Bubsy: The Complete History - SGR

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Dumont wild party suspended infidel and of course cutthroats which was actually inspired by his treasure hunting brother who discovered the only known sunken pirate ship off of Cape Cod in other words Mike Berlin is quite the interesting chap [Music] now with all of these excellent titles under his belt he had a desire to break away from the heavy story-based games and decided to do something that were simply just more fun similar in the vein to marry oh and of course the more recent Sonic the Hedgehog his producer was more interested in Mike staying with what he knew already that being story based games but Mike constantly pursued this idea until he was finally given a tiny light at the end of the tunnel and that was to go off and write an analysis on Sonic the Hedgehog now obviously Sonic was the big thing of the time and was the only true competition towards the all-mighty Mario and the company basically wanted to replicate that success Mike accepted the offer went home and for the next week for ten hours a day he did nothing but play Sonic the Hedgehog he then wrote his analysis handed it in and the project was finally greenlit originally accolade the company behind the games put forward the idea to make a chester Cheetah game of all things however Mike didn't see the point in paying to get a character when they could just go and make one themselves the management like this and that's basically what they did they decided to create a cat with attitude of course you know this is the nineties in all that and well you know credit where credit's Jew bubsy definitely ended up looking better than chester Cheetah this was probably because Mike was a big fan of the classic Fletcher cartoons such as Betty Boop and of course Popeye and he wanted to portray that style into his video game and you know what I actually admire Mike for this if we do jump ahead a little bit to the release of bubsy you can actually see that classic Fletcher style in the cars found in the game anyway back again the character design took mumps the company had one idea in their head and Mike had another they wanted the cat to wear trousers my guess is a nice baggy pair of Dickies to bring the character up to date but Mike wanted to stay true to the classic cartoons that he grew up with his art director had a go at designing him based on Mike's random drawings but he couldn't nail it another seven artists had a go and they couldn't suss it out either Mike was obviously very particular about his new creation which was when his art director suggested Ken Macklin a comic book artist that he went to school with Mike was apparently quite a big fan of the anthropomorphic drawings and decided sure let's give it a shot and that's when Ken got it right almost first time for anybody out there that's watched that classic Simpsons episode the itchy-scratchy and Bucci show you know the one where the artist is drawing it down and he got the execs over their shoulders telling them that he needs more chewed well the same thing happened here at the recommendation of my art director then he contracted with him to do some sketches and he almost got it right first time I said to him basically you got a picture this Bobcat as being a real wise guy who's got an attitude and the baseball bats behind his back like he's holding a baseball bat ready to smack you of it he got it and he actually drew that and I said to him okay yeah hired and with that bubsy was born now the name bubsy itself actually comes from his brother-in-law's description of rounded bouncy happy things such as a Volkswagen Beetle and in the early days bubsy himself actually had a baseball bat and his explanation point on his shirt would actually change depending on what was going on on the screen but obviously these things were changed during development mostly due to running out of time the game's storyline of aliens attacking earth and bubs he needing to protect the world supply of yarn ball dobbsy came from Mike's background as a science fiction writer heck even the title was a pretty on-the-nose reference to one of the greatest science fiction story of all time and during development as Mike had no real idea how to create a sonic or Mario type game he decided to go back to the beginning and basically draw out his levels old-school programmers style similar to how the Oliver twins did it when they created the dizzy games back in the 80s but the size of the levels inside a game majorly built around speed tended to be exceptionally larger one of the major problems I had was that I didn't have any tools to switch to creating I had no idea how sonic or any other platform games were built I took a very difficult metaphor and purchase rolls of paper and tape them together and created scrolls that was 6 feet 8 feet 9 feet long and drew the levels on them I also made a window that was proportionately the size to the television screen and I placed it over the surface of the grid to actually see the gameplay underneath okay fair enough he obviously had no real idea how to make a game like this and yeah this is how he did it a lot of blood sweat and tears went into the creation of bubsy from Mike and his team they even paid an outside team to develop the Super Nintendo Court which by the way was known as Bub's his great adventure in Japan where the main character was known as a mounting cat due to Japan genuinely being unfamiliar with a bobcat and on the lead-up to his release accolade not realizing just how much money it would cost to release a new franchise like this decided to get in a rather talented programmer to backward engineer the genesis / Mega Drive to get past Sega's copyright system the reason for this was that Sega would take a small percentage of each sale around the ten to fourteen dollar mark as well as a further reported $30 per cartridge to produce it but by cracking the code and doing it themselves accolade could scrap all of those standard fees and only pay for the production costs which obviously they could just get some random company in China to produce right well yes this is why Bugsy cartridges are actually a slightly different shape compared to the standard cartridges that you would normally find in the wild and sure this is all fine and dandy except for the fact that it obviously wound up saying us something chronic and led to a rather big legal battle between Sega and accolade similar to what was gonna happen between Sega and EA beforehand again for the same reason however unlike EA this battle actually went to court and would you believe it accolade actually won resulting in a much cheaper agreement between the two companies this this was such a risky move guys as numerous interviews with Mike explain that the company had already put so much money behind their new character so much so that if they couldn't reverse-engineer the system and they didn't win the battle and of course if all of that bubsy marketing which even included a pilot of a TV show just didn't work and it wouldn't just be a failed product it would pretty much destroy the company thankfully for them all that hard work and wishful thinking did pay off because on March the 4th 1993 in America and later that same year for the rest of the world and competing systems bubsy in Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released [Music] [Applause] so it's probably time I reviewed this game isn't it yes I'll tell you in a nutshell right now guys I do not like this game I never have liked this game but that's quite a polarizing opinion it's such a weird game if you go back and look at the reviews of this game it's very very different than what people think of it now look on its surface is a pretty standard platformer go from left to right jumping running and gliding whilst landing on top of enemies every three levels you've got a boss it's bright it's colorful it looks good the soundtrack is actually in my opinion a little above average it's got synthesized voice and plenty of it that although annoying now was pretty impressive back then it's all pretty standard fare so many games did this for the time literally you couldn't go five minutes about a new platform game coming out and this was released directly in the center of a very overpopulated platforming era but it's not a good game even my nine-year-old self who was obsessed with this genre at the time rented it and thought its own pay at best it was fine as a rental but just like most rental type games I ended up going back to my carefully selected stack of games that were far superior soon after I played this one I don't even remember finishing it which was very much not a me thing to do back then which perfectly demonstrates my feelings for it nowadays I simply just do not like this game sure I don't hate the character himself like most people do but the gameplay is borderline unplayable maybe I was trying to convince myself back then by being so generous with my review after all I just spent one pound 99 of my free pound pocket money which again was very unlike me as I usually say for Munster by just one game and why did I do this well the hype around bubsy guys was unreal now granted we didn't get as much marketing hype as America got but it was still present for sure in fact one of the most interesting things about this game was just how much the magazine game for in the States was sniffing the litter tray over accolades you had makin of articles going up ages before its release and when it was finally released a near-perfect score in fact the fun factor scale which is the main part of the score was all the way up to 5 out of 5 aka bubsy was a 100% rated game for both the genesis and the super nintendo competitors - Mickey mania which in my opinion is one of the very best platforms on the system and that one got 4 out of 5 aka 80% seriously what the hell is going on well actually reviews in game pro tended to be a little bit higher across the board anyway but yeah ask anyone about bubsy that's a 1 out of 5 on the fun fact so don't just ask me ask anyone nowadays which is why it's so confusing the problem with the game was that it was trying to be Mario and Sonic which you know was its goal from the beginning but it's the injected Sonic elements that really does let it down never known if you're gonna run directly into a stationary enemy is something you will learn to live with on the very first level not for long of course because it's just one hit and you're gone resulting in a game that wants you to play super fast yet requires you to take baby steps you can weirdly jump very very highly but you also die if you fall from too high of a platform turn this into a more bog-standard Mario like platformer and it would have actually been pretty good but instead they went down the sonic route on top of that people moan about the in-your-face annoying attitude but honestly I didn't mind it it's definitely annoying by today's standards but in 1993 this was perfectly normal I never got annoyed that the global Gladius saying you'll just do bad it was the standard and all those digitized voice Clips like I said were quite impressive for the time it's just that the gameplay was just so below average back then and very bad now and even though plenty of fans of the games will stand by it even Mike himself weirdly admits to this a retro gamer interview I think bubs his legacy is really the characters the story and the environment sonic didn't have much going for it except it's massively beautiful game play Mario kind of lost its charm about going to save the princess it had gotten very watered down Bugsy's characters are what live on what a weird way of looking it Sykes only got massively beautiful gameplay and Mary only goes and saves the princess seriously even if that was true which it isn't surely you would want people to remember and enjoy the gameplay before the characters right well obviously not [Music] the long and short of it was that this game was weirdly reviewed quite highly which obviously resulted in big numbers for the game but today it's hated it doesn't make sense but it's the way it is back in the day buzzy was destined to be huge and as I said before the TV show pilot which is easily found online was obviously supposed to be something much bigger and it even had Taco Bell involved to given it a far more 90s jagged shaped aesthetic very similar I supposed to stuff like the Saved by the Bell intro sequence it too was bad like really bad nothing really makes too much sense here and the wisecracks get pushed in your face even more than before and this opinion was actually shared by Mike and his team who all cringed when the pilot was shown off for the first time anyway let's move on from that first game shall we because let's be honest it's been beaten to death by this point accolade really did put all their balls of yarn into this one basket and in an interview with electronic games magazine it reported that a sequel was indeed already being looked at before the first game was even released and just over a year later we got to see it with bubsy - this is Bob Z's first adventure on Super Nintendo called Close Encounters of the Third Kind on this Bobcats Travis he has to avoid many pitfalls as well whose email encounter the 16 make cut has great music and graphics as well as some of the best speech I've ever seen on the Super Nintendo he has become a cult hero in America and looks like doing the same when the UK by this point Mike had moved on from accolade to start up a development business with a friend so this game was actually not made by him at all in fact you think you hate bubsy well the developers who worked on bubsy 2 hated him even more it seems and that's not a joke seriously the developers hated bubsy and because of this mike believes that this was the reason that the second game was so bad in fact the devs on the sequel hated bubsy so much that when mike did go to visit them at one point he saw a studio with bubsy dolls being hung from the ceiling like an execution and even saw one of the bubsy dolls having a pencil stabbed for its face whatever in my opinion the game isn't much different if someone was to tell me that this was a later level I'd never reached in the original game I believed in it pretty much is just more bubsy levels albeit a little worse this time around perhaps they would play better with standard platforming characters again because the super fast running and gliding is even more pointless this time around as the levels feel incredibly cramped and it's filled to the brim of projectiles all over the place thankfully however the game does have a free hit sister rather than the one hit in your dead style of game and at least it does change up the gameplay a little bit by chucking in a few side levels too but overall it's another below average game and honestly the same could be said for its Gameboy ports which do have different level layouts but it's even harder to control also is it just me thinking that black and white gameboy games as opposed to have light backgrounds with darker sprites and not the other way around whatever let's move on to bubsy in the fractured buried Hales yeah yeah and then this bubsy title was released only 42 days after the second bubsy game oh yes they were churning these bad boys out besides this one being on the Atari Jaguar there really isn't anything different I did ear Eva sure the music is nicer and a lot more fitting to the Jaguar style the graphics have been boosted a little but the gameplay was still bubsy through and through it was more like the original game which makes sense I mean they're not gonna be taking anything from the second game that was released only two months earlier were they and that's because it was actually made by another company a magic Tech they had been given the source code for several earlier released Mega Drive games by accolade and they were apparently easier to port to the Jaguar and the source code for the original was used here in this game however not wanting to release the exact same game again for an Thomason and his team did what they could in the short time frame to make something new based on the original title in an interview with firaon he explains that this wasn't exactly a big deal for them another port to simply get done before moving on to the next one but with that said he does remember how incredibly annoying it was listening to those same buzzy voice clips over and over in fact when the devs wanted to annoy each other they would shout what could possibly go wrong and they still do that to this very day when they meet up bubsy the Bobcats with free games under his belt of failed TV show and pawlenty of merchandise accolades decided that it was now time to well make a fourth game and who better to do that than Michael Berlin himself as stated he had left shortly after the release of the first game and he wasn't too impressed with what came after he had teamed up with the former infocomm work buddy mark Frank and with the help of ex Apple employee Russ Wetmore the team programmed No the Newton list manager at their new company I detect the software becomes such a success that it even got bundled with all systems that were released and this was the perfect amount of seed money needed to start making games again starting with bubsy 3d oh yes it's bubsy 3d time guys taking inspiration from the rather good jumping flash game which was indeed a 3d platformer although it had more of a first-person doom like tank control scheme the team got to work trying to replicate and trying to build on that new 3d style let's go third person let's have bigger levels let's bring in stuff from the other pubsey games like humor and the Looney Toon style visuals let's make it really high resolution said Richard Hamm one of the game designers we went for high res as opposed to lots of textures because no one else was doing super high resolutions and that's why the game has a stark look major portions of it are untextured because of all the memory was committed to the resolution that was the biggest hurdle memory we couldn't build what we wanted to build we couldn't draw what we wanted to draw on our development kit bubsy would work fine but on the retail kits which comparatively was an anemic piece of crap it didn't if you saw the in-house build all the crazy colors and the checkered walls looked great together but on the PlayStation that was impossible there was no way the engine would support it so we had to bring in the fog and they bring in the fog and then bring in the fog it destroyed the sensation sure this explains the graphics but it was the gameplay yet again that killed it the world of bums Afridi felt Hollow controls terribly and instantly was boring before it became frustrating and sure you've heard this all a million times already but this game is quite literally one of the worst games of all time Richard and the rest of the team works hard on this title any more recent reviews seems that another big issue for the game was that during development resources were actually split between this and another title called jumper before that one eventually got shelved and of course another big issue was the fact that bubsy 3d was yet again planned to be a multi-platform game richard remembers how hard it was having to hold back and what they wanted to do with bubsy 3d because of the sega saturn's limited hardware capabilities but thankfully this saturn port was also shelved towards the end of its life but by then it was too late however it is worth noting that the sega saturn port was actually going to be using the analog controller so you know that would have been quite nice if they went with that regardless they did what they could with the game but as we all know it was worse than dreadful now was that said I want you to put yourself in the shoes of people at the company there really wasn't any major 3d platformers around at the time and although you may hate bubsy there's no denying that plenty of people like bubsy and you just made a 3d version of the game that everybody knew and had sold well in the past I'm sure with almost no competition to compare you may actually think that what you have is pretty impressive right well with this new sense of hope and excitement you Michael Berlin make your way to the 1996 Consumer Electronics Show to show to the world that you just made a 3d platformer game it can be done a release date was already in place for later that year nobody could have done this right everybody will be impressed here's exactly what happened it was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas my den partner and I flew out there to help man accolades booth and demo bubsy 3d it looks pretty good I mean it was in beta it wasn't a final shippable product but it was pretty good I wandered over to the Nintendo area and I saw Mario 64 I said that's it back to the drawing board I went back and told my partner to go look at Mario and come back and talk to me about it and he did and I said we can't ship this we just can't he said accolade paid us a lot of money to develop it what are we gonna do I said we're gonna go back and we're gonna do the best that we can to make it as good and product as we can with the time limits that we have and that's what we did but it was definitely a rude awakening when I saw Mario 64 and you imagine it Mario 64 was released only two months before bubsy 3d was and actually the same thing happened with crash bandicoot 2 bubsy 3d simply just didn't have a chance the only thing he had going for it was the fact that it was one of the earliest games for the system and because of that it sold an average amount of copies regardless the reviews words haribol from the beginning this time and as stated it's now known as one of the world's worst video games nothing much happened for bubsy after the final nail in the coffin that world's bubsy 3d besides the rights being passed about a bit and the odd compilation of its older games getting released however Bub's his name and legacy somehow grew and grew and how was this even possible well it was because of youtubers do just that you were supposed to be the chosen one what could possibly go wrong [ __ ] boxy 3d with the rise of retro gaming youtubers getting big off the back of ripping into games the Bugsy franchise became popular again albeit for the wrong reasons and as new generations emerged the name Bugsy just didn't die out classic game franchises that you would expect to stay relevant started falling by the wayside whilst Bobbsey stayed relevant without doing anything to warrant it besides simply being a bad series of games the same can be said for titles such as Shaq boom I'm not sure what the moral of the story is here perhaps if you're making a game and it's looking bad he should really make it the best bad game you possibly can because just like games like shampoo it too was brought back from the dead with bubsy the Woolies strike back now earlier on I said I wanted Bugsy to control like a more standard platformer and this is kind of that it still has annoying glitchy moments but for the most part it has slowed down dramatically and it definitely feels nicer but the new problem is it's incredibly boring as well as being frustrating and it's crazy short so far this is the best of the bunch guys and that really is not saying much I had high hopes considering it was developed by the same people that worked from the giana sisters remakes but ultimately it's just a boring as hell game that feels better than a downright crap game the scores for this one all came in at just below average and that you know perfectly fits this one but never fear that didn't stop accolade from doing it again here we have choice provisions stab at the series with the sixth and final entry pause on fire now if that name seems familiar to you it should these are the guys behind the incredible bit.trip and runner series and in all honesty these are good games in fact one of three is a pretty addictive title that I genuinely really do enjoy and Bugsy paws a fire well they finally did it guys yes Bugsy paws of fire aka Bugsy number six is in fact an above average game yep it only took nine thousand five hundred and sixty nine days but Bugsy finally had a game released that's kind of worth playing the only problem is it's not as good as anything choice provisions have made before look as far as endless runners go you could do worse at least this time you have three characters and you know it does look pretty good but again as far as endless runners go there are plenty of better games out there and those better games are actually made by choice divisions Bugsy paws on fire isn't as hard as I was in the same genre it's not as colourful as the games that came before it and all those annoying traits that you didn't like such the smart aleck lead character can also be found right here but still it's an above-average game I found myself not realizing just how long I was playing it compared to looking at the clock wishing I wasn't playing it's like I did before so you know what at least it's got that going for it so with that there you have it Bugsy has five games that are all below average and one is a little bit better but still this Bobcat is so incredibly popular for the wrong reasons originally and yet it still has its fans obviously I'm not the biggest fan I'm sure you will work that out by now but still Bugsy is an important part of gaming history mainly due to all of the hype it got back in the day everybody still knows about this cat nowadays and why is that I don't know but hey at least you can stop asking me to do stupid completing histories now can't ya no no no go ahead make my day hey there guys thanks for checking out the video I know bubs isn't exactly the most loved game franchise of all time like I said I'm not actually the biggest fan myself but I found the history behind the whole Bugsy franchise Mike Berlin and all that sort of stuff quite interesting and you know it's still a recognizable character and I thought it was definitely worth its spot in the complete history playlist so yeah I you guys liked it I really push myself this time of the audio and visual side of things so the point where I could possibly turn this into a podcast would you be interested in a complete history podcast let me know we would call some of my earlier ones in a podcast style fashion and but yeah anyway I hope you guys all enjoyed the show but now I want to give a massive massive shout out to the patrons and YouTube members that helped me out every single month with an extra big shoutout going to Gary pink is Ryan Burford Andrew Daulton Ben Jackson Jonathan Hayward Kevin King Christopher Turnbull health daughter crafts Richard Aldi Jack's shadow doll Rovin army Ryan 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content that I like the most that stays evergreen the most and I'm pretty sure that you guys like the most so yeah let me know if you want to see more videos like this the way I've edited this one is ever so slightly different and yeah I'm rambling now rambling thank you all so much for supporting the show if you want to bump into so that heats up settle this look I'm gonna go I'm gonna go this video was a very long one to make yeah I'm off I'm off this is DJ slope signing out and hopefully I'll see you all next time worst ending ever worst ending ever [Music]

Channel: Slope's Game Room

Views: 42,476

Rating: 4.9053383 out of 5

Keywords: slopes game room, dj slope, SGR, Review, Opinion, the complete history, daniel ibbertson, slopes gaming room, franchise, bubsy, claws encounters of the furred kind, bobcat, bubsy: the complete history - sgr, bubsy paws on fire, bubsy a brief history, bubsy history, bubsy 3d, bubsy the woolies strike back, bubsy 2, atari jaguar, super nintendo, sega, mega drive, genesis, 16bit platformer, sonic rip offs, best 16 bit platformers, gameboy, mike berlyn, accolade

Id: Jea5BBMIA0A

Length: 36min 11sec (2171 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 07 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/De-Mattos]

Bubsy was on the SNES. Maybe they own it now. I wouldn't know. It wasn't a SEGA franchise though.

[u/Lizardguy64]

That wasn't Sega. They basically pirated a cartridge to get it on Sega.