The Princess is in another Castle

It was one those days at school when every teacher were ill. You have some Free hours and no idea what to do with you time. So I decided to start my SNES Emulator. After a few minutes of gaming games like: Yoshi’s Island and Super Mario Allstars, I remembered one special game I loved when I was a child. I don’t exactly now how much hours,  days and weeks I spend with thinking of game’s name. The only things I knew were that it was a Orange cat which can run very fast and that it is a JumpN’Run.

Today I also think of the games name. Then I visited a Website were every SNES game is listed on. I choosed some Letters with “C” for cat.. and something like that. After minutes of reading game names I choosed the letter “B”… and there it was… The game I loved so many years… which I played togehter with my brother. It’s Bubsy!

Acctually it’s called: “Bubsy – Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind“

Story: (copied from: Wikipedia)
“The plot focuses on a race of fabric-stealing aliens called “Woolies”, who have stolen the world’s yarn ball supply (especially Bubsy’s, who owns the world’s largest collection). Naturally, Bubsy does not take too kindly to the theft and sets out to “humble” the Woolies.”

I compare Bubsy with Soni with some differences in the Gamedesign. Bubsy also have to collect items like the rings in Sonic. In Bubsy this is Yarn. You have this jump platforms in Sonic. In Bubsy this are Sewer which blews up it’s lid. In one thing I’m sure: Sonic is much faster than Bubsy. Bubsy is also fast but not THAT fast.

You jump, run and glide through the whole level and try to don’t TOUCH the enemys. Because if you do, you die with a funny animation. You don’t have to be afraid of running out of lifes. In Bubsy you find very much extra lifes, sometimes two at once. You can easy kill the enemys with jumping on their heads. In one level there are much Save Points from which you can start if you die. But you have to touch them, so if you forget you have to get back and touch it.

Bubsy has many skills to get those Woolies. He can jump…run… and glide. Yes, Bubsy has three abilities. The funny thing is ju can jump on: A,B, X and Y. With X and Y you can glide if you press them again. From A to Y the power of Bubsy’s jumps reduces. So: A is the strongest and Y the weakest jump.

Bubsy has no 2-Player options so that you have to switch the controller some times if you wanna play with a friend or your brother/sister.

In the end:
In my opinion this game is just amazing. It makes a lot of fun so that you wanna play it again, and again, and again and again.

Infos:

• Bubsy was released on: SNES, Sega Mega Drive/Genesis, Atari Jaguar, PC and Playstation.
• Bubsy had a pilot episode for an animated series in 1993.
• The Voice of Bubsy is Rob Paulson (MGS: TTS: Gray Fox or Pinky from “Pinky and the Brain”)
• The Playstation Version of Bubsy which is called: “Bubsy 3D” was the 8th Place of the worst games of all time.

There Is one genre in this god damn world I cant actually play. Survival Horror. I clearly remember the day when I was like 11 years old, playing playstation with a friend. I suddenly inserted Resident Evil 1, as I thought it would be a cool zombie shooter.
After going through the dining-room, opening the door and seeing the first zombie, I never hit the “off” Button of a console that fast. I was scared. Im fascinated by the fear those games create, but I cant play one of those games for more than 10 minutes, even in the middle of a shining day. Im that much of a pussy.

Either way, yesterday I accidentally read about Clock-Tower for the SNES on Wikipedia. The story made me curious, so I went through dark-paths on the interwebs to look for this game.

You remember my 10 minute rule?

I closed my emulator after 10 minutes. It were exactly 10 minutes of playing.

Gameplay is easily explained. Move the Cursor around with your D-Pad, and interact with the enviroment via ABXY-Buttons.

So, instead of focusing on the gameplay,I’m going to focus on the enviroment. That is the main factor of making a game scary, right? There is no music most of the time, until you meet anything trying to harm you. The game itself is very dark, and the sound youll hear most is the sound of your footsteps.

Normally, when playing a Survival Horror, you expect 2 basic game elements. Trying to survive and feeling the horror. Any Survival Horror game I played gave me a Weapon to defend myself. I was able to defeat most of the evil creatures by shooting them, stabbing in their heart, basic stuff like that. But in Clock-Tower, you are defenseless. Thats right, the game gives you no possibility to fight. The main character is a defenseless 14 year old school girl. Youre constantly running away, trying to hide from the stalker, a nine year old boy with an oversized pair of scissors.  He will attack you if youre in a room for too long ( havent stopped time for that yet ), if you enter a room youre not supposed to enter, if you enter a room youre supposed to enter, if you go through a hallway, if you climb up some stairs. You never have the chance to rest.

The most exciting fact about this game is : its an SNES game. You dont need kick-ass graphics of special light rendering algorithms to strike fear in a heart. The knowledge of being defenseless, the quiet atmosphere, your own footsteps, everything makes this game thrilling. And best of all : its non linear, you have the chance of doing what you want to do. And it has about 6-7 endings, which makes this game replayable. I’ll try to beat it. Honestly, I will _try_ .