Bucky O'hare Ending

Ending #78
Bucky O'Hare (バッキー オヘア)
Developer: Konami
Publisher: Konami
Nintendo
1992
Wow!
This game is great! It's everything I would expect from a platformer of this era. It's a shame that this game didn't garner a larger audience like Mega Man. Unfortunately, by 1992, consumers and the industry had all but moved on from NES and were drooling over the SNES since the console wars were in full swing.
A lot of Nintendo's later titles fell into two categories. The first group were mainly puzzle games or sports titles, offerings that were popular and easy to produce to squeeze all the money they could out of the system. The second group of games fell into the type that tried to squeeze every last pixel and processing power from the Nintendo. With seven years of experience under their belt, veterans to the system could do some amazing things with 64 colors, 5.37 MHz of processing, expansion memory and bank switching. This is exactly one of those games that benefited from a late release.
Graphically this title can almost hold up to the first generation 16-bit era. It was a colorful, enjoyable experience and I was impressed by the level of detail in the sprites. Definitely a mastery of what the Nintendo could do.
Gameplay wise this has to be one of the hardest platformers on the system. This IS the definition of Nintendo hard. The great thing is, this game is difficult on it's own right, not because of shoddy, poor controls. When a mistake was made, I found myself owning up to it, and never blaming the controls. Very well done.
Another thing I liked about it was that each zone was broken into scenes and if you lost all your lives in a scene you were allowed to continue from the scene and not have to start the whole zone over. The developers knew what they were doing for this, they understood that each scene was pretty much a challenge that the player had to overcome so why not let them throw themselves at it until they overcame the challenge.
I could wax on and on about this game, but no one ever reads this anyways so I will close by saying that I was glad I had a chance to experience this title.