The Blues Brothers (NES Review)

The Blues Brothers
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released September, 1992
Developed by Titus
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

I will never know joy again.

I go through extended periods of melancholy. If my rate of game reviews slows down, that’s probably a sign that I’m currently having an extended case of the blues. I try to avoid reviewing games when that’s happening because it’s just plain not fair to the games. The bitch of it is, it’s never clear when it’s over. It’s the most quiet recovery phase imaginable, and it’s so frustrating. You can imagine how tough it is to play a bad game when this is happening because it’s never clear if it’s ME or the game. Thankfully, Blues Brothers on the NES is so bad that I don’t have to guess. I used my emulator to select a random game and it gave me Blues Brothers, making me believe the universe really is a simulator and the person playing the Cathy game is trolling me in the same way I did when I fenced in people while playing the Sims. It took about a minute of playtime with Blues Brothers before I said “even my emulator hates me.” Blues Brothers is absolutely abysmal. A series of cheap shots, GOTCHAs, unavoidable damage moments, last pixel jumps, and terrible level design.

This is one of those games that looks fine in screenshots. But playing it is the pits.

The problem is Blues Brothers wants to have sprawling, labyrinthine level design, but it doesn’t quite understand how to go about doing that. There’s so many sloppily-executed jumping puzzles that make no sense, with no semblance of elegance to their design. There’s far too many moments where it’s not even clear what direction you’re supposed to be going. In place of cleverness, Blues Brothers keeps going to the same handful of unimaginative tricks. There’s too many blind jumps, which is probably my least favorite type of bad design. Blues Brothers relies so heavily on blind jumps that eventually I don’t think you could consider the jumps blind anymore. I was able to anticipate when they were coming. Not so much with the other trope: last pixel jumps. It’s not unusual for both types of crap jumping segments to be combined: last pixel blind jumps. Oh, and don’t forget that they often end those necessary blind jumps with enemies placed at the end that you can’t see coming and that you can’t really avoid. Often, it’s possible those blind jumps, when missed, could result in you falling back to the beginning of the level and having to start all over. Thank god for save states and rewind. I’d never had the patience to finish this otherwise.

I think there were maybe two parts in the entire game where riding animals worked the way I think it was supposed to. Mind you, there’s a lot more of these creatures you can piggyback onto, but they didn’t do anything and often just dropped dead.

And it’s kind of glitchy, too. There’s a few animals you can “ride” but they don’t really do anything when it happens and just as often just immediately die and fall off screen. Sometimes the enemies seem like they get caught on a pixel and wiggle back and forth in place. None of the enemies feel specifically themed to the IP, though. The levels I think try to be as there’s a jailbreak scene, but they look so drab and plain. It’s not exactly an ugly game, but it often feels like this could have been anything. Oh, and moving platforms aren’t synced right, but this does contribute to the one semi-clever bit in the entire game. There’s a moment in the final level where there’s multiple moving platforms that all intersect with each-other, and you have to figure out which is the right one. Okay, that was cool, but the moment passes quickly and then it’s back to the same blind jumps and last pixel jumps. You have to use B-run/B-jumping, but you move too fast and the controls are too loose for a game that demands this much accuracy. Having the game end with moving platforms surrounded by spikes before the non-ending ending was the final slap in the face. This is one of the worst games I’ve ever reviewed.

This is how the final level of the game starts. Your minimum jumping height is more than enough to hit those spikes. I spent several minutes rewinding and replaying this, jumping from every angle trying to avoid the spikes, and I came to the conclusion this is just an automatic loss of a health point. It just sucks. This game is horrible.

I don’t have much more to say about Blues Brothers as a game. They weren’t even trying to be fun. They were being sadistic just for sadism’s sake. Five terrible levels of lifeless, boring blind/last pixel jumps, with pretty much nothing else. You can’t defeat enemies. There’s no trinkets to find. Just find the unmarked exit to the level and that’s it. It’s really lazy, actually. There’s no bosses, either. Levels and the game itself just end anticlimactically. I have nothing positive to say here. It doesn’t even really work as a Blues Brothers game. It feels like a completely generic template that an out of touch producer got the license for. “Guys, you won’t believe this, but we finally outbid Konami, Capcom, Nintendo, Sega, everyone, for a hot ticket license that kids will love!” “What is it? Disney? Nickelodeon? Disnelodeon?” “Blues Brothers!” “As in.. Blues Brothers? The Saturday Night Live sketch starring a guy who died before most NES owners were even born?” “Did I say kids will love it? Sorry, my dentures got caught in my throat. I mean their parents will recognize it as a thing they enjoyed when they were stoned on Saturday nights in college and buy it for their kids, because kids always love the outdated pop culture their parents enjoyed in their youth.” See also 20th Century Fox’s Atari 2600 output. That mentality lived well into the NES era.

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My question is why would you get this license only to do a lazy platform game? If you’re going to make a game based on a comedy music act, shouldn’t that game be, you know, musical and funny? Why would you just make sprites based on the characters? Besides music notes restoring your health, there’s no music theme to this, nor are there any sight or sound gags. None at all. Maybe the bad design was meant to be ironically funny. Nah, that’s far too clever for this. I’m not going to say “this license deserved better” because I don’t know it all too well. I only recently saw the 1980 film for the first time, and I’ve never been able to make myself watch Saturday Night Live from before I was born. I feel like most of the sketches are “you had to be there” in nature. My experience was limited entirely to the sequel, which I saw once, when I was 8 years old. I was bored with Blues Brothers then. I was bored with it now. But, if you’re going to make a Blues Brothers game, I would think the first two steps were “be musical” and “be funny.” This is just generic template 385-B, with sprites made to look like John Belushi, who I imagine is spinning in his grave, though that could be residual from the speedball that killed him. So much for being out of my melancholy phase, but with a game this bad, how the hell can I tell?
Verdict: NO!