can do after he levels up all the characters, levels up all the magic, and discovers a few of the hidden weapons.

And this picture encapsulates my feelings for the game.

The Verdict

It’s a game that has its flaws. Between the frustrating AI and the frustrating translation, the gameplay can get seriously marred. These flaws have their fixes—the translation can be patched and the game can be played multiplayer to overcome the wonky AI—but they’re still there. The player shouldn’t have to overcome this sort of thing to get to the fun part.  But behind those flaws is a game with great art, fun gameplay, visually satisfying special attacks and magic, and a simply wonderful adventure.

Next week’s game is Bubsy for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.

Earthbound

 Introduction 

Earthbound is an RPG for the Super Nintendo in which 4 ten year olds, 3 boys and a girl, must journey across Eagleland (Totally not the US) in order to defeat a cosmic evil entity, Giygas, that will destroy the Earth in 10 years. These youths must use their strength, intelligence, and completely unexplained psychic powers to traverse a world filled with eccentric individuals and overcome strange, but dangerous, enemies. 

Our Eager Heroes: Poo, Jeff, Ness, and Paula from left to right.

Earthbound Development

In order to talk about Earthbound we need to begin at the mind that began it, the mind of Shigesato Itoi. Itoi is a writer/comedian/celebrity/jack-of-all-trades in his native Japan. He made the precursor to Earthbound, Mother, in 1989. It was a harrowing experience for Itoi. He expressed his frustration for the project in the final area, named Mt. Itoi perfectly enough. By the time the team was making the area their attitude was “When we got to fine-tuning the difficulty there, I was like, ‘Whatever!'” The enemies there weren’t properly tested and they were far more powerful than the enemies in previous zones leaving players very frustrated. The localization was completed in 1990 but by that time the Super Nintendo Entertainment System was in the pipeline. The localization producer, Phil Sandhop, said, “I believe that the marketing execs just decided that the game would be too expensive to produce and unsuccessful without marketing, and that’s why it fell into oblivion.”

Itoi Himself

Itoi began working on Mother 2 immediately after Mother 1 was finished, planned to be released on the Super Nintendo. To keep the narrative voice and flow consistent Itoi would write every line of dialogue, to the smallest NPC’s quip, every word is his. His tenuous grasp on the english language and his inexperience with computers forced him to dictate the dialogue to staff member Matchan Miura, gauging the quality of the line on his reactions. Itoi would spend some nights sleeping at the office on a series of lined up chairs so that he wouldn’t have to travel to and from the office. Development dragged on for years, it looked like the project wouldn’t be finished but Hal Laboratory’s “genius programmer”, Satoru Iwata, was able to put his coding expertise to work and push the game to completion.

The American advertising policy was a little strange to say the least. The tag line for the game was “This game stinks!” and Nintendo Power magazines were outfitted with scratch and sniff tiles meant to emulate smells that the player would encounter in the game. The campaign was almost disastrous. Earthbound would be released in August, 1994 competing with Super Street Fighter II: The New Challengers, Super Metroid, and Illusion of Gaia as it’s competition, games that are classics today.

It released with a larger than normal box and the pricy 80$ price tag, the standard price being around 50$ for other games. The boxes had to be large to contain the strategy guide that came with every copy of the game, most games having an instruction manual. These increased expenses raised the price to match, but the consumer wasn’t so willing to purchase such an expensive product. The guide included tips and hints for the game as well as humorous anecdotes about locations in the game like, “Deep Darkness has 4,000,603 Mosquitoes,” and “ In Dusty Dunes Desert, there are 2,000,001 Cacti, and 5 people living there.”

A good game manual can dazzle the player…

…Or give them a bunch of useless information.

Nostalgia and The Game Itself

 When it comes to classic games like Earthbound, that I played in my childhood, it’s easy to look back fondly on the times of yesteryear. When things were simple and life was carefree, I was only a boy of 10 when I played this title. I remember when the “War Against Giygas” title card showed up it would scare me so much that I had to skip past it or shut the television off until it had passed. I’ll admit, I was a scaredy cat when I was younger.

And then the screen starts flashing and the music gets really intense… it was scary okay!

When it comes to Earthbound it’s not just a matter of whether nostalgia is blinding my perceptions of the game, it’s a matter of when the nostalgia begins blinding my perceptions of the game. The game’s big hook is nostalgia itself. When Ness reaches a “Your Sanctuary point” he experiences a happy memory from a moment in the past. Not necessarily his past such as when, “Ness has a short vision of seeing his mother when she was young, ” at the Pink Cloud Sanctuary. These memories and the memory of the adventure fill Ness when he faces his Nightmare in the dark reaches of his own mind. These happy fuzzy memories are Ness’ strength. But even this strength is not powerful enough to defeat Giygas, the final boss, the embodiment of evil itself. He can’t be defeated with psychic power or mortal weapons, it takes the power of raw nostalgia itself. In order to defeat Giygas the player has to draw on all the powerful and happy feelings from all the people that the character’s have helped in the adventure. Each of them in return hopes that the kids are doing alright. This culminates in the player themself, called by the game itself, remembering all the times and experiences that they’ve had and doing a massive amount of damage. The credits even includes a montage of photos take by a traveling photographer so that the player can point at the screen and say, “I remember when that happened”.

Giygas can be a little scary.

There’s not a lot else to hook the player in a classical sense. It’s not about the protagonist, Ness is a blank slate. All of his aspects are added by the player, he doesn’t speak, and doesn’t take any actions without the players input. When I played I named Ness after myself and pretended that I was him, that’s just how I assumed that games worked when I was ten (We were even the same age). There weren’t many that I played where I was playing a preconceived character, I knew that I wasn’t Mario, but when I looked at Ness I saw someone that resembled myself. I don’t remember if I started to wear hats when I played this game or if my dalliance with caps was affirmed by Ness’ appearance. I chose my favorite food and my favorite thing. I named Paula after my cat, Jeff after my best friend at the time, and Poo after my grandfather, I think. So this was my adventure, I considered anything that happened to me in the game as happening to me. Every SMASH hit was mine, every game over that I persevered through was something that was actually happening. I felt like I went to those places. I tried to feel like I was in the game. Of course I’m going to look back fondly on a rousing adventure like that. I feel like it was my success. I get to that photography album and I’m filled with memory and a few months or years later I want to play through it again to feel those memories as I felt them then. But that’s not possible, I can only remember a new memory and it’s still just as great.

The Gush

There are so many mechanics in this game that were innovative for the time. If the strategy guide that came with the game wasn’t enough there’s a guy in every town with a stand or a sign labled, “Hints!”. Living up to his name, he’ll give the player a hint for the modest fee of 50$ in game. It was an RPG without random battles, the monsters are walking around the overworld. Some of them run away from you, some of them charge forward with reckless abandon. If they player sneaks up on them then they get a free round to fight, but if the enemy attacks the player from behind then the monsters get a surprise round. The monsters also weren’t monsters. There’s the typical fair of robots and strange creatures but some of the enemies are Mole’s Playing Rough or Unassuming Local Guys.

The dialogue in this game is usually played for laughs but there are a lot of lines and moments that hit me right in the feels. I like the way Paula refers to all of the characters that she psychically contacts as “Friends she hasn’t met yet.” One of the Your Sanctuary locations has a guy trying to see what’s over the wall surrounding it and he says, “This isn’t my place, I know that. Maybe it’s yours,” an attitude that I’ve tried to adopt.The Game Over screen isn’t just a “Continue? Or Give up?” question, there’s a whole conversation about whether Ness wants to go on. If the player chooses to continue the game proudly proclaims that, “Ness decided to return after summoning all the courage and energy he had,” and that makes me feel like he’s a human with flaws. But that is as human as he gets.

The music is some of the best music in a Super Nintendo game, it’s also very diverse. It was my first experience listening to something sort of metal in the track Pokey Means Business and I was blown away. There are musical easter eggs all over the place too, the song for the Flying Men, the embodiments of Ness’ courage, is a sped up version of the Game Over Theme. This further symbolizes, for me, the courage of the protagonist.

I love this game even though I feel like I’ve outgrown it a little. I remember the day when I started the game over after I beat it just so that I could try to go through it all again. But as the game feels more familiar I play it less and less. These days I go back to it once a year, to a year and a half. I feel like Mother 3, it’s sequel, is a more mature, modern, and feeling game but that’s another game for another day.

The Verdict

Although the game is musically fit, it’s writing is humorous and even touching at times, and it’s mechanically advanced for the time the plot is shallow and the reason I keep coming back is to feel the way I did when I was young. To try to feel my youth through and in the youth of the characters and my experience playing the game. Earthbound is a good game but I keep coming back for nostalgia more than anything, so naturally, I recommend it.

Next week’s game is Secret of Mana.

What’re we Even Doing Here?

When does hobby cross into obsession? How do we define a game? How should a game be measured? How many games is too many games?

I’m Renald Lefebvre, I’m a working stiff in New England and I own a collection of video games that might be described as too many. I’m working on getting a Let’s Play Youtube channel up and I figure it’ll be nice to go over the finer points of the game here instead of trying to cram it all into the video and commentary. Or maybe you don’t want to hear my silly voice on the Youtubes and just get into the meat of the matter. This is going to be a blog about video games, what makes them fun and what can really ruin them. I’m a little technologically behind right now so I’ll be sticking to older games. I’m thinking that I’ll start somewhere simple, something that’s not too fast paced. With those aspects in mind the first game for discussion is Earthbound.

I might also stray into movies and board games or something, the sky is the limit at Approximately Too Many Games!