Tiny Toon Adventures (NES Review)

Tiny Toon Adventures
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released December, 1991
Directed by Kazuyuki Yamashita
Developed by Konami
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

This had so much promise.

I’ve not had the best of luck with Konami games in 2024 so far. I love Parodius, but the original did nothing for me. I didn’t care for their DOS port of Simpsons Arcade. I reviewed Monster in my Pocket a little less than two months ago and was stunned by how lazy of a game it was. You expect better from Konami, right? The thing was, literally nobody requested I review Monster in my Pocket, so it’s not like it was a surprise. On the other hand, Tiny Toon Adventures is one of my most requested NES reviews. A licensed game that was beloved by children of the early 90s. And in a way, I get that. While I don’t think the overall graphics are anything special, the character sprites are some of the best, and most animated, on the NES. Buster especially has a fairly decent variety of jumping sprites, and most of the characters in the game, heroes and enemies, look just like the cartoon. The game controls well and has some decent chiptunes. THIS is the Konami licensed game that lives up the franchise.. right? Maybe in a sense that Tiny Toons is overrated, and so is the game based on it.

Oh joy! Slow-ass, paint-by-numbers swimming stages. What frustrates me about swimming stages in 2D platformers is that they mostly all play the same. Avoid enemies while slowly inching your way through a stage by tapping the jump button to paddle, and there’s always the pits that have the currents that either push you up or suck you down. There’s nothing particularly original about Tiny Toons’ take. It’s nearly identical in tone and gameplay to the 2D Mario games of this era, especially Super Mario Bros. 3, with the only minor twist that once in a while you can throw a projectile if your power meter is charged all the way. But even Mario had underwater projectiles if you had gotten a fire flower before then. This is such an uninspired game.

Since today is my 35th birthday, I figured I’d give myself a birthday present by reviewing a game that was sure to appeal to my retro-loving readers. And then I played Tiny Toons, and I stopped getting what all the fuss was about after a while. It’s a pretty bland experience, and one that feels like it gets rushed to the finale during the final stretch of the game. The first handful of worlds have three levels to a stage. But then world fifth and sixth “worlds” are each only single level. The whole structure is off, as at one point, after fighting a boss, you fight another boss, Darth Duck or something, for three extra lives. I don’t know why that happened. I never watched reruns of the show as a kid. It’s a very typical hop ‘n bop platformer where you jump on most baddies to slay them. The biggest twist is you can select an alternative character at the start of each world. Buster has no special ability, but the three helpers can either break blocks, float, or run straight up walls. Okay, that sounds neat.

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Sadly, the concept is wrecked by how it works. First off, there’s really no reason to play as Buster. Everything he can do, as far as I could tell, the other characters can do too. They can all jump reasonably high, swim reasonably well, and hop on enemy heads. Maybe he’s faster, but there’s really not a whole lot of fast-running sections. The other three characters all have desirable, consistently useful superpowers. Buster is the star of the game because he’s the star of the show, but he comes off as particularly under-powered and useless. But, you can’t just ditch him immediately. Instead of swapping characters on the fly, you have to find an item that trades you for your chosen partner. When you find it, it lasts until you find another item that swaps you back. How stupid, and why on earth would you ever want to change back? The other three characters, especially Furball the cat, nerf the game’s difficulty. Weirdly, it feels like the levels were tailored specifically to be circumvented. When you run up walls, or jump high in the air and hover across entire sections of the game, it never feels like you’re cheesing it. It feels like the directors are saying “yep, that’s why we put that there.” Consequently, the levels are all samey and boring.

I have no idea why this boss fight happens. It occurs after the 4th world’s boss fight, like it’s crashing the party. Is this a running gag or something? Does Darth Duck interrupt cartoons?

And it’s actually not as well-coded as the graphics or decent combat suggest. First off, the collision isn’t that good. Take a look at this screen and note that I’m taking damage.

What?

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Okay, well, I didn’t touch a thing, but bullsh*t as that might be, at least there’s an enemy there to indicate the presence of danger. That’s not always the case when you take damage. Throughout a few stages of the game, there’s barrels arranged like platforms, and if you walk on some of them, you take damage and maybe even die. Not all of them, but some of them, with no giveaway sprites to tell the safe barrels from the unsafe ones. There’s no enemy sprites or any warning of danger at all. They’re not blowing fire out the top. They’re not marked with a skull and crossbones. You just get hurt. I think maybe they meant to draw an enemy sprite because, if you hold down the jump button when you leap onto them, while you’re still very likely to take damage, you can also neutralize the barrel by.. um.. damaging it? I did safely “defeat” it a couple times, but most contact with the top is deadly no matter where you land. It happens in both the US and Japanese ROMs, and it happens regardless of which character you choose.

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What the f*ck is happening? Are they twisting their ankles on the barrel? Did they blow out a knee? I have never seen the likes of this. There is nothing there! I get this game had fans in the 90s, but come on! If this didn’t star your favorite cartoon’s characters you’d be completely furious at a game with this type of crap happening. And no, there’s not an enemy hiding in them. I waited to see if one ever popped out and it didn’t. I don’t know if this is sloppy coding or something went amiss but this is just bad. I’ve chewed out well-meaning indie developers for a lot less than that crap, and it’s not an indie studio. It’s Konami at their absolute 8-bit peak. It’s beyond the pale. I’ve been reviewing games for thirteen years now, and playing games since I was 7 years old, and I’ve never seen anything like this! How can anyone justify this and say “I still think it’s a good game” with a straight face?!

I actively wondered if there was some running gag on the show, like a tongue-in-cheek public service announcement about the danger of playing with empty barrels. Possibly a satire on playing with empty refrigerators, and this is a reference to it. Then, I thought about it, and even if it were true, it would still be inexcusable. Every single person who plays this game would have had to watch the show AND remember every single gag from it on the off chance the game pays homage to it. I can’t figure out any way to spin this as acceptable. This couldn’t have been a coding accident. There’s just too many barrels that do this. The one above isn’t even the first or second one sequentially. It’s the third. Here’s the first two.

There’s no justifying this, and in order for a game that pulls a stunt like that to get a YES!, the rest of the game better be f*cking immaculate! Well, Tiny Toons certainly isn’t. The collision is spotty, the set pieces are too conservative and lack showmanship, the level design ranges from average to boring, and the boss fights are very dull. There’s a level that has the balls to call itself “Wacky Land” that doesn’t NOTHING wacky. I get that it’s the name of a theme park on the TV show, but have something like a roller coaster or a Ferris Wheel to signal to players “this is a theme park.” It doesn’t feel like one. (UPDATE: I was confusing Wacky Land with the park “HappyWorldLand” from the direct-to-video Tiny Toons movie How I Spent my Summer Vacation. Wackyland is the home of the Do-Do characters you must find in the stage, based on a 1938 Porky Pig cartoon. Watch that here. It does somewhat resemble that, I guess? In the background? Barely? But in terms of the level design, replacing an end-goal with finding the do-dos is lame and the level layout has a case for the second most basic in the game, besides the opening stage. So, I stand by my hate-filled tirade. There is NOTHING wacky about this!) It feels like a normal “jump the pits” stage. It might actually be the most conservative-looking stage in the entire game. It looks like this. Behold: a level that Babs in the cartoon describes as “wild, crazy, and completely out of control.” Then, she says, hand over my heart, “hope I’m not bored.” Well..

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I can’t speak for Babs Bunny, but I sure am bored. It’s telling that the game’s structure abruptly abandons the three levels to a world format after the fourth world. They were completely out of ideas. Now, it’s not like Konami put the varsity team on Tiny Toons. This game’s director only has four credits to his name at MobyGames. That’s only two more credits than *I* have. So, maybe this wasn’t phoned-in. Maybe a mediocre-at-best Mario knock-off was the absolute maximum they could squeeze out of their talent. I think it probably speaks more to the popularity of the source material that Tiny Toons is remembered as one of the best post-SNES 8-bit games. I’m going to guess children of the NES era probably wanted to like this a lot more than they did. It rarely comes up in casual conversation and only pops up in specific discussions of Konami or licensed games or even the best graphics on the NES. I don’t happen to think the graphics are that good. The sprites are, sure. But the worlds they inhabit don’t feel alive. That’s 50% of the equation, because the settings and facades of the levels have to be immersive. I don’t think Tiny Toons comes close. These levels feel dead inside, like I do after playing this. I know this probably wasn’t the review fans wanted, but I didn’t want bricks thrown through my windows on my birthday either. Sigh. I knew I should have reviewed the G.I. Joe NES games instead. Nobody throws bricks over those.
Verdict: NO!

Oh, Acme Looniversity is one of THOSE types of schools. Well, it was the 90s.