Bubsy is 3D in "Furbitten Planet" (PSX) - Guest Post

It's time for everybody's favourite video game cat! And he's playing Bubsy 3D!

There are no words for what the title screen music sounds like. No, wait, it sounds broken. (YouTube link).

On the distant planet Rayon, zany aliens gather to a press conference.

"As you may already know, a great catastrophe has befallen us, that threatens to destroy our very Woolie way of life... Bubsy Bobcat! Bubsy Bobcat is on Rayon!"

The aliens from the very first Bubsy game conspire still to steal all of the wool balls from Earth. To prevent Bubsy from interfering again, they kidnap him. But, being the crafty devil he is, he's escaped and now he's running amok on their planet!

To the aliens, Bubsy is a mass murderer whose presence could bring their entire civilisation to ruin. They're scared silly of being bopped by him, so the boss orders everybody to stay in their homes.

According to their sources, Bubsy is gathering the materials necessary to build a rocketship capable of interstellar travel! And they have absolutely no idea why. They're not very smart.

BUT THEN!

"I knew I should have taken that left turn at Uranus! Was it something I said? What could possibly go wrong?!"

Bubsy crashes onto the scene yelling every catchphrase he can think of as fast as he can think 'em up! He doesn't care if he's straight-up stealing lines from Bugs Bunny! He doesn't care if they don't make sense! He's BUBSY! And he's 3D! Yeah!

Let's begin. There's no hub level, only a really cheap and tatty looking level select.

Level 1: 'Claws for Alarm'... they used that pun already in Bubsy 1! And what happened to the start-of-level quip?

What... is this? This can't be the finished game I'm playing, surely?

Picking up the question mark gets you some advice from the Bubster himself:

"So you wanna be a video game star? For starters, collect all the atoms you see! There's plenty of them in each level. And if you get enough of them, you'll be in for some surprises!"

What does Bubsy's voice sound like?

Doesn't sound like Bubsy 1 or the crazy Bubsy from the Bubsy cartoon (the one and only Rob Paulsen, folks!). Bubsy 3D's got a mushy, gargling voice. Full volume, all caps.

At least the music here isn't as bad as it was on the title screen. It wouldn't be out of place in something like Day of the Tentacle. Zany.

Argh! When you jump, the camera dips down so you can't see what's in front of Bubsy!

The tilting camera makes sense in theory when you're jumping on platforms like this, but it's not done very well. At least there's no falling damage.

What is up with these controls? Bubsy drives like a remote-controlled car. He's good at going in straight lines very fast but any sort of precision is near impossible. To get up on this platform, I had to take a few practice runs first.

There's your problem, Mac. No analogue controls.

Glide and Jump on separate buttons? That makes no sense. Pressing Glide makes you jump anyway! And Bubsy can shoot in this one?

It's the alien guys from the intro! They must be absolutely terrified because they're standing perfectly still. Shoot 'em, Bubsy!

No dice. Maybe I haven't got the gun yet. Plenty of atoms though.

I know Bubsy can glide into enemies to bop 'em. Glide 'em Bubsy!

Eargh! Foiled again!

While I'm disoriented, the aliens puke on me and I lose a hit point. Bubsy's got multiple hit points, so it's no big deal.

A couple of tries and a great deal of effort later and the enemies are down. These controls are making this a lot more difficult than it has to be. Bubsy controls as if I'm describing his actions over the telephone.

WALL.

That helicoptery-boxy thing to Bubsy's left is a switch and ramming into it has just lowered the WALL in front of him. I like that it tells me what's been activated, but it could be a little more specific about which WALL's been moved. The landscape is solely made out of the tiles on the ground, so to me it all looks like hills and mountains, not WALLs.

This new area isn't especially pretty. I should be thankful there's a lot of fog here, but I'm going to have trouble making my way around if I can't see any landmarks.

Running! Free as a bird! Don't tell me to stop, 'cause I ain't got no brakes!

That telescope in the distance is a single-use item that shows me that over the hill to the right is a rocket. Bubsy yells that I need to collect 32 rockets to win the game. I have no idea how to get over there just yet. There's no heli-switches to hit and Bubsy can't climb trees. I'll leave that for later.

For every dozen crappy things that this game does, it does one thing right: Bubsy can climb up platforms.

Bubsy is surprisingly well animated in general, really. He's only got a couple of frames of animation for each thing he does, but you can tell what he's doing which is enough. It looks a bit like Quake's animation and everybody loves Quake, right?

Being able to glide is useful, but having to use Triangle to do it is uncomfortable. Not being able to see where you're going isn't a problem because Bubsy falls like a brick.

Now I'm powerupped Bubsy!! You're in for it now, innocent Woolies! I can run through the enemies and kill them instantly! If they're directly in front of me and I can get Bubsy to actually move! Ha-ha!

Which way is Bubsy running in this screenshot and which way is forward? Who can say!

That cube is a cube. It doesn't do anything. I ran around for a couple of minutes trying to catch it and ended up in the water. Instant death. He doesn't even sink into it, the screen goes black as soon as your feet touch the surface.

Full screen death animations are an old Bubsy staple. They're skippable here at least. If Bubsy is this fragile, this explains why they did away with the start-of-level quips.

Bubsy 3D takes the concept of an idle animation to its limit. First he taps his foot. Then then he looks behind to make sure I'm still here. Then he points forward and makes an angry face at me.

And then the screen fades to black and he starts mucking about with a bat and ball in a prerendered animation.

And in this one...

You probably won't believe me, but there's even more full-screen idle animations on top of that. He juggles bombs, messes with a TV remote, gets rained on by a cloud, and that's only the ones I saw before I got on with the level. People who don't want to play the game are well-catered for, apparently.

I know I missed a rocket! That's because it was behind a damned WALL and I couldn't figure out a way past it!

I'm not letting this slide. Let's go back to 'Claws for Alarm' and do it right this time.

So here we are back at the odd-looking trees and... the wall's gone!

To shoot atoms, you have to hold Square while running into them. After you've run into one, Bubsy holds the atom and you can aim where to fire it. Hold it for too long and it explodes in his paws. If you don't pick up the atom, Bubsy collects it and it's gone until you restart the level.

How did I know I had to fire it at the 'wall'? Lucky guess. Now I have to avoid collecting any the atoms so I can fire them at the walls to find the rockets. They don't protect me like Sonic's rings, so it's safe to avoid them. It's just damned difficult to do it.

Level two: 'Clawstrophobic'. I understand that there's only so many puns involving bobcats, but you can't use the same one for two consecutive levels. That's just lazy!

This isn't an underwater level, by the way. That's the fog again. Music's much worse this time around. Much, much worse.

There was one of these jagged platforms in the previous level, too. Navigating just one of them using these controls without falling off was pretty difficult, but now I have to pass two and jump between them! The top down view is almost helpful here.

I managed to find a different kind of atom that I can take with me, but they look just like the atoms from the first level. I'm confused.

That's enough! I can't do this!

That's a confident stride for a dead man.

I couldn't bring myself to play Level 2 fully, the music really got to me. Yet, I went back to Level 1 to get the missing rocket... I think somewhere along the way I caught Bubsy's enthusiasm. He clearly loves his work, even if he's doing a crappy, gargly Bugs Bunny impression all the time. Maybe I thought that the second level would be better than the first for some reason.

To fix Bubsy 3D, you'd have to fix (in this order) the controls, the music, the fog, the voice, the dialogue, the level designs and the enemies.

You could keep the following things the same: -fill in later-.

If you made Bubsy controllable and responsive, added unbelievably catchy but not annoying music, allowed the player to see into the distance, replaced those drab, triangular mountains with some kind of recognisable shapes, got Rob Paulsen back, let him ad-lib a disc's worth of dialogue and pit Bubsy against some cuddly yet nefarious foes, I bet you'd get a really good game out of it!

I did a picture showing roughly how it would look:

That's a cheap shot, but even adding pretty clouds to the Bubsy 3D screenshot and altering the colours makes it look a lot more inviting.

Look, it's daytime! Don't you want to play that? Don't you want to know what's behind that hill? And doesn't it look more like Bubsy 1?

It's well known that Bubsy 3D is an awful game, but the fact is that many PS games are ugly and impossible to control, especially the early ones. The most important thing that we need to remember is that that alien planet levels always suck.

Bubsy 3D seriously screws up in the same way that the Bubsy cartoon did too. Bubsy is a wisecracking, larger-than-life bobcat who lives for adventure and making fun of cartoons. What you've got here isn't a cartoon, it's just some idiotic nightmare. You can't just scribble some jagged lines on a piece of paper, colour them purple and yellow, get the orchestra to fart out some tum-ta-tum notes and call it a cartoon. Or a game.

Bubsy, get the hell out of my sight.