REVIEW: BUBSY the Bobcat in : Claws encounters of the furred kind 1993 SNES
	By: Accolade Type: Platformer Players: 1 Difficulty: Medium

Since there are absolutely millions of platformers out there on the Super NES, you have to do something pretty special in order to get noticed if you're about to hurl yet another platform game into the already overcrowded frenzy. Like make a game that is really, really good. Or, if you don't have the skill it takes for that, make a so-so game and try to make everyone believe that it's very, very good. Accolade have unfortunately gone for the latter option with Bubsy (and it's a sad fact that this latter option is often quite effective; there are always people that will believe anything), but they've taken the idea of over-hyping an average game to the limit.
    Bubsy's gimmick is that it is "almost like playing a cartoon". What, again? There must be about three million games out there making the same claim, and a lot of them are hopelessly crap. The second nail in Bubsy's coffin is that it is, in fact, too much like a cartoon, and that the "playing" bit has been a little overlooked.
    Bubsy smirks, blabbers, delivers dumb remarks, silly mimics and poses (a regular Louis de Funes, but with more hair) performs twenty million "hilarious" death routines and dances the cha-cha-cha on your screen, all for no reason whatsoever (allright, he doesn't dance the cha-cha-cha). Yes, that's all very nice and quite amusing for about five minutes, but a game needs to be more than just a super deluxe screenmate. And while there is a game in there somewhere, a game that even manages to be fun to play on the odd ocasion, it just has too many flaws to be any good.

The game is packed with unfair deaths and annoying jumps, the controls are way too loose and fiddly, you constantly get lost in the badly-designed levels (they're too large and confusing, there's no structure to them), there is very little variety between the levels and the game often gets on your nerves. Examples: projectiles are suddenly flung at you, apparently out of nowhere (in fact, they're fired by a baddie who is not yet visible on your screen) at a speed of 200 km and kill you before you can even begin to react. Repeat four times in a row, have nervous breakdown, etc..... Another one: you activate a switch, hoping that it will unearth some secret, instead it causes the room you're in to flood and you drown as soon as the water wets the bottom of Bubsy's feet (It's a gag based on cats hating water. Hysterical). Que mildly funny death scene and fits of frustration. And so on. These unfair instant-death situations absolutely plague the game. Add to that the many other flaws mentioned above, plus rather drab presentation (the color palette is very limited giving the game a bit of an Amiga look, i.e: painted in horse vomit), and it's obvious that all of Bubsy's amusing mimics and sound samples are not enough to save this from the pits of averageness. Sound is probably the only impressive and polished part of the game: there are loads of speech samples, most of them sounding not too bad, and some of the music is very good (there's a great whistling effect in the canyon levels and the river level BGM has something as well). But just good sound and funny animations is no excuse for a drab game that spends it's time laughing at it's own jokes instead of entertaining you. No, really, one can't let software companies get away with that, right? Bubsy himself probably sums it up best: "Whoa, are you still playing this thing?". Even he finds it hard to believe. - Toasty 67%

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