Review: Bubsy In: The Purrfect Collection (Switch)

When the Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection was announced, the news received hundreds of thousands of shares and millions of cumulative views. This, friends, is a stark reminder of the strength of nostalgia, an evocative sensation that can stir the heart and cloud the memory.

Let’s be clear: Bubsy the Bobcat has never had a good game. While Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back (2017) and Bubsy: Paws On Fire! (2019) are certainly more playable than the ’90s titles, they were still met with a lukewarm reception.

At the time of Bubsy’s Super Nintendo debut in 1993, some publications were impressed with its digitised soundbites, character animation, humour, and colourful graphics; while others criticised it heavily for its shortcomings. Regardless, it sold well enough to spawn sequels up to and including the PlayStation era.

The Purrfect Collection combines five Bubsy retro titles if counting the Game Boy version of Bubsy II independently, as it’s very different from its console cousins. The frontend presentation is good, cartoony, and fitting, with nice, clean menus and plenty of bonuses, from galleries spanning original advertisements and box art, to recorded developer interviews chopped up into individual questions.

Every Bubsy release is here, including those cross-platform entries on Super Nintendo and Mega Drive. One interesting inclusion is the Super Famicom version with its regional voice acting; the only 16-bit-era Bubsy title released in Japan, after which they presumably couldn’t stand the sight of him. There’s a music player for those who enjoy pain, save states, screen adjustments, and wallpaper borders, as well as a somewhat lacklustre CRT filter. The collection also includes a rewind function, and, while this is a feature I generally dislike, here its presence has never been more crucial. After administering it once or twice, one can barely imagine slogging through any Bubsy game without it, in fact.

The first two Bubsy titles run slightly quicker on Mega Drive than Super Nintendo, but with muted colours and weaker sound. All suck. The initial game, Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, starts you with nine lives – and that’s less a “cats-have-nine-lives” gag and more a crude patch for how broken the controls are and how poorly arranged everything is.

Busby is a one-hit-kill affair, and if you so much as graze anything you shouldn’t, it’s back to a checkpoint. The control inertia is one of the most egregious in any 2D platform game, with Bubsy being breeze block slow from a stationary position, to racing flat-out within two seconds of picking up speed. It’s a game where the design teams seemingly worked on opposite sides of the world: one engineering the character with Sonic-like zip; the other building maps that are totally antithetical to fast movement. Bubsy moves too quickly and too far to the right of the screen to react to incoming obstacles, and the stages are a hellscape of unavoidable, seemingly random pitfalls that require you to either inch along or learn every myriad avenue in a repetitive trial-by-fire.

Bubsy has pitiful aerial mobility and is barely adjustable during a jump, leading to hilarious deaths when trying to land on the head of an inert enemy. It often feels akin to digital bull-wrangling, with you driving your thumb into the D-Pad in a futile attempt to redirect him. The jump’s shortcomings are somewhat ameliorated by a glide manoeuvre that sends Bubsy left and right as he travels downward, but this, like everything else, will usually get you killed too.

It’s often difficult to know what can hurt you, what qualifies as a ledge and what doesn’t, and the collision detection is hilariously poor, where in some instances you will pass through an obstacle just fine, only to be killed by the same obstacle on a subsequent meeting. As if all this wasn’t bad enough, the stage designers do utterly nonsensical things like placing traps on rollercoasters that kick you off after a whole two-second ride, or send you spiralling down drawn-out winding waterways to your death.

Beyond all these problems, the absolute worst design decision is that Bubsy — a platform game character — dies if he falls from too great a height. It’s absolutely ridiculous, and even more so in a game where the cavernous layouts and cropped screen parameters mean you rarely know where the next leap of faith will actually take you.

Its sequel, Bubsy II, set in a theme park world with selectable historical zones, carries over many of the same issues. The stages are more enclosed and maze-like, making for a painfully boring game where you move around an endless, samey sprawl of cut and paste backgrounds, battling marginally-improved but still-terrible control inertia, while searching for doors that teleport you to other doors, and then to other doors again, and occasionally back to the beginning door. It’s confusing to know what are platforms versus background art, especially in the Egyptian zone, and the haphazard nature of the placement of everything feels even more prominent this time around.

It’s worth noting also, that Bubsy II has some of the worst music in a 16-bit game, challenging the Mega Drive’s Taz-Mania for that particular crown. The routine ear-bleeding cacophony even accompanies your adventure in the music-themed zone, where you’re jumping across saxophones, octaves, and quavers. It’s bewildering.

To Bubsy II’s credit, however, it does away with the much-maligned one-hit-kill and allows the bobcat three health bumps, which eases tensions considerably. It also has a kind-of-fun frog-firing bonus game and sections where Bubsy pilots a space ship and then a biplane through impossible terrain. And, if for some reason you want to endure torture with a friend, local multiplayer co-op still functions here.

Bubsy II for Game Boy is a calamitous mess: slow, horrible, and barely playable. There’s no reason for it to be here except for completeness.

Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales for Atari’s incredibly, truly powerful (no really, promise) 64-bit Jaguar really flexes the big cat’s CPU, reusing assets for the third time, having poorer parallax depth than the 16-bit entries, and bringing back the one-hit-kill while maintaining awful inertia controls, tragic jumping mobility, crappy collision detection and flaky hit-boxes. What it does right, however, is get rid of those terrible hacked-together maze stages to make things more streamlined. Yes, it’s still comprised of overly-large maps, but there’s more of a general direction. The music, too, after its predecessor’s keyboard-on-the-fritz oeuvre, is at least listenable. That said, it’s still a hair-tearingly frustrating game, full of terrible enemy placements and myriad stage design problems. You’ll do well to play it more than 10 minutes before throwing in the towel.

Finally, Bubsy 3D for the Sony PlayStation, infamously awful and the butt of a thousand jokes, rounds off the collection. And, considering the quality up until this point, it’s a wonder anyone expected anything more. Abominably bad, unplayable trash, powered only by its constant and invasive speech, it’s glitchy, the camera is a mess, and it’s woefully imprecise to hit a yawning platform right in front of you.

For this release, though, Bubsy 3D has been given new modern controls, assigning the camera to the right stick to improve the experience. Yet it doesn’t. It’s a game so timelessly terrible that the overhauled inputs do little to improve its bearability. Unless you’re a pure masochist, it’s pointless to even hit start on it.

This, I realise, isn’t exactly a glowing review. But, despite what angry Bubsy enthusiasts may say, it’s an honest one. What Bubsy does best is in its humour, its wackiness, its personality, and the quips that pepper the series. And this is probably what made it interesting in the first place: a catty cat with a ’90s wryness and a Rocko’s Modern Life-style irreverence.

But it’s also a demonstration of why Japan ruled during this programming era, and why so many Western developers, seemingly incapable of understanding basic jumping weight and inventive stage layouts, struggled to find the mark. To that end, the Bobcat has endured far, far beyond his natural shelf life. If nostalgia alone is really enough to tease that cash from your wallet, be my guest.

Conclusion

One wonders if the entire Bubsy series wasn’t actually designed as a sort of torture parody; that the intention all along was to pummel unsuspecting children into submission via an innocent-looking, anthropomorphic-bobcat-led platform game.

Picture this: some kid in 1993 got Bubsy for Christmas after the sales clerk told his parents that Sonic and Mario were old hat, and this was the hot new thing. That kid either never forgave his parents for the injustice and the playground bullying they endured as a result, or they committed fully to the Bubsy universe and found a happy place within it. If you’re the latter, then this collection is for you. And only for you.