The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout (NES Review)

Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout
Platform: NES
Developed by Kemco
First Released August 3, 1990
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

I think this HAS to set the record for most 1ups you can earn from a bonus game. I got a 50up from this bingo. Good lord. Why not just cut straight to the ending?

After being a little more generous with Wizards & Warriors than I probably should have been, I need a game where I have NOTHING good to say about it. How about a game that was supposed to celebrate Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday, but missed the date by over two years? Well, apparently it didn’t. Despite the fact that Bugs Bunny debuted in 1938, meaning 1988 should have been the 50th birthday, Warner Bros. celebrated Bugs’ birthday in 1990. So, instead of being two years late and sucking, this game was rushed to release and sucks. The end result is the same: The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout is one of the worst games on the NES, and certainly one of the worst licensed games on the platform. What’s really infuriating is that the Wikipedia page says, exact quote, “The gameplay is very similar to that of Super Mario Bros. 2.” Are you f*cking kidding me? Who the hell writes these things and how many times did they have to headbutt a brick wall for that statement to sound accurate? Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout and Super Mario Bros. 2 have NOTHING in common besides being on the same platform and being the same genre. It’d be like saying a Formula One game has similar gameplay to Mario Kart. Only a complete moron would say that, and that’s not even accounting for Super Mario 2 withstanding the test of time better than 99% of all games and Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout feeling like a barely functioning and very unfinished prototype.

Look how far I am from this enemy, but my hammer scored a successful kill here. The collision is embarrassing.

The first thing that stands out about Bugs Bunny is how badly the scrolling looks. This isn’t a smoothly animated game at all.. which is pretty damn sad given the fact that it’s based on a global cartoon icon. It seems to load the action one slice at a time, with a “slice” being between 1/3 and 1/4 the length of Bugs’ character sprite. It never goes away, either, so the game has this unavoidable jerkiness to the action. The characters, be it you (Bugs) or the enemies also all look jerky and crappy too. Actually, it almost looks like stop animation. And all characters have collision boxes that could double as aircraft carriers. It feels like they created an engine for Blowout that just never worked right. There’s a chance that it’s using a modified version of the same engine Kemco used for their historically god-awful Superman game. After completing Blowout, I threw on Superman and noticed it had the same “slice-scrolling” with poor collision and a similar vibe to the sound effects and music. Is it really THAT big a stretch to assume that they just had no idea what they were doing by this point in their existence?

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Well, actually, it is a stretch. I gave Roger Rabbit on the Famicom Disk System, the game that was released stateside as the Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, a YES!, along with the Game Boy version, aka Mickey Mouse in Japan. And if side scrollers aren’t your thing, Nintendo fans seem to like Kemco’s NES ports of Shadowgate and Déjà Vu as well. So, it’s not like Kemco were completely clueless. But maybe they should have cut their losses with Birthday Blowout. The action is limited to a flimsy hammer that you don’t even need to be anywhere near enemies to score a hit using. Not that it matters, since there’s no OOMPH to the action whether or not the sprite for the hammer makes contact with the enemies or is nearly a full character length away from them. There’s something despicable about Bugs Bunny, one of the most violent cartoon characters, having his video game violence reduced to having all the impact of a tardigrade landing on a cotton ball.

I’ll spare you a bad Foghorn Leghorn impression and just say that you can ignore confrontation with him because, to win the battle against him, you just have to smack Henery Hawk. Now son, A SAY SON, that’s a joke.

The level design is super bland and relatively straight forward, with the same handful of generic enemies. A clock that explodes when you hit is stood out because usually after you blow one up, another falls out the sky as soon as its sprite vanishes from the screen. Oh, you don’t have to worry about dying. You’re giving so many hit points that it’s nearly impossible to die via enemy damage. I lost two lives the entire time due to mistimed jumps. Jumps that I could have easily hit but I just had run out of patience and wanted the game to be over with. Which, technically I reached that point by the end of the third of twenty-four levels, but I pressed on because I have no life.

This is about as ambitious as Birthday Blowout gets with level design: no warning Simon’s Quest-like illusion flooring late in the game. I **HATE** this platforming trope in general. It’s just such a lazy and imaginative GOTCHA, you know?

Weirdly, the only enemies that dropped life were these faces made of fire. What a strange decision. They seem to have programmed one specific enemy, and only one, to have an item drop. Even weirder is they ALWAYS dropped hearts when I killed them. It’s so amateurish. This whole game is. The main highlight is the “boss” encounters with other Looney Tunes characters that happen at the end of every stage. Sometimes it’s Daffy Duck, and those suck because you don’t even have to hit him with the hammer.. which given how bad the hammer is, might be a blessing. Seriously, I can’t stress enough: it’s one of the worst primary weapons on the NES. Bugs is a wabbit. MAKE JUMPING ON ENEMIES LETHAL YOU NUMBSKULLS! It was right there! Yeesh. Anyway, to beat Daffy, you just have to touch the giant carrot. I usually needed only a couple seconds to “win” those battles. They’re so underwhelming.

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The remaining battles are against Tweety, the Coyote, Sylvester, Pepé Le Pew, Foghorn Leghorn, Elmer Fudd, Yosemite Sam, and the Tasmanian Devil. On the plus side, they’re actual fights. However, they’re not fun encounters at all, and it’s not just because of the complete lack of weight to both your attack and theirs. When you blink from taking damage in Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout, it takes FOREVER for you to stop blinking. You’re seeing stars, and while this happens, you can’t attack. You’re also blinking in the literal sense, which is annoying. You’d think seeing stars alone should be enough to signal the point the game is trying to make, but nope. So, for bosses like Tweety, Pepé, and Elmer who fire projectiles, if you take a hit, you have to wait for the blinking to stop. But, the blinking doesn’t “wind down” so timing when you’ll be able to attack again is an exercise in frustration. The only interesting boss is the final one, Taz at the end of level 6-4. He throws footballs at you that you have to knock back at him. Why footballs? Why Taz for the last boss? Why Taz and footballs? Is that from one of the cartoons? Apparently not.

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You have to wonder if they ever thought about cutting their losses with this one. They got rid of some ambitious ideas, presumably because the development team couldn’t get them working. Speedy Gonzales was originally going to be in the game. He’s not in it. Porky Pig is on the cover but he’s not in it, either. There were going to be spiked balls. Those didn’t make the cut. Okay, so maybe “ambitious” might be a stretch because spiked balls are as boilerplate and mundane a staple of platforming as it gets. The fact that they were cut tells me they knew the collision detection wasn’t up to snuff, but they didn’t have a clue how to fix it. That’s probably why the game that actually came out still feels like a prototype that’s barely not collapsing under its own weight. According to Cutting Room Floor, they originally wanted to have rotating blocks. In the final build, the platforms are instead flat, personality-free lines that just vanish sometimes. No animation to warn of this. I couldn’t even use the phrase “poof, it’s gone” because there’s not even a “poof.” They just vanish sometimes. And that’s the Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout canary in the coal mine. The “Tweety in the coal mine” if you will. It feels like a game made with no love or care. Even if the technical foibles were fixed, it’d still be one of the most boring games on the NES. MAYBE little kids in 1990 would have liked it. It’s not very challenging, so I suppose the kiddie set might have liked this more. Except those technical hang-ups are there, and compared to Nintendo’s smoothly animated offerings, it feels like a major technical regression. I might not be a big Bugs Bunny fan, but jeez, he deserved better than this.
Verdict: NO!

Post Retro Review Fun Fact: The Bugs Bunny Birthday Blowout’s title screen directly copies the actual logo for Bugs Bunny’s 50th birthday special. Have a look below. You know what? Dang, that’s some good sprite work there. So I do have ONE good thing to say about Birthday Blowout. Of course, when the most impressive aspect of a game is its title screen, you might want to reevaluate.. well.. everything. Still, S-tier title screen that is.

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