An explanation of what’s going on here can be found in the intro post.
Last time we looked back at the Saturn in early 1996 in our half year Round-Up.
Last time with the Jaguar, we looked at our second batch of games in 1994 with Checkered Flag, Club Drive, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, and Doom.
Now, we’re wrapping up the Jaguar in 1994 with the most cursed European vibes possible as we look at Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales, Kasumi Ninja, Val d’Isère Skiing and Snowboarding, Zool 2, and Iron Soldier.
**This post was originally published on 5/23/2024 on Giant Bomb dot com**
Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tails
Developer: Imagitec Design
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 12/9/1994
Time to Fracturing My Furry Tail: 58 Minutes
This has been a long time coming; I knew that one day I would need to confront Bubsy and his tired puns. What we have now is to deal with the third entry in this ignominious franchise, which only ever saw release on the Jaguar. The first two Bubsy games had been produced for the SNES and Genesis as an answer to Sonic the Hedgehog and the result was a mascot platformer that proved to be a shittified take on the Sonic concept in every way possible. It could be conceptually described as the amiga-fication of Sonic, even though the Bubsy games weren’t made for that platform.
On both a surface and deep level, Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales is a maze-style 2D Platformer with multi-layered stages that emphasize precise platforming. Add in the acceleration-based movement physics and it might seem like I’m just describing any given 2D Sonic game, but where Bubsy goes wrong is in the execution. Every single component of the experience is the worst version of itself. First, the acceleration and inertia on Bubsy’s movement is excessive, which dovetails with the platforming design relying on thin platforms that are usually sloped in the middle to create completely unmanageable movement. This fits into the overall level design that attempts to imitate the multi-layered maze layouts of the weakest 2D Sonic levels but without any expertise or good judgement. The enemy placement in those levels is haphazard at best and blatantly malicious at worst. That placement is made worse by replacing Sonic’s ring-based health system with a one-hit-kill approach and stingy checkpointing. The minute-to-minute experience involves slipping and sliding around convoluted levels, running face first into enemies that instantly kill you, falling off of badly placed platforms, and picking up hundreds of collectibles that serve no purpose with no indication of where you’re supposed to go.
If the gameplay wasn’t bad enough, the music is bad in the kind of way you would expect from a low rent Amiga game and it’s on a short loop because of our old friend Jaguar ROM limitations. The visuals are nightmarish in a similar vein as Zool, Earthworm Jim, or the later Rayman yet somehow more insultingly lazy than any of those examples. I say that because this game goes for a fairy tale pastiche but with limited and boring sprites and tilesets that paradoxically maintains a staid, unhinged vibe. That’s a long way of saying it’s British, I suppose. The cherry on top is that Bubsy the character is one of the least appealing platforming mascots of the 90’s, depending on how you feel about Earthworm Jim or Gex. There are a couple saving graces, though, which are both attributable to the console itself.
First, Bubsy himself isn’t particularly chatty. Considering the quality of humor seen within this franchise, I can only imagine a chatty Bubsy coming across as a worse, G-rated Gex. The curse of the Jaguar’s ROM limitations saves us from this even worse fate. Second, because this game is, again, running on a system with two 32-bit processors taped together and enough ram to dump half a cart to memory, the graphical stability is immaculate. This is still 1994 we’re talking about, and the big 16-bit consoles are getting long-in-the-tooth. Displaying a bunch of nonsense onscreen with no sprite limitations or slowdown is an advantage that 2D games would have on all 32-bit consoles, and that capability is first showcased with these Jaguar platformers. Both positive points may seem minor or perfunctory, but keep in mind these are the only nice things that can be said about Fractured Furry Tales. Oh well, we know from hindsight that Rayman, Gex, and Earthworm Jim would improve to varying degrees by moving from 2D to 3D in the coming years, let’s wait to see how it goes for Bubsy.
Kasumi Ninja
Developer: Hand Made Software
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 12/9/1994
Time to Kusoge Ninja: 10 Minutes
We’ve seen plenty of bad Mortal Kombat knockoffs during this blog project. They usually have one redeeming quality or are otherwise mostly inoffensive. Primal Rage has a commendable claymation art style, Way of the Warrior licensed a cool guy soundtrack, and Rise 2: Resurrection is easily ignorable. On top of that, the actual Mortal Kombat ports we’ve seen have been miserable but accurate enough that I have to give them some credit. Yet, after all that, we’re now faced with Kasumi Ninja, a truly rancid piece of shit that has no redeeming qualities of any kind. The Jag really wasn’t a good system for Fighting games.
Mechanically, visually, and thematically this is a shameless Mortal Kombat knock-off. Normally, I’d want to leave it at that and move on, but this thing crossed an invisible line for me. One of the things we all know about Mortal Kombat, but we as an audience tend to just accept, is the questionable cultural representations in that series, especially the early games. When looking at the first couple of MK games, you can kinda see beyond the screen at the 20-something dipshits who made them. The pastiche of elements from the ’70’s kung fu craze, exploitation cinema, and the ’80’s ninja craze is something that could have occurred innocuously to a certain type of guy of the time. The final execution of those elements is also corny and absurd enough that it’d be dumb to take it at anything other than face value. Even still, those MK games navigated a precarious greyzone that most imitators shied away from; but then there’s fuckin’ Kasumi Ninja.
This game doubles down on the casual racism to point of crossing out of that greyzone. Take the announcer as an example. In Mortal Kombat those voice clips were styled after the kind of VO you could expect from a poorly dubbed 70’s martial arts movie, invoking that kind of campy cheese while, likely unintentionally, swerving around any outright racism. The guys at Hand Made Software clearly misunderstood the joke, as the announcer in Kasumi Ninja is some Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffanys tier bullshit. It sounds like the guy was pulling the sides of his eyes back in the VO booth. A second example is the fatality for the Native American character, which is literally just him scalping his opponent. Nighthawk’s design is highly dubious, but he’s never scalped anyone. There’s enough small stuff like that for the experience to add up into something actively gross.
On top of that, the game plays like absolute trash. It takes all the mechanics from MK and then implements them badly. The controls are unresponsive, the attacks are unoriginal, and the whole thing is unbalanced. It somehow looks worse than the original Mk, which came out 2 years earlier on worse hardware, and the sound design is as trash as everything else. There’s also a barebones plot, but even that is bizarre and not even in a fun way. This game is commonly accepted as one of the worst Fighting games of all time, but even then, this just barely doesn’t make the cut as the worst Jaguar game, entirely because Bubsy is a sleep-paralysis demon who’s several times more horrific than Freddy Fazbear.
Val d’Isère Skiing and Snowboarding
Developer: Virtual Studio
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 12/9/1994
Time to Hitting A Tree: 23 Minutes
Switching gears, we now have a bad game that is at least playable. Val-Duh-Zare Skiing and Snowboarding might sound like a sports game similar to what you would find for winter Olympics tie-ins, but fear not for this is only a mediocre Scaler Racer. So much so, that I have no commentary outside of a factual description of the game!
Valleyed Share Snowing and Skiboarding contains a series of time trial races using Slalom rules across several modes. You can do single events on ~12 courses, a tournament mode, and a freeride mode where you race down branching paths to get to the bottom of the mountain before running out of time. You can also choose to use either skis or snowboards, though the gameplay is identical for each. In whatever mode you play, you skiboard downhill controlling your player like he’s an OutRun car or something while having to navigate between flag gates; for every gate you miss you get seconds added to your time like in slalom. There are turns, hills, and obstacles that come at you fast enough to be impossible to avoid without some level of course memorization. That’s it. There’s a lot of content by Jaguar standards but none of it is particularly fun.
Oh, fun fact: this thing is apparently a retooling of an SNES game released by this developer earlier in ’94. That game, Tommy Moe’s Winter Extreme: Skiing & Snowboarding, was decently received and relatively innocuous. I suppose they couldn’t maintain the coveted Tommy Moe branding beyond that one release. There’s something kinda sad about how one of the few games released in the Jaguar’s launch year was just a worse port of a SNES game with a half-hearted coat of paint slapped over it.
Zool 2
Developer: Imagitec Design
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 12/9/1994
Time to Craving A Chupa Chups™ Brand Confection : 25 Minutes
Since one bad Sonic clone isn’t enough for the likes of the Jaguar, we now have our second. Fortunately, and despite being an Amiga port, Zool 2 plays as though it was designed by human beings, which automatically puts it one over on Bubsy. Another plus is there being weird stuff that I can latch onto other than existential horror. But first, the game itself.
Zool is an interdimensional ninja who needs to run through levels collecting various kinds of candy and other food items for reasons. Besides the normal jumping around with terrible inertia, there’s bad wall-jumping and a pea shooter that can be used on the plentiful enemies littering the sickly colorful, candy-themed levels. Besides having a gun and a health bar, the mechanic setting this apart from Bubsy is the fact that you need to collect a certain amount of the pick-ups in order to unlock the level exits. It’s also sanely linear, even if the platforming requires way more precision than the movement allows. Though, it’s possible to turn off the momentum physics, which was an oddly self-aware design choice. I’m tempted to give this thing more credit than it deserves just for not being Bubsy, and I need to constantly check myself on that. I’d still rather play this game than any of the other Amiga ports we’ve seen on the 3DO and Jaguar.
Where this gets weird is the omnipresent Chupa Chups branding. For everyone like me who has no idea what that is, it’s apparently a Spanish candy brand specializing in lollipops that’s prevalent in Europe. It might also be sold in North America as well, but hell if I’ve ever seen it in stores. The thing is, Zool the interdimensional ninja isn’t a Chupa Chups mascot, like what you would expect from a Cool Spot or Sneak King style brand exercise. This is more of a Dole bananas in Super Monkey Ball kind of thing, though there’s no thematic connection here like there is there. The branding feels wholly independent from anything else going on with this game.
The only thing I can figure out is that Chupa Chups had a history of weird marketing leading up to this point in the early-90’s. Being a Spanish company, it has sketchy origins in the Francoist era, but it also had its logo designed by Salvador Dali for some reason. Additionally, in the 80’s they jumped on a Europe-wide antismoking campaign by putting out slogans such as. “stop smoking, start sucking” and, “sucking does not kill”. I’m not going to comment on that any further. There’s probably way more that someone could dig into regarding Zool, but these games were made by Gremlin Interactive, you know, the fuckin’ Loaded guys. So, I couldn’t care less to look any more closely into it.
Iron Soldier
Developer: Eclipse Software Design
Publisher: Atari
Release Date: 12/22/1994
Time to A Textureless Mech Dystopia: 15 Minutes
Finally, we have our last Jaguar game of 1994, and it’s kinda sorta neat. The short description is that Iron Soldier is a semi-hardcore mech shooter that’s trying to emulate Mechwarrior, both mechanically and thematically. Much more importantly, this game served as one of the core technical showcases that Atari used in their marketing for the system during the console’s wide release. Even more so than the above Val d’Isère review, there’s a whole lot 6/10 going on here that is hard to comment on, but let’s see what we can do.
The game consists of 16 missions, each of which drops you as the titular Iron Soldier mech into the middle of a large, open area filled with enemies, buildings, and some kind of mission objective. The enemies can include tanks, helicopters, and other mechs with the smaller ones seeming to infinitely spawn and the level objectives usually involve going somewhere and/or blowing something up. The interesting part is the fact that the environments are fully polygonal, and all of the buildings are destructible. Some of those buildings contain new weapons, ammo, or health so destruction is encouraged. The straightforward gameplay exists to give you reasons to interact with the levels, which were technically novel for console games at the time.
Not that the game is a glorified tech demo like Club Drive. Being an old-school mech game, it viscerally and immediately hates you and wants you to die. On top of that, the design isn’t the most competent that you could expect from the era, leading to an uneven difficulty curve. That’s exacerbated by the clunky control scheme which uses a throttling system for movement and requires use of the Jaguar’s number pad. Taking it all together, this thing isn’t really any fun to play. Atari’s purpose was to have something that would show well at trade shows and in marketing material. From what information is available, it seems that the team at Eclipse, who were one of the second party studios building the Jag’s dev tools, wanted to make a Starblade clone because that wouldn’t have been too big a task with the given hardware. Yet, Starblade already existed and the Tramiels needed something to make the system visually stand out, so here we are. Iron Soldier succeeds at that, and nothing else.
With four British games and one French game, this has been the most European entry yet in this blogging project. That also puts this on the shortlist of entries that have given me the most psychic damage. Oh well, it’s over now. Let’s update the Ranking of all Jaguar Games and move on from this sad disaster.
1. Wolfenstein 3D
…
7. Iron Soldier
8. Val d’Isère Skiing and Snowboarding
12. Zool 2
16. Kasumi Ninja
…
17. Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales
Because we’re looking at all of 13 games released for this console throughout 1994, there isn’t enough to support an independent Round-Up, so as with last time we’ll revisit the story of the Jaguar after we wrap up with the 3DO.
Thus, next time we’ll finally get back to the main event by picking up with the PlayStation in July ’96 as we look at Space Hulk: Vengeance of the Blood Angels, Gunship, SimCity 2000, and Bogey Dead 6.
I stream around twice a week over on my twitch channel: https://www.twitch.tv/fifthgenerationgaming. There, we’re looking over the games covered in these entries along with whatever other nonsense I happen to be streaming.
Below you can watch the archive of me streaming the games featured in this entry.
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