It was an experience so horrific, it's going to haunt me for the rest of my time on this Earth.
A Bug's Life was a pretty good movie. At least, that's what I thought when I saw it, way back in the day. But, its memory in my mind will be forever tarnished because of a recent traumatic experience I had. It was an experience so horrific, it's going to haunt me for the rest of my time on this Earth. It's an experience which I really don't want to recall, but I will for the purposes of this writing. It was worse than being eaten alive by army ants. It was A Bug's Life for the Game Boy Color.
It started innocently enough. I was searching Ebay for a good deal on a used copy of Pokemon Yellow. Not only did I find a great deal, but the seller threw in an additional game. I was stoked. Little did I know, the disaster that lay ahead. After hours of playing Pokemon Yellow, I took a step back, and popped in the other game.
At first, I was impressed with A Bug's Life. The little opening title screens looked pretty impressive for a Game Boy game. Once I got passed those, I got to the gameplay itself. Graphics are great, again for Game Boy. This game definitely seemed to have high production values.
But as soon as I started to press a button, things took a turn for the worse. So, you play as Flik, and it's a side scroller. You walk using the d-pad, jump with A, run and throw stuff with B, same as every other side scroller. But the controls still manage to be horrendous. First of all, you walk so slowly, it's ridiculous. There's a noticeable delay when jumping, and you can't jump very high. So, in order to make it over certain obstacles, you have to jump onto a small platform, then jump back to a slightly higher platform, and then jump forward again to another slightly higher platform.
As I said, B runs, but it's not very helpful. It makes you run very fast, but doing a running jump is impossible, as running and jumping doesn't add any additional height or distance. It's also weird that instead of having to hold the button to keep running, all you have to do is tap the button, and then you keep running until you either let go of the d-pad or hit an obstacle.
The enemies are almost impossible to dodge. You can throw stuff at them. The things you can throw appear to be coconuts. Since you're playing as a bug, they're probably grains of sand, but I'll just call them coconuts. Anyway, it's unnecessarily difficult to hit your enemies with these things, as they usually just go right under your enemies. Also, if you're holding the B button to run, and you hit an obstacle, you'll quickly throw all of your coconuts, so you'll have to backtrack across the level to get more, or risk taking hits from your enemies. Three hits and you lose a life, by the way. But it seems you have like a trillion lives by default, so it takes forever to run out.
So, the platforming is crap, the enemies are godawful, the controls are mind-blowingly horrifying, and to top it all off, in the first level there's an obstacle that's too high, and it's impossible to clear. I tried everything, but it's just not possible to get past. So, that's as far as I ever got. There's a password system so if there's a cheat, I could skip the first level and see the rest of the game, but I'm not going to torture myself anymore. I'm already scarred for life thanks to this steaming pile of anteater feces. Easily the worst side-scroller I've ever played in my life. Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm gonna go see if I can get my cat to pee on this cartridge. If that doesn't work, I'll pee on it myself.
Scoring:
Graphics: Great (seriously)
Gameplay: Garbage
Sound: Slightly better than nails on a chalkboard.
Value: It was free and I still feel ripped off.
Tilt: This game tilts me toward seriously considering suicide.
Overall Score:
I'd rather play E.T.