Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland

The Good
If you're a fan of the cartoon, you may note that this game includes all four of the major characters (Buster, Babs, Plucky, and Hampton) as playable characters unlike the first game which only had Buster, Plucky, Dizzy, and Furball (who also returns in this game). Their also represented well by some good sprite work, particularly Buster and Babs who have a few sprites that are even non-essential. The music is thankfully more varied than the previous game.

The game is divided into four stages that are played using a limited number of tickets and one final stage. If you run out of tickets it's game over, but you can also buy more using points from beating stages. Although you might assume the game is a simple platformer like the first game, the stages don't play as such. Plucky's bumper car stage is more like pinball meets golf while the other three stages mostly involve dodging hazards. Only Buster's stage seems at all conventional, but the stage's design itself is a long and varied maze full of traps.

The Bad
I don't have a problem with mini-game style games, but they tend to work best either with lots of short varied stages or with a few well developed stages like in Gunstar Heroes. This game has the worst of both worlds which makes it disappointing. Although the last stage is well developed and Hampton's stage isn't bad, Plucky's seems like a bonus round that goes on too long and Babs and Furball's stages are just long and stressful with no gameplay depth.

The difficulty of these stages is very artificial as well, the game's actually easier than the first but requires memorization and knowledge of all the character's moves. Babs's in particular requires you to memorize the entire stage layout and some players won't have the patience to do this. The difficulty might surprise certain players who expect this game to be geared towards younger players, but this is pretty typical for a Konami licensed game.

The Bottom Line
Konami and Capcom made some pretty good licensed games for the NES, but this, narrowly, isn't one of them. It's too short, with stages of little depth that go on way too long. However, it is playable, the level design is good, and if you like tough memory based games you'll get more out of it, but even given that it's not very fun. People who want to cruise through games with save states won't enjoy it all naturally.