Oftentimes, I look back at things I enjoyed during my childhood and think, "What
the fuck type of crack was I smoking?" I mean, come on...GREEN FUCKING HUMANOID
RABBIT FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION? FOUR-ARMED, EX-PIRATE, HUMANOID DUCK WITH A
NEW YORK ACCENT? PINK-HAIRED, PSYCHOKINETIC KITTY CAT IN A TIGHT-FITTING
SPANDEX SUIT? What is it with these companies, even back then, trying to make
female animal characters appear "sexy"? Even back then I remember thinking,
"Why does the cat have jugs?"
Yep, that's Bucky O'Hare, a short-lived (13 episodes) Saturday morning cartoon
about hunimals from another dimension fighting a war against...toads. God, this
just gets more and more ridiculous with each word I type. Anyway, the good guys
befriend some weird dork-imus kid from Earth to help them fight their war for
whatever reason...Ya know what? Fuck it. I have no idea what the story is
anymore, but you can take the small details I do remember and build your own
[REDACTED]ed story around them and it'd probably be somewhere close.
Back in the day, Konami and Capcom had a tendency to snag up a license for every
stupid little cartoon that they could get their grubby mitts on (or that Acclaim
hadn't already raped into the ground with a 14 foot long sandpaper dildo). While
these shows were clearly targetted at children, there's no way you can tell me the
games could have been. More often than not (a few of Capcom's Disney titles are
the exception) these games were an excercise in frustration. Not because the
controls sucked, or the game cheated, or the company clearly just didn't think
things out. No, siree, it was because the games were actually legitimately
tough to get through and challenged even the most seasoned of gamers, oftentimes
driving them up the wall that something aimed at a five year old was
kicking their fucking ass. This is one of those games.
Bucky O'Hare appeared pretty late into the NES' incredibly long lifespan, so no
question that it certainly takes advantage of all Konami had learned about making
graphics for the console at that point. Character sprites are fairly representitive
of their cartooney animated TV counterparts and display a surprising amount of
color that help make them more authentic than most games ever got. Character animation
for both heroes and enemies is a bit choppy, but not really enough to be
bothersome. Background
art is typical Konami at the time - Colorful, detailed, and varied. There's even
a good bit of parallax scrolling going on in some stages, which was almost
unheard of at the time on the 8-bit shoebox. The problem?
If you've played a lot of Konami games before this one, you're gonna start to
recognize a trend with this game. It recycles A LOT. I swear, the game's almost
like a greatest hits compilation album in some areas, right down to the Red Planet's
flaming pits and arcs of fire nicked directly from Gradius with no graphical
changes whatsoever. Nonetheless, the graphics still look good and are solid enough
for most players to not really mind that much.
Soundtrack-wise, it seemed that in the NES Days Konami could do no wrong. All the
tunes here are nicely done and feature those signature Konami up-tempo stage
anthems that get you into the action and end up being a little TOO damn catchy.
There's not much in the way of music that I didn't like about this game. If there's
one thing you can fault almost all Konami games for in the NES Days, it was that
every one of their games sounded the same. It's like they made one set of sound
effects in 1988 and never bothered making new ones. You'll recognize every single
one. It's not that they're bad or anything, but a teensy bit of originality
couldn't have hurt. Maybe they just like having their games look and sound a
bit uniform, though. Who knows?
Let me just get this out of the way, so we're all clear: This game demands nothing
but absolute perfection on the behalf of the player and will viciously maul you
until you either give up crying or finally come to terms with it. Think you're
some kind of bad ass platforming god? Go ahead, then. Throw this game in or
load up a ROM and beat it without Save States. It will take you a loooooooong
time to do so. I've managed it twice (once on an NES and while doing this
review) and it's quite an accomplishment, I must say.
The game plays pretty much like a Mega Man game. You start out with access to
four planets, each of which contains one of Bucky's captured comrades. Initially,
this gives you a false sense of freedom, because as you'll play through the levels,
you'll notice that there's an obvious order in which you HAVE to complete the
stages in. If you happen into the wrong stage without the right character
for a specific job, there's no way to just escape the stage. You have to lose
all your lives (and in turn all your health power-ups) and go back to the
stage select screen to try, try again. That's some really shitty design, right
there. They should have just forced you to play the stages in the correct order
as opposed to a tedious and unfair trial and error setup.
Once you rescue a comrade they'll now be on your team and you can switch to them
on the fly which is kind of neato. Each hero brings a unique ability and weapon
to the table that can be powered up easily with the massive amount of power-up
items found throughout the game. Bucky has a super high jump that can be charged
to get those out of reach power-ups or to escape danger to higher ground. Blinky
has an EVER so useful jetpack you can use to glide your way through tricky
situations. He's also very small, so getting into tight areas is never a problem
and usually yeilds valuable power-ups. Dead Eye can cling to walls and climb around.
Willy has his Retard Laser, and Jenny has the TELEKENETIC FUCK YOU MIND BEAM OF
DOOM, DEATH, PAIN AND DESTRUCTION THAT WILL SAW YOU BOSS SHITS UP IN MERE
SECONDS!!! Every character being different really does add a little more to the
game and oftentimes there's more than one way out of a jam so the extra bit of
creativity they squeezed in here certainly doesn't go against the game at all.
The stages themselves are pretty standard 2D Action Platformer fare. The ultimate
goal is more often than not, the right side of the screen and getting there is
RARELY ever an easy task. Each stage presents many unique challenges throughout,
surprising the player at every opportunity. Almost every screen of the game
is vastly different from the last presenting new obstacles for you to overcome which
helps to keep things interesting. The problem is, there's just way too much
"been there, done that" going on. While Bucky O'Hare is full of a lot of ideas
being thrown at you at once, none of them are exactly new. There's not one
thing in this game that you haven't done before and though they are done well,
it's hard to get over that "Best of" Compilation feeling again.
If there's one thing this game DOES do, it's probably that it makes those older
ideas MUCH harder than the games they probably originated from. Like I said,
this game wants nothing but perfection. While the game DOES give you a TON of
HP (even without health power-ups), its sole focus is purely killing you in
one hit and laughing at you for even thinking about trying to grab that
power-up that was sitting just a little too close to the fire. This is where
the perfection comes in. You like making insane and intricately timed jumps?
Well, here's your fucking game, because you're gonna be doing a whole hell of
a lot of it. I wouldn't have a problem with this usually, but the controls
don't feel quite as tight as they need to be for this activity. Jumping is
very fast and feels a bit too stiff so it may take a while to get used to.
It also feel like button presses aren't getting through sometimes, so you
may find yourself running toward a jump and just falling into the hole anyway,
because for some reason your jump button press wasn't detected. It's not a
majorly common problem, but it's a problem that shouldn't even be there.
Once you've finally managed to run, jump, shoot, die, jump, die, shoot, jump
run, die, shoot, run, jump, die, jump past every obstacle in a stage and finally
stumble completely exhausted into the boss' room, you'll be relieved to know that
they're probably a little too shocked at your efforts in reaching them to do
much to you or really be all that menacing. Because they give you so much life
to get there and most normal enemies are complete chumps, boss battles seem a
bit too out of balance with the difficulty of the rest of the game. Not that
a letting up in the difficulty isn't welcome, but they're BOSSES! They're SUPPOSED
to CHALLENGE me! Most, if not all bosses can be completely annihilated with no
strategy at all if you waltz in with a fully powered up life gauge and just
mindlessly pump shots into them. Jenny's TOTALLY NOT UNBALANCED fully-powered
mind-beam can take out most bosses in 1-3 hits. If you're NOT lucky enough to
have full health (or Jenny), you'll have to employ some evasive maneuvers, but
none are all that difficult to figure out.
I can't call Bucky O'Hare a bad game, because there is some fun to be had here.
I will call it a lazy game, because everything feels completely phoned-in.
Why Konami didn't do a port of the FAR superior Bucky O'Hare arcade game is
beyond me. They did a great job with the TMNT arcade to NES conversion two
years earlier, and there's no doubt that this game could have ranked up there
in fun factor right along with it had a little more effort been put in.
