Bubsy 3D (1996)

Bubsy 3D is one of those games that people only bring up to remind you that it is uniformly terrible, and to use as the butt of dumb jokes. I have my own: I got this game for Christmas as part of the "well our grandkid likes vidya and we need to find some other crap to fill the stocking, so let's just grab what's in this bargain bin here" (a process that also got me such winners like Criticom). I ended up selling it to a friend a few months later for $3. I overcharged her.

Though that's more of an anecdote than a joke, but I digress.

Now that I've gotten the reminder that Bubsy 3D is Bad out of the way, I'd like to spend the rest of the review apologizing for my dumb joke: I don't actually hate the game, and I've grown to even hold a little fondness for it. I never enjoyed playing the game, and I have no intentions of owning it ever again, but it's just too incompetent and inoffensive to really hate it. It's kind of like how you love your "slow" sibling even though he can't really do anything except sit there and eat cereal and piss himself.

The poor game was in development around the same time as Super Mario 64 but ended up releasing after that game, so right out the bat it looks outdated and it didn't even get the chance to try and rip off 64's playstyle. It's second nature to us now, but back in the early 90s lots of developers were still struggling with the fundamental question of 3D, especially when the target platform uses a controller with a digital pad for movement and the only viable way for the player to control the camera (if you weren't going to just have it fixed all the time and run into the risks inherent with that) was via buttons. The graphics and music at first glance are crude and primitive, even for the time it was released in, but another look and you can easily see it as trying to mimic the goofy, off-kilter charm of a Tex Avery cartoon as much as it was masking technical limitations. And it probably doesn't need to be said that nobody wanted another goddamn Bubsy game, period. Really, the game just didn't stand a chance -- do we really need to kick it down even more?

If there is a lesson to take away from Bubsy 3D's existence, perhaps it is that good games are very frequently accidents, and it's very possible that what keeps your game from being another middling and easily-forgotten also-ran to an eternal whipping boy is when it goes gold.