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Bubsy II

Started by Double, April 22, 2009, 09:17:01 PM

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Double

April 22, 2009, 09:17:01 PM Last Edit: April 23, 2009, 04:38:53 PM by Phoenix Magnion
Intro: Last we left Bubsy he had made an average at best platformer for the SNES and Genesis. Given the game wasn't completely awful a sequel was inevitable (this is also in part likely due to Accolade having few other intellectual properties). So a little over a year later a sequel game out for the SNES and Genesis

Gameplay: Bubsy has gotten over that whole dying from EVERYTHING and now has hit points, three of them in fact and he can even heal mid-level and shit. This isn't to say there aren't ways to die instantly, those return pits, fires, water, and Bubsy still has the weird habit of taking fall damage in a 2d platformer.

Caves aren't really used this time, instead you get random bonus games for entering them, specifically launching frogs for lives or guiding Bubsy's completely out of nowhere new Armadillo sidekick through a truck's engine for lives. There is another pointless mini-game involving using a divesuit and jumping into a body of water for... seemingly nothing. These seem to be for little more than filler as they all take quite a bit of time to do.

Bubsy now has some items this time around and a shop he can buy things from using tickets, he can also sell his items for tickets. These items are as follows, a smart bomb which turns enemies into marbles (this game uses marbles instead of yarn for some inexplicable reason), an item that lets you escape levels (what start-select not good enough?), the aforementioned dive suit, and ammunition for this:

Yes, product placement in a Super Nintendo game. Bubsy can use his Nerf Ballzookaâ„¢ to shoot enemies and turn them into tickets. This is actually fairly pointless as it is quite slow. Checkpoints return, and are still !.

The game is also a bit different in terms of the way it does stages, the game is set it a museum and has two wings, each with three floors with five levels. So there are 30 levels, and you can choose either to play a floor of a certain wing or do a grand tour of all three floors of a wing. Not bad but this brings up an issue I address in the length section of this review. This time level themes are spread throughout the floors, each floor has a music level, an Egypt level, a medieval level, a plane level and a space pirate level.

The game has a retarded scoring system too, you can play for points or time, but neither of these are saved so there is no point whatsoever. The games two player mode is greatly improved however, you can play co-op or versus. In co-op players alternate between Bubsy and one of his flying relatives that shoots bananas at enemies and their progress in clearing stages is shared. In versus not only is there progress not shared, the relative now can drop bananas on Bubsy to try and make him slip. Overall not bad but not great.

Despite all of this, there is really little here that makes Bubsy II unique it basically took the unique ideas of the first game and toned them down making the game easier for everyone else.

... or it would be but the game takes these positive points and promptly throws them out the window with the games plane sections. A fifth of the games levels are plane levels, which are obnoxious shooting levels with horrible controls (you press L and R to turn), where you take damage from everything, including touching the walls, and are just not fun.  What is worse is these are also present in the space pirate levels but without the ability to turn. If this was a shitty shooting game it could make sense, but it is a platforming game and it has no place in it, and even if it did it's horribly executed.
5 out of 20

Music: The SNES version was unique to use a concept that would later be used by Rare in its N64 games, having the music change during parts of levels. While this seems like an interesting idea, this game was in a 2d plane not 3d and it was very easy to end up cycling through several different themes in a few seconds, which isn't nice sounding to say the least.

Now here's where shit gets all meta on us, as mentioned before there are music levels. These levels have horrible music, consisting of random notes with no sense of rhythm or purpose. This shit alone is just so fucking hilarious I have to give it a low mark. Combined with the above point on the music often being all over the place and the fact the music isn't that memorable anyways I had no choice but to score this a zero.
0 out of 15

Translation: Here's a rare case, the translation is fine... of course it is it's an English game! But for the same reason as I did for Diddy Kong Racing I'm deducting a few points for how annoying Bubsy's voice actor is. I don't know what happened to the guy from the first game but I'd imagine the Bubsy II guy assassinated him for his job.
7 out of 10

Length: By all accounts the game is longer than the first, it has 30 levels whereas the original had 16. However as mentioned  in the gameplay section the way they went about using these levels could make it seem shorter. Also I would like to argue the plane levels really shouldn't count, as they aren't true platforming levels which shrinks the level size to 24 which is still an improvement.

If anything the grand tour option could be critizied for being too long, 15 stages... with no passwords. This seems nonsensical when THE PREVIOUS GAME HAD THEM. I seriously do not understand this at all. Despite this I'm still going to give the game a better score as there are still more stages.
13 out of 15

Rehash Factor: Bubsy uses a lot of sprites from the previous game... but I'll give Accolade credit for actually changing a lot of the animations for stuff that already existed, it's really minor but they do deserve to be acknowledged. The game also gets some points for having completely new enemies... sure they aren't particularly great but still...
15 out of 15

Plot: Ok, this is going to hurt both me for writing it and you for reading it, I sincerely apologize but this has to be the most retarded plot I have ever seen in a video game. No, saving the president from ninjas because you're a bad enough dude makes more sense, running around an island and cleaning up paint makes more sense, having a person who battles viruses power a giant laser to blow up an asteroid that's really a giant robot intent on destroying the earth, MAKES MORE SENSE.

Ok so there's this historical theme park run by an evil museum curator Oinker P. Hamm... yes he's a pig, yes it's probably the worse name for a pig character ever and vindicates Wizpig from Diddy Kong Racing as a generally decent name but this is besides the point. Anyways he works with this Vole guy and he's created a machine that will let them steal history to put it in their museum. Yes, these aren't recreations they actually built a machine to STEAL history and put it into a HISTORY museum. IF YOU'VE STOLEN IT IT'S NO LONGER HISTORY YOU #$#@&)$(*#@! Ok this aside, when exactly where Space Pirates part of history? Did I, the person with a history liberal arts concentrations, somehow miss that in all my classes? It must be taught in the same class where they talk about the epic zeppelin powered by bike battles of World War One. Shit giant enemy crab has nothing on this!

Anyways, Bubsy his niece and nephew and the seemingly random armadillo show up vacation and Bubsy realizes shit's going down and HE'S THE ONLY BOBCAT BAD ENOUGH TO PUT HISTORY BACK. But he's not even the one who realizes what Oinker is doing, his relatives do, Bubsy and the armadillo decide to break into the museum to free them (this seemingly disconnects with the fact they are rescued in two player modes...). So what happened to those aliens? Or that massive pile of yarn, that's not something you just leave unattended while taking your relatives and your friend on a trip to a freaking museum. Oinker realizing that shit is going down sends his barnyard goons out through his museum to combat Bubsy. That's it, oh and Oinker somehow has a giant death robot but that is seriously the least of this games plot concerns.

I honestly don't even know where to begin with how half assed this plot is. It would have been fine if Bubsy was in a museum for some reason and went through exhibits but they just had to put in this time thievery bullshit. Hell they could of justified it by having Oinker be in cahoots with the aliens from the last game. If you stole history you'd create some serious temporal issues this isn't a matter of going back and changing the past this a matter of erasing it! I'm not the biggest fan of time travel stories, but this is probably the single worse one I've ever seen. So bad in fact I have no choice but give it an unprecedented rating.
-1 out of 10

Difficulty: Bubsy II suffers from one noticeable problem , unlike the previous game it has you having three hit points, but you still start out with  9 lives and the game has no problems throwing lives at you all over the place. From the minigames and the shop alone you'll be swimming in them, making the game pretty laughably easy. Compare this to the first game where you could die on slightly pointy trees.
3 out of 15

Total: 42/100 = 42 %

This is the last time you'll see me remark on this Bobcat, Bubsy 3d is universally accepted as awful and there is no reason to talk about it. Yes I am aware of the very obscure Bubsy game on the Atari Jaguar, but the fact it's on the Jaguar means I can't possibly talk about it... I am aware there is also a Game Boy version of Bubsy II, but I think it goes without saying it's going to be horrible beyond belief.

Positive: It's still not like he's going to be referenced in Slot Machine Mk II as an attack, really.

Negative: The opening sound effect when you turn the game on.

Jesuszilla

That plot is so damn horrible my head hurts just reading that.


Just try to keep things peaceful.