A playthough of THQ's 1993 license-based platformer for the Super NES, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.
You can find my playthrough of the NES game, if you're interested, here: • The Adventures of Rock...
Like I said in my write-up for the NES game, I really have no idea why the powers that be deemed it necessary to release a game based on an ancient cartoon that most kids probably only knew through its being used as filler on a couple of TV networks at the time.
Thankfully, the SNES game (which was also ported to the Sega Genesis) was a massive improvement over the 1992 NES game. It's still a bog-standard platformer, but Imagineer's 16-bit take on the license took much more care in showing respect to the (albeit all-but-irrelevant) cartoon.
The gameplay feels like a nicely polished reworking of some of the company's older 8-bit titles. The controls are simple: for both Rocky and Bullwinkle, you can jump, throw a projectile, or do a physical attack. The stages are linear, and the platforming focuses on precise jumps and the dodging of endless waves of enemies and projectiles that constantly fly in your general direction. The controls are stiff but responsive, feeling similar to the ones in Mousetrap Hotel and Ren & Stimpy: Space Cadet Adventures, both on the Game Boy, and like both of those games, it's fairly difficult. I don't think it's nearly as hard as a lot of people make it out to be, but it does require a fair amount of memorization and a some careful attention to timing. It feels far more 8-bit than it looks.
Because though it doesn't perform any miracles, Rocky & Bullwinkle is a very decent looking SNES game. It does a nice job of recreating the simple look of the cartoon by featuring bold character outlines, garish colors, and flat shading. And thankfully, it comes across as a solid stylistic choice here, unlike the NES game that used a similar "style" as an excuse to be cheap looking and ugly.
The game features a lot of neat nods to the TV show in how it introduces stages and characters, and the music, though cheesy, is solid and generally doesn't grate on the nerves too much.
Overall, Rocky & Bullwinkle is about as average as a SNES platformer gets, and while that normally isn't good reason for praise, remember that this is a license-based game published by THQ in 1993. Compared to the soul-crushing garbage they were known for putting out (Home Alone and Fox's Peter Pan on NES... ugh), Rocky & Bullwinkle feels positively top-tier.
But while this one is strictly middle-shelf, it does its duty just fine. This is the sort of game that you might've seen a screenshot of in a magazine and thought, "Oh, that looks like it could be cool," and if a random relative gave it to you as a birthday present, you probably would legitimately have had some fun with it. You might not have finished it, but it would've at least been a somewhat engaging distraction if you were bored.
For a THQ game from the early 90s, that's a huge achievement.
Seriously.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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27 сен 2024
