Thoughts by Elwood (10 Jul 2010) – PC (DOS)
Bugs Bunny, hero of countless episodes and movies – one of the most popular cartoon characters – is the protagonist of this game. Now you might have played one or the other game based on a cartoon before and usually those games are just not… good. But in this case – trust me on this one – you get quite a nice game.
So… what’s the deal here? Bugs finds himself trapped inside the castle of a mad scientist and – of course – has to escape. To achieve this he has to find several keys. Just like every scientist this one is a bit messy, so he left these keys lying around on the floor somewhere in his castle. And also for that reason Bugs can find other useful stuff like nitroglycerine, invisibility potions etc. (the usual stuff you’d expect in the castle of a mad scientist). Of course life isn’t so easy for Mr. Bunny as the mad scientist and his minions, the big hairy things, are trying to catch him. The scientist is slow enough to not really be a big threat, the hairies on the other hand are almost as fast as our hero, so you better watch out when one (or more) enter the room.
The game seems to be loosely based on the Merrie Melodies cartoon Hair-Raising Hare . If you’ve seen it (and that’s quite likely, as it’s one of the more popular ones) you will know that Bugs was lured into the castle by a female rabbit robot (and I won’t discuss the hare/rabbit problem here, as the guys behind Bugs Bunny deliberately mix those terms up) and is supposed to be fed to the big hairy monster. Other than in the game in the original cartoon there’s only one of these monsters. It’s referred to as “Gossamer” – however in the game there’s severel of them. I’ve seen up to three of them in the same room, considering the size of the castle and how often one is met there must be well over a dozen of them here. But well, as I said – the game is only loosely based on the cartoon.
As I mentioned earlier, the game is not bad. It has a simple concept (collect things, don’t get caught), funny characters and works very well on the technical side. Considering the items you can collect and put to use the game would today be classed as an adventure game, well… action-adventure, but still. On the other hand it would be 3D then and probably not be half as fun. But that’s beside the point. The gameplay is Arcade-like, but as you don’t play for points only, but for a “true” goal (escape by collecting the keys) I wouldn’t classify it as an Arcade game.
What really strikes me about this one is the graphics. I mean… it’s CGA, 4 colors – but it just fits for some reason. The graphics are pretty much the best I’ve ever seen… in CGA. But that lets me wonder why… why the hell did they make a game in CGA in 1990? That’s not even close to the standard of that time. Most games still had a CGA-mode back then, true, but VGA was available and EGA was about the minimum you would expect. Just for comparison: Ultima VI: The False Prophet is from 1990 as well… I wonder what wonders they could’ve done with 16 or even 256 colors! Anyway – the game manages to create a nice atmosphere just as it is.
There’s really nothing to complain about, you get a nice classic game here based on a classic cartoon star.