NES Game Reviews #12 – Bucky O’Hare
Remember Bucky O’Hare, the fearless green rabbit and his band of intergalactic do gooders? No? Well neither do I to be honest bar the theme song for some reason. It was a short lived cartoon in the 90s. I do remember buying a figure off the show as a present for a party of a primary school friend. He cried when I gave it to him. It’s okay though, I didn’t like him much anyway!
Well hit or not, Konami (under their Palcom subsidiary), were tasked with making a game to cash in on the …success of the cartoon. And guess what? They delivered!
Bucky O’Hare on NES is undeniably one of many hidden gems on the system. Fasted paced action packed platforming, with great controls and a host of characters to unlock. Once new characters have been rescued, they become playable at any time, offering you new weapon, jumping and climbing abilities. These will come in handy as the things progresses because it gets much harder as the game nears the end. Its a long game (for a platformer), but there is both a password system and infinite continues which allow you to re-spawn at the beginning of each screen rather than each level which is uncommon on the NES. Considering some of the later stages are very tough, I guess it would just have been too taxing on the player to have to restart each level endlessly -Thanks Konami.
This game looks lovely, sporting big sprites, lots of movement, detailed backgrounds and suffers no flicker or slowdown that I remember. A top notch job programming this one and hats off to those responsible, another pleasure to play.
