#106 - Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle

You see how the Seal of Quality is tilted, like it's trying to run away? Yeah, it's a sign.

Uh... yeah.

 Just so you know, when you turn on the game, the title card states that this isn't just Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle. This is The Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle, just so you know Bugs ain't frontin'. Apparently, there are a lot of Bugs imitators out there running around, setting up their own crazy castles made of sand. Rest assured, Bugs has built his castle out of rock and it's not going anywhere. From what I understand, in 1989, Bugs knew his 50th Birthday Blowout would be fast approaching in two years, and he wanted to build a castle where his friends could throw a party for him because he's just that vain. The resulting castle is a nightmare, and though it still stands within the confines of a gray NES catridge, it should be avoided at all costs.

I wish more NES games came with warning labels: “Warning! This game will bore you to tears, when it's not sucking the life out of you with its cheapness!” Yes, you play as Bugs Bunny, and you traverse through sixty levels of his castle in an attempt to resuce all of his carrots. Various Looney Tunes thugs show up along the way (Wile E., Yosemite, Sylvester, etc) and run around maniacally because they can. If you touch them, you die. No problem, you say? Just jump over them, you say? Hah! The game features no such thing as a jump button, and as far as I can tell, it's for one reason only: if Bugs could jump, there would be no challenge to the game. You could jump over every enemy in your mad quest to get the carrots and call it good. Something's wrong with your game if you have to take a normal feature of any NES action game – like jumping – and take it away in order to add so-called depth.

The level layouts are abominable, especially as you progress. Go up stairs, collect a carrot, go down stairs, go across the screen, collect a carrot. Oh! Watch out for Sylvester, run away! Go back up stairs, wait until Sylvester follows you up, then jump off the side and go back to the other side of the level. There, now that you've read that, you don't need to play the game. Simple as pie. The later levels are even worse because, instead of two enemies, you'll have four or five coming after you. The levels don't get bigger to accommodate for the extra enemies, either, they stay about the same size. It's true, the game gives you items like bank safes and crates to drop on the heads of passing enemies, but it's rare for you to actually land them.

Two things that disturb me a little bit about Crazy Castle: a lot of people have fond memories of this game. If you go onto GameFAQS, there are no user reviews that score this game less than a 6, and in fact, many give the game a score as high as 9. If they were to play the game today, I'd hope they would smash their rose-colored lenses on the ground, rip their clothes, and wail. Second, the Crazy Castle series continued on Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance, to the extent that there are actually four more Crazy Castle games. Four! Does anyone really want to collect thousands of carrots and avoid Yosemite Sam through hundreds of levels? Ugh, it disturbs the soul to think that these games were profitable. There's absolutely no substance to them whatsoever.

F

#105 - Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout

SPOILER: Bugs doesn't actually wear a tux in the game.

Once you collect a carrot, it morphs into the Warner Bros. logo.


I remember when Bugs Bunny and his friends formerly known as the Looney Tunes were cool. They shot each other, blew each other up, smoked cigars, cultivated racial stereotypes, dressed in drag. Being born in the mid-80's, I caught the tail end of their politically incorrect hijinx and it tickled every section of my funny bone. I know Bugs and co. are still around now, but their antics are muted, tamer. It's true, cartoons don't have to be crass and violent to be worth our time, but it helps... ah yes, the review! I tend to trap myself on memory lane when I begin one of these things. You see, for me, the first and the last paragraph are always the hardest because I have to come up with some cockamamie way to tie the whole review together, and sometimes (all the time?) it's just easier for me to unload some random thoughts and gibberish that's mildly associated with the subject I'm writing about. The more you know!!!

In one of the greater stories told on the NES, Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout - or Bx4, as it will be called henceforth - has Bugs attempting to reach his fiftieth birthday ceremony thrown by some of his biggest fans. Unfortunately, all of his fellow Looney Tunes feel neglected, hurt, and angry that they weren't invited and are attempting to sabotage Bugs on his way to the party. One would think this would involve traps, guns, bombs, rockets, and other well-laid plans, but no. It involves exploding alarm clocks, walking mallets, juice boxes, among other strangely designed enemies; Kemco was going for a more avant-garde Looney Tunes game, apparently. The enemies, while obscure and confusing, don't do much to hurt you. It's usually by mistake when Bugs gets hit. The bosses are, of course, the other Looney Tunes, but their attempts to stop Bugs are poor at best. Why does Tweety think that throwing a tomato at Bugs will stop him dead in his path? Bugs has a mallet and Tweety is a dumpy little bird, easily squashed by mallets and other blunt instruments. All this to say, this game is incredibly easy.

Not only is the game a cinch, there really isn't a goal, per say, other than to collect obscene amounts of carrots. At the end of each level, you play a bonus game to get extra lives, and the amount of times you play are based on how many carrots you collect; other than that, the carrots serve no purpose. Like all early platformers, the game is really trying to emulate Mario - collect carrots instead of coins, destroy goofy lookin' enemies, go down misshapen block chunks that resemble pipes - but what made Mario stand out was the level design. Here, the environments are wide open and boring. While there are some secret areas scattered about, they usually just revolve around getting more carrots. The game's repetitive and can be boring, BUT!... for some reason, I found that my quest to collect all the carrots I could drove me further into the game than necessary. Perhaps I, like Bugs, had become addicted to what rabbit scholars call "orange crack."

Once you play through the game, eating and collecting all the carrots you can stomach, there's really no reason to revisit it. The levels are bland and uncreative, the boss battles are uninspired, and the game can be beaten in a couple of hours. Bx4 came out a mere five months after the debut of Super Mario Bros. 3 and it shows, although the latter could crush the former with the mere tap of a Kuribo Shoe. Poor Bugs Bunny: if this game was worse, we could chalk it up to another cartoon license lost to the winds of greedy developers. Instead, it's a merely average game riding on the coattails of a better game. Bugs could have gotten a worse present for his fiftieth birthday, but this is hardly a worthy homage to one of the great cartoon characters of all time. Sad, that.

C