NES Game Reviews #9 – Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Blowout
Well I’ve taken on the painfully difficult, now it’s time for the painfully easy, Bugs Bunny’s Birthday Blowout.
Armed with a Walt Disney mallet you take Bugs through a seemingly endless sea of cookie cutter stages, most of which could be finished blindfolded. The bosses are much the same deal. While it’s great to see all the classic characters such as Daffy, Tweety, Porkie Pig etc the ease at which you disperse them is laughable, clearly this was aimed at a younger audience!
Well I was young when I first played this, did I complete it? No! Was the gameplay too challenging for me? No, I simply had better things to do than sit around playing this lacklustre marathon (what the hell am I doing with my time now?).
Look playing aggressively difficult games is not particularly fun, but neither is grinding out a hundred levels with nothing to call a challenge! There is a slight increase in the difficulty towards the final stages, but alot of that comes directly from the less than perfect (and often giltchy mess) control of Bugs. What helps make this so easy is simply the ridiculous number of extra lives you amass via bonus stages. Depending on the amount of Walt Disney blocks you mallet throughout the stages, Bugs can earn himself an arsenal of extra lives. Don’t get me wrong extra lives are very welcome in any NES game, but normally a bucket full of lives goes hand in hand with a punishing game. When the game is a cakewalk, it’s almost embarrassing to have the amount of lives you see on screen. Towards the end the only thing that kept my interest was seeing if I could reach one hundred lives, the sheer cheek of seeing such a number on screen was appealing. In the end I failed, and could only amass 87, (my fault for trying to speed-run the final levels!) There’s a strangely calming sense to the repetitiveness, I wonder if being lobotomized feels similar?
At the end of the game we learn that all the characters, who have been attempting to kill Bugs throughout, were just playing ‘tricks’ for his birthday. He should have brought his Mallet to the party to play some tricks on them!
