Article by: FinalGamer 11/8/2009 6:54:57 PM
(GUESS WHO'S ABOUT TO DROWN IN 3D, FUCKERS!)
[i]AWFUL GAMING[/i]
Bubsy 3D: Furbitten Planet
Developer - Eidetic Inc.
Publisher - Accolade
Genre - Platformer
Year - 1996
System - Playstation/PC
There comes a time when a company will try to create a mascot. Someone who's cool, or rad, or whatever the most popular term for popular is that month. Sometimes they succeed perfectly like Sonic did for 8 years. Sometimes they succeed for the wrong reasons like Joe the Camel. And then sometimes, they just fail overall, like Bubsy the Bobcat.
But what's sadder, is while most mascots go and lie in a cardboard box in an alleyway peacefully, Bubsy tried to jump over the rooftops outside of two dimensions, before falling to his death.
This, my friends, is the obituary of a bobcat.
Story - The story tries to continue from the (absence of a) story from the previous games, with Bubsy's ever ongoing battle with the Woolies of the planet Rayon, who aim to steal all the fabric of the world, including Bubsy's who owns the largest collection of yard in the world. In the final game of the series, Bubsy heads to the planet itself and tries to defeat the Woolies' two queens, Poly and Esther.
Now it's bad enough to have a plot entirely revolving around a stereotype of cats applied to the wrong species of cat, but now we're dealing with puns. And not just any pun. FABRIC PUNS!
(If you ever wanted to explore a confusing dead wasteland that looked it was made of modern art exhibits...it's either here or the Tate-Modern)
Graphics - Well let's start on the worst excuse of 3D ever in the awakening of 3D. First off, the graphics are far from the beautiful pointy textures of Super Mario 64 where you knew what everything was, like an impassable slope, or a river, or a tree. In Bubsy 3D, everything looks....simplistic, to put it kindly.
To put it clearly, it looks like someone stitched together frozen ugly cardigans for the ground, and the mountains look like the kind of projects you get when you first use safety scissors.
This is seriously basic 3D, the kind that would be absolutely groundbreaking as they were with the game Sentinel, when it was released in 1987.
Even Starfox, a game renowned for its amazing pseudo-3D effects in 1993, had recognisable objects like arches, meteors, and enemies.
The world of Bubsy 3D's Rayon is horrendously cluttered with items and yet so devoid of any real texture it's not just terrible, but it's also boring, to the point that you honestly do not care where you want to go, not that you'll ever figure out WHERE despite the huge red arrows that are meant to help you but the state of the level layout only makes it frustratingly confusing. And guess what, three of the 18 levels in this game are UNDERWATER. Have fun with that.
And if you think there's a weird chessboard theme going on with the place, well, let's see the boss fights where if you step out of the area into the literally black-and-white chessboard area, you instantly die.
Course I'll explain about gameplay now but I had to say, I dunno what the fuck is going on with these horrible squares.
(Does anyone remember Tron? That was a great movie wasn't it?)
Gameplay - What tries to be a dyed-in-the-wool platformer (oh god just kill me already), comes out as just plain died. In this year, Mario had already perfected the very template of all 3D games, with his immaculate camera control and 360-degree control that is emulated to this very day as the standard of videogames.
Bubsy however has neither, even though he tries to be. Instead of a mostly manual camera control, there's a lazy as hell semi-automatic camera, which is pointless when the graphics are neither interesting nor helpful.
And instead of 360-degree control, Bubsy moves like a submarine with half of its engines crippled (and that will be made literally true in the underwater levels).
No strafing, no immediate turn in one direction, but instead a slow paw-shuffle in one direction with the grace of a drug addict, and the running speed of an exceptionally fast penguin on land.
He can jump with a small acrobatic rolling leap which is not only a little inaccurate but also not very fluid, in the same way the first Land Before Time was fluid and every other sequel was not.
He can also glide which again is inaccurate, to the point that the cheapest kite you can make out of two uneven sticks and toilet paper would fare better. Not horrendous, but not accurate. Then again, Bubsy didn't do this well in the old games anyway so you can't fault the game for not sticking to its roots.
Oh and attacking enemies is still by jumping on their heads which, thanks to the terrible clumsy controls and the fact this game inherits the hit detection of its predecessors, gives you a 50% chance of getting hit anyway, but at LEAST you don't instantly die from one hit this time!
("Uhh Michael Berlyn, why do those trees look like from Sonic 3D Blast?"
"Because I fucking made Bubsy, so shut the fuck up?")
There are also a number of items to collect but quite frankly they are rarely explained on what they do other than the obvious extra lives. Atoms can be collected to use against enemies or gain points for obtaining more Paw Points. So basically the Star Bits from Super Mario Galaxy except very dull.
Paw Points are Bubsy's health, not his lives though.
You initially start with 3 and, other than fatal environmental hazards, one enemy hit takes one Paw Point off, but you can get up to 99, apparently by getting 40,000 points, collecting 50 atoms, finding all of the jewels in a given level, or setting up a chain in which a thrown atom hits 4 others in its path, which is something you will never do.
Music/Sound - The music sounds like it was from a cheap cartoon, and not the nostalgic kinds that some people realise weren't that good, but the kind you knew wasn't good at the time. A sort of flouncy, pathetic attempt at quirkiness that's one step above that song you always hear in cartoons whenever they visit shopping malls.
You know the one I mean.
(Oh look. A submarine-driving section, which is amazingly realistic in the control-oh wait that's just Bubsy, sorry)
Lastly there is Bubsy's voice. One of his trademarks, or attempted trademarks rather, was his wisecracking voice, which in the original game was voiced by Rob Paulsen, legendary voice of Yakko and Pinky from Animaniacs, and would only speak at the start of each level.
In this game, it's the voice of Lani Minella, the voice of Ivy from Soul Calibur III and IV, the voice of Pit in Smash Bros Brawl, the first voice for Rouge the Bat in the Sonic games, and various others.
Despite being something of a well-working respectable voice actress in the videogame community, Bubsy is without a doubt the worst voice she has ever done, probably because that was what the makers wanted Bubsy to sound.
It's screechy, irritating, patronising in the way a New York office worker would be (hint: very very very fucking nasal and obvious) to actually have the gall to tell YOU off for bad controls.
And it never EVER stops talking. Bubsy is a motormouth personified, it's as if he believes that if he doesn't stop talking, he'll stop breathing and just die. Which to be honest we'd actually want.
This game looks like a shipwreck, plays like a shipwreck, and sounds as fun as a shipwreck, when you're on the ship. Bubsy did not just die, he fucking crashed and burned his excuse of a career in a pathetic attempt to be famous again and jump into 3D, without realising that it was too much for him.
This is the videogame equivalent of a former child actor trying to be in an edgy movie that fails horrendously, and remains as a pathetic last entry on his filmography in IMDB.
The only reason why this game did not get a fully low score, is at least you can turn the music and the voice off, thankfully putting the pillow over the bobcat's face to send him to where all failed mascots eventually go.
Fun and Innovation - 1
Replayability - 1
Gameplay - 1
Presentation - 2