Hudson Hawk (NES Review)

Hudson Hawk
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released December 27, 1991
Developed by Ocean
Published by Sony Imagesoft
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

My father is an unironic superfan of Hudson Hawk, so I want to preface this review by saying that, as miserable a time as I had, I’m happy that I’m almost 36 years old and I still get to play video games with my father, who’s about to turn 76. I love you, Daddy. Amo a mi Papá risueño! By the way, he hated the game too.

So yeah, Hudson Hawk is a terrible game that, like the infamous box office bomb that it’s based on, has a cult following. I don’t get it, at least with the NES game. Apparently most of its fans are fans of the home computer ports. They can have them. After playing the NES game, I didn’t like the concept of Hudson Hawk at all. I don’t even think it had any concept at all besides “hey, we got a license for the next movie starring the Die Hard guy! We’ve made it to the big time and OH MY GOD, what have we done?” At best, the game Hudson Hawk could have turned out to be a bland, rushed-through-production platformer. But, needless to say, the version I played is not the concept at its best. A game completely devoid of polish or craftsmanship, Hudson Hawk on the NES is one of the most sloppily coded games I’ve played at IGC. Currently, the worst NES game I’ve reviewed is Fox’s Peter Pan & The Pirates. A game that, mechanically speaking, I have nothing positive to say about. Hudson Hawk gave it a run for its money.

What the heck are these sprites? Hudson Hawk’s teeny tiny sprites all look deranged. “Oh look! The baby got into our LSD supply! Baby’s first acid trip! Look at that mouth foam! He’ll be having flashbacks for years and not even know why! How precious!”

I’ll start with the biggest problem. You’re given a whopping eight hit points per life, which sounds generous, but there’s a catch: they never bothered to program most of the notifications for when you’re taking damage. Some elements, like bullets, make a noise, but for the most part, damage is completely silent. There’s no damage sprites. There’s no blinking (my term for invincibility frames). There’s typically no noise to indicate you’ve been hit. You don’t even get to see your life bar during the action. You have to pause the game to do that. Here’s what that looks like with an enemy dropping objects out a window onto you. I had seven hearts going into this and let the guy drop something on me. Despite the fact that I lose six out of seven hearts here, you wouldn’t know it from how the game reacts, which is LITERALLY NOT AT ALL!

It’s unbelievable that anyone making a game that’s supposed to be fun could actually believe this was a good idea. “Nobody likes it when Mega Man goes GLLLLLICK or when Simon Belmont goes PISSHHH. Let’s just not do that, and everyone will love our game!” I’d like to see someone ROM hack those games to remove all reactions to taking damage, including removing the life bar from the primary gameplay screen and see how fun they are. The answer is “they would be next to unplayable.” It’s like how only an idiot would hear about those people who are born with CIPA, aka congenital inability to feel pain, and think “I wish I had been born with that!” In reality, those people live short, tragic lives because pain is sort of essential to survival. Well, the appearance of pain is essential for action games to work. Don’t believe me? Play Hudson Hawk, a video game that has CIPA. That alone qualifies it for a NO! but Hudson Hawk has other fatal problems.

The gigantic slap that I think is supposed to be a punch is one of the weakest-feeling attacks on the NES. Usually a lack of OOMPH is because there’s no damage frames, but the lack of quality sound plays into it here.

Hudson Hawk is based around precision movement and jumping, but this is one of those games with seemingly deliberately rough controls, mechanics, and physics. I hate that. I always have. Saying the game engine itself should be the source of the challenge is like saying a car’s airbag should be attached to the brake pedal. It always feels like a product of having no ambition at all. You get a pathetic jump, but typical to this piece of junk, even that doesn’t work right. For this teeny tiny little jump to work at all, you have to build up sufficient momentum first. So naturally they built the level design largely around ledges that you have to do the hokey pokey on, turning around and trying to position yourself to build that momentum. Then the developers REALLY give players the middle finger by having your movement in general be too loose. Take a look at this segment:

This room, the finale of level two, is divided into two sections. On the top floor, you have to avoid walking on those yellow squares. They’re trampolines which will launch you onto those bookcases and force you to return to the ladder you entered from and start over. These aren’t platforms you’re jumping over. It’s a solid floor. Hudson Hawk does this trick constantly. Instead of trampolines, it’s usually alarms that are the floor tiles you jump over. Regardless of what you’re triggering, it’s always too sensitive and far harder than normal platform jumping to get right. Then you get to the bottom floor, and it’s unstated that you’re playing “the floor is lava” only instead of killing you, touching the floor activates a cage that lowers around the book you’re trying to reach. You can see that the platforms are pretty small, so you barely have enough room to build that momentum up. You can’t just jump blindly either since touching a light does damage. It doesn’t tell you that part either. Hell, the lights don’t even look like danger elements. Neither do the wall alarms in level one.

Touching either of the circled switches triggers an alarm. These are cropped photos. They’re very small in the game, and even more annoying is that there are switches you have to deliberately trigger. Just making contact with the bad ones sets them off.

The level design is probably the only part of the game that comes close to not being thoughtless. To the developer’s minuscule credit, they did try to make Hudson Hawk feel like more than a simple Point A to Point B game. It’s based on a caper film about a cat burglar. Like every other aspect, they failed, because they never even come close to staging it correctly. The above sequence where you can’t touch the floor? That could have felt like a heist, but it comes with no warning, and you don’t even get to see the cage lowering around the book because you’re so far away from it. The consequences for hitting the floor are more likely to happen off-screen. I’d have preferred a text screen before entering the room to explain the rules. A small break in the action would have been better than how they set the table for it, and there are text screens in the game between levels. If you’re a game developer, you HAVE to paint a picture for your higher-concept designs. Hudson Hawk doesn’t do that.

If not for the loose movement and lack of damage sprites/blinking, some of the screens would have risen to the level of “fine.” Really! Nothing special. These are boilerplate video game challenges, but the classics are classics for a reason: they work. Well, provided the mechanics work.

I’m not a fan of the movie, but Hudson Hawk should lend itself to an action game far easier than something like Back to the Future. Actually, they probably should have leaned more into stealth type of elements. Hudson Hawk is a caper film. Make Hudson Hawk a caper game. But the “stealth elements” don’t feel like stealth gameplay at all, so it never really succeeds at being a caper video game. The “alarms” don’t function like alarms because you’re just jumping or crawling under them and, like everything else in the game, they’re too sensitive and too subtle. I’d also think a “caper” game would have more slap-stick based “outwit enemies” combat, but Hudson Hawk doesn’t do that either. You just kill baddies with flimsy baseballs that come with a stiff penalty for missing. Or, sometimes the baseballs only stun enemies for a second or two and you have to finish them off with a clunky slap move that doesn’t even have to make contact to work. They phoned-in everything. Look at this:

It’s a blind jump that, when you make the leap, the platform just appears. It’s not exciting, though. Players are going to try it because the developers built it in a way where there’s literally no other option but to just try to jump. It happens several times in this room, and then at least one other time late in the game. I’m pretty sure it’s the block I’m standing on in the picture below that wasn’t originally visible. I found it by accident when I shorted a jump. You know what would have been more exciting, knuckleheads that made this game? Having it visible, because then I know what needs to be done and the consequences for not doing it. You’ve created the wrong sense of relief: surprise relief that builds no anticipation. Did any of you even play video games before you started making this?

And I might as well say it: this is one f*cking ugly game. I have no idea what motivated the art direction but these sprites are terrible.

My spidey-sense tells me the invisible platform thing might be a relic of a deleted gameplay mechanic that required an item to reveal hidden platforms. That’s a caper-like thing. There’s no items that affect gameplay at all. My father said the game they should have tried to replicate was Konami’s Goonies II. A licensed game with caper-like first person exploration segments. But, Goonies II is an excellent game because it probably took a lot of effort to make, and who has time for that? As a general action platformer, Hudson Hawk has no excitement because of the poor movement and jumping, and because the graphics are so ugly that you can’t even see half the things killing you. All these fatal problems in a game that has so little ambition to begin with. Hudson Hawk is a movie that’s famously overproduced. Maybe the designers felt like they had to balance the scales of the universe by grossly underproducing it.

Oh thank God I’m finished with the game.

The best thing I can say about Hudson Hawk: at least it’s not as bad as Peter Pan & The Pirates. I did have to think about it, though. Probably the second best thing I can say about Hudson Hawk is the game only lasts three levels. That’s probably a pretty good indication of a creatively bankrupt game made by people who were completely disinterested. Maybe they saw a screening of film and were like “oh f*ck, this is what we’re making a game for?” It happens, but you can still make a great game out of a bad property. Ever heard of Johnny Mnemonic? It’s a famously terrible movie that Midway signed up to do a pinball table of before knowing how the film would turn out. Even after George Gomez saw the film and questioned every decision that led to him having this gig, the finished pinball machine is beloved by fans. If you work for a AAA game maker who does licensed games, you’re going to end up working on a mediocre IP eventually. Great developers resolve to make their game the best thing to ever come out of the franchise. The bad developers simply don’t care because they get paid either way, and the worst ones? They make games like Hudson Hawk.
Verdict: NO!

“WOOOOO BABY! COCAINE IS AWESOME! QUICK, SOMEONE HAND ME A POGO STICK BEFORE THE COME DOWN!”