Just Say No

Today’s game deserves no fanfair, it’s not a brand new title nor is it a classic one, it’s just the first one I picked out to play through on my new Playstation Now subscription and thought “huh, I’ve never played a game in this franchise so let’s give it a shot.” Like many things I’ve done in my life, like working in retail or going to college, this was a mistake and total waste of my time. Time that I’ll never get back.

To say that Bubsy: Woolies Strike Back is a piss-poor game is insulting piss and piss-related things and activities. As a wee nerd in the 90’s I remember seeing the original Bubsy games and figured I’d get around to playing them at some point, but then once Bubsy 3D came out and was heralded as one of the worst games ever made, I decided not to try them and basically just ignored anything about the franchise until now. Going off what I read online which we all know is *always* correct and *never* full of bias and lies, the first games in the 16-bit era were actually decent and like most child actors’ careers, it all just went downhill after that.

That’s about as much history as you’re getting from me on Bubsy. He’s a bobcat who collects balls of yarn, something that I can’t get my own cats to care at all about, and his enemies are the Woolies, an alien race of, well, aliens that look like sausages without arms. They steal yarn and he wants it all back.

You’re not going to get it all back, though, because at best you’re going to find the platforming so bland and the controls so irritating that if you actually decide to play this game through to the end you’re going to skip the exploration of each stage to find all the yarn balls and just dart through to the end as best as you can. It doesn’t seem to affect anything other than bragging rights or feeling the satisfaction of fully completing each stage, and I promise you’re not going to want to brag about beating this game, nor should you feel satisfied in getting all the stages completed.

The controls are probably my biggest problem with this game. To best describe it for you, it feels like he’s constantly slipping on ice. When you want him to stop running, he always goes a little further. This means that none of the platforming is as exact as you’re going to want it to be, and you’re going to miss jumps or accidentally run off the edges of platforms a lot. This is infuriating since water kills him and everything else kills him in 1 hit unless he has a special t shirt on that acts like the blue shield in the Sonic games. I don’t know how many times I screamed about how much I hate the controls. Also I did check and there’s not way to adjust any sensitivity in the controls so you’re stuck.

Also just as irritating is his pounce attack. Hitting square makes him do this jump forward to attack an enemy, but he does it at such a high arc that unless you’re far away or right next to them, you’ll jump right over them every time. This will also get you killed and for the life of me I can’t figure out why they’d design his attack this way. And if you try it from too far away, you’ll just end up running into the enemy after your attack falls short and get killed. Like I can feel my blood pressure going up just talking about it even though I’m not playing it anymore.

Why the hell do you have to map a double jump to a different button? Just make it so I hit X once, then hit it again and hold the button.

On top of all of this garbage, you have a double jump that transitions into a glide. Sounds useful, right? It would be a lot more useful if it was all mapped to the same button! Hitting X makes you jump, and if you want to do a double jump, you have to hit triangle, then hold triangle to glide. Why the hell do you have to map a double jump to a different button? Just make it so I hit X once, then hit it again and hold the button. To my knowledge that’s how it works in every other platformer since, what, Mario 2? Princess Peach didn’t have a problem floating with just 1 button but this idiot can’t do it?

So that I’m not totally trashing this, the overall presentation of the game isn’t terrible and while you can tell there wasn’t much of a budget to work with, the game looks okay. I mean it was released in 2017 and does look like it’s something you would’ve seen on Xbox Live Arcade 10 years earlier, but the backgrounds and textures don’t look bad for a 2D platformer. The cutscenes are just still pictures being moved around – they’re so short that you won’t have time to be bored with them.

The music is pretty generic and the little pop noise the yarn balls make when you collect them is oddly satisfying, though Bubsy doesn’t shut up with the same half dozen jokes over and over again. Half the time I couldn’t make out what he was saying because none of the sound in this is mixed all that well, so it sounded like he was mumbling something you’re sure was stupid to begin with. Like when you were in school and you had that friend who’d try to make weird jokes but didn’t have the confidence to speak up and say them out loud, so it sounded like they were just muttering insanity to themselves – by the way most of those people grow up to be engineers. It sounds a lot like that. But when you do hear him speak, it’s some version of “No idea how I’m doing this but I like it!” or “is there a veterinarian in the house?” with this weird voice like the Pillsbury doughboy. He also says “Take that, you cotton-gobbling monster!” and he says it so quickly that unless you’re really paying attention, it doesn’t sound like he’s saying “cotton.” I’ll just let you guess what it actually sounds like.

So in summary I think you can probably figure out that I didn’t enjoy Bubsy: Woolies Strike Back. I think I beat it in under 2 hours, so at least like being stabbed in the temple with an icepick, it was mercifully quick. Though at launch this game was $30 and still retails at $20 which is just insane to me. I don’t know if there’s hidden levels or anything like that, because searching further for that type of thing in-game would be just like searching through a used toilet at Taco Bell for a gold ring. There’s some things you just leave alone.