More About Bucky O'Hare

Returning again to Bucky O'Hare for the NES...

Before I wrote that terrible little retrospective on Bucky O'Hare a few months ago, I half-heartedly tried to dig up some information about the development team at Konami responsible for creating, against all odds, a very solid NES game about a space-faring rabbit and a fat kid. While I wasted my time at Wikipedia, however, I managed to forget that Eric-Jon had already answered this question for me over a year ago, a few months before the IC forums fell victim to ridiculous internet drama and exploded. I want to warn you beforehand how totally ridiculous (and in retrospect stunningly obvious) the people who made this game were.

I remembered those halcyon days when I saw this GameSetWatch article by Todd Clolek. I suggest you read it if you want to learn even more about Bucky O'Hare (you don't really want to learn anything more about Bucky O'Hare at this point, I know. But you should!)There's information on another Komani Bucky title in the article -- an arcade game much like The Simpsons that I desperately want to play now.

Bucky O'Hare's pedigree is outstanding because many of the key members of soon-to-exist Treasure were the principle programmers and artists on the game. Yeah, that Treasure. The developer behind:
Gunstar Heros, Guardian Heros, Sin and Punishment, Radiant Silvergun, Ikaruga, Bangai-O, and a personal favorite of mine, Alien Soldier, a game with 25 incredibly short levels and 31 incredibly awesome boss fights.

Masato Maegawa,, Bucky O'Hare's director and lead programmer, is the founder of Treasure. He must have left Konami around the same time this licensed game hit store shelves -- Treasure was formed in 1992 -- and there is every reason to believe getting assignments like this one, on top of the pressure to make yet another Contra game after yet another Contra game, was a major catalyst to his departure.

I can see a few of Treasure's trademark design here in an embryonic state: short levels with lots of checkpoints; great boss fights; wackiness (although in Bucky O'Hare's case, the weirdness is external, a direct result of its license; the greatest Treasure games have a very unique ascetic far removed from Bucky O'Hare by virtue of being vibrant and interesting instead of garish and moronic).

There are a few moments that betray this game as pre-Treasure, however. Asinine, memorization-heavy subchapters and unavoidable instant deaths -- two things notable by their absence in the 16 & 32-bit Treasure classics -- are constant, frustrating obstacles. The game somewhat offsets this nonsense by placing dozens of checkpoints in every stage. You do not ever have to replay long segments of the game just because a fucking robotic snake arbitrarily took a zig when you thought it was going to zag, thank God. Other Treasure signatures are missing. You won't find a convoluted control scheme that takes forever to master or some gameplay mechanic involving colors, for instance. It is a shame, too, because the Treasure fanboy contingency would be talking this game up like it was the second coming of Jesus, with import copies going for hundreds of dollars on eBay, if Bucky could turn purple and shoot little purple bullets.

So there's another silly idea of mine that GameSetWatch already did. They've taken a good chunk of my blog ideas, which would be mysterious and sinister if it wasn't so apparent that GameSetWatch and Gamasutra are eight hundred kinds of smarter than I am. Anyway I highly doubt Simon Carless or Christian Nutt or even Brandon Sheffield, whose hand I have shaken, pay any attention to me whatsoever.

Remembrances of Thefts Past

With much of the internet succumbing to Grand Theft Auto IV monomania this past week, I've been feeling unwelcome. It's like I'm at a party where everyone is debating wether T-Pain is the best musician of all time or the best musician of an infinite number of unimaginable parallel universes. What am I supposed to say at a party like that? "Yeah, T-Pain's alright, I guess, but let's not get carried away here"?

I may be indifferent to this hype today, but I did once love a Grand Theft Auto, back when Rockstar North was DMA.

In 1997, I played a whole hell of a lot of the first game. I had to; there was no in-chapter save function in the first game, and those chapters could be looooooooooong. The weird thing about the first game is that, despite it's simple gameplay, Commodore 64-like graphics, and bothersome overhead camera wildly zooming about, the game just clicked. Like Lego blocks. The entire experience felt old-school in the extreme, but it still seemed incredibly innovative. I've come to believe the engine that drove the first GTA straight into my heart was its sense of scale: the diminutive stature of your little 8 pixel ruffian contrasted fabulously with the cities exponentially larger than other 90's action games. The crudeness of the presentation mirrored the crudeness of the premise. It was sweet.

Then things changed.

I never played much GTAIII -- I got stuck on the first mission that forced you to chase down and shoot someone -- and I've never even been in the same room with Vice City on. I assumed they were good games, of course. Eventually I tried very, very hard to play San Andreas.

This might not be the consensus on the internet, but my God, that game was a fucking mess.

There were dozens of neat little ideas -- ride your BMX bike! eat and work out to change your appearance! shoot hoops! break into homes! fly UFO's! There is trouble stuffing a gigantic game like SA full of gimmicky minigames and sidequests: they didn't have the resources to fix the annoying shooting mechanics, the largely uninteresting settings of cities and countryside (because L.A. is not an interesting place to play around in, it really isn't), or the general jankyness of the animation and crudeness of the ascetic style in the game.

Oh. And there was a mission involving R.C. Helicopters and explosives. If you enjoyed that mission, you're clearly a bad human being.

Because SA was so "wacky" and "funny" (there were moments, but that game thought it was way funnier than it actually was), and because you could "literally do anything!" (as someone recently said to me at a party -- I believe he had a college degree, which is something you cannot literally or figuratively get in GTA: SA), everyone overlooked the games imperfections. I might have been able to see past them as well if the game did any one thing extraordinarily well -- if the driving was a lot of fun (I hate the way cars handle in the 3D GTA series), or the shooting, or one of the minigames even. Instead it did some things very well, some things atrociously, and a lot of things sorta "meh."

My complaint is not a common one, I'm sure. "Make Grand Theft Auto more like an Amiga game again!" I scream, and no one listens, and no one cares.