Spirou

aka: Piko, Robbedoes, Splint, Sprint
Moby ID: 987
SNES Specs

Description

Spirou is a platform side-scroller based on popular Franco-Belgian comic strip Spirou et Fantasio. The story begins in New York where famous inventor Count of Champignac is about to present his latest inventions. Journalists Spirou and Fantasio, the Count’s most faithful friends are also there. Suddenly an evil robot woman Cyanida (originally called Cyanure), known to be obsessed with plans to enslave humanity, appears and abducts the scientist! There’s no time to lose, so Spirou and his pet squirrel Spip rush to the rescue, while Fantasio stays back to dig for more information.

The player controls Spirou. He is able to jump, duck, climb ladders and cliffs and run fast if the player holds down the action button. In the fourth level Spirou gets a gun to stand a chance against the increasing numbers of Cyanida’s minions. Spirou’s quest will see him travel through city streets and rooftops, a toy store, subway, Palombian swamp and jungle and other locations in over 12 levels.

The player only gets 3 lives and no continues to beat the game. A single password is granted after beating the first half of the game.

Groups +

Screenshots

Credits (SNES version)

24 People (19 developers, 5 thanks)

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 79% (based on 16 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.4 out of 5 (based on 16 ratings with 2 reviews)

Spirou the zerou – world’s most lame herou

The Good
There’s only one good thing about the game – its visuals. The graphics are colorful and varied with several instances of nice parallax scrolling (that’s what I enjoy the most in 16-bit games!). The game’s atmosphere is depicted pretty well. If it’s a jungle, you’ll know you’re in the jungle; if it’s a street at night – there will be no mistake about that. Animation is nice too. Spirou and his almost useless squirrel sidekick are animated especially well, with cartoon-like quality. And that’s about all there is good to it. By the way, while we’re still at it, SNES visuals seem to be a bit better – more parallax scrolling and overall better backgrounds.

The Bad
Absolutely everything else in this game is bad, no – horrible. The game is long and very hard. It’s not the bullet-hell type of hardness or strategic type of hardness – oh, no, sir – it’s a “fight-with-unbelievably-broken-controls” type of hardness. You’ll be constantly dying – over and over again just to get past the first three or four levels. It requires a lot of memorization, and even when you do memorize the levels, you’ll still die and die and die – ugh, bad luck!

The controls ruin this game completely. It seems the French developers were trying to make the movements of Spirou life-like, so please be patient to wait for about a second for him to pull his gun and fire it. To shoot down diagonally press fire and then down, and if you’re lucky, Spirou the zerou will shoot instead of ducking. Otherwise you’ll most likely get hit again and again. The unbelievably long shooting animation leaves you completely vulnerable. And by the way, you only get a gun four levels into the game! Running is another issue. When running, Spirou gains momentum and that leads to many instant deaths – no matter how careful you are
 Walk slowly and be punished for being slow, run fast and die constantly – it’s all the same! And sometimes Spirou will just refuse to jump when you most need it.

To beat the game all you get is mere 3 lives (about 5 hits each) and no continues. You can grab a few 1-ups here and there, but it won’t save you. The cheating developers don’t even replenish your hit points between the levels. The levels are full of deadly hazards, hard to hit enemies (they are hard to hit because this Spirou guy is a limp invalid when it comes to shootin'), instant deaths and leaps of faith – with most of them leading into bottomless pits! And there are no checkpoints! You start from the very beginning of the level each time you die! There are 2 boss fights in the game and both of them are just atrocious. Ignore tactics and just shoot hoping that the villain’s health will be depleted faster than yours. I won’t lie here – some levels are well designed, but it looks like they were originally intended for some better hero, some kind of Probotector or other crap like that. But no, we get this Spirou the under-herou as a protagonist. Gosh, the French guys clearly thought: let’s make a game harder than the freakin’ Battletoads! And they succeeded – the game is nearly impossible to beat. Hell, I’ve beaten Battletoads when I was 13!

There’s a password screen but it’s more like a sadistic joke: the long, tiresome, brutally hard game gives you only 1 password. That’s right. In the middle of the game they grant you a password. What an abomination. Needless to say there is hardly a 16-bit gamer who did see this password – it’s nearly impossible to get to it. And it only gets harder further on.

Music and sound are also terrible. Nothing really to say here – it sounds like the developers worked with the Genesis sound chip for the first time. No drums, no good tunes, no recognizable sounds – just yer typical late Mega Drive European sound crap. That’s right, in mid 1990-s most of European developers (namely, Infogrames) messed with Genesis sound chip to produce some of the worst video game music ever.

The Bottom Line
Overall – stay away from this pile of dang. Don’t touch it even if you’re in love with 16-bit era as much as I am. Or better yet – give it a try. Yes, download a rom (don’t you spend a dime on this game!), pop it up into your emulator and try it for yourself. Go on, don’t be shy to die again and again and again! What you say? Savestates? Hell, no! Be a man. Or you can try a code and skip to any level – try this also. The developers will laugh in hell watching you die!

It’s one of the worst games I’ve ever played and I’ve played a lot of ‘em. In fact it’s so bad that there isn’t even a FAQ for this game. Yes, it’s the same guys who made Tintin and Smurfs. No wonder I loathe Infogrames and their freakin’ armadillo. It creeps me out.

Genesis · by GTramp (81965) · 2011

A epic game!

The Good
This is one of my most favorite gameboy titles. Based on the Spirou et Fantasio series this game does a great job at bringing the comics to life. For the gameboy the music is some of the best I heard on the whole system every track just makes it more enjoyable to play and they will be stuck in your head for days. The world's such as new york and all the way to the jungle are very fun. The final boss with Cyanide is also the perfect ending to a great platform game. As far as gameboy platformers from Infogrames go I prefer this over the tintin ones with this you get bosses and much more action. Your enjoy battling robots and saving the world!

The Bad
There is not much I didn't enjoy here good title. It can be rather difficult for beginner players but with patience this can be overlooked.

The Bottom Line
Awesome and fun!

Game Boy · by Dragon 72 (13) · 2020

Trivia

Cancelled Game Gear version

Bit Managers was working on a Game Gear version, but ultimately Infogrames decided not to publish the game.

Inspiration

While the game borrows a few elements from the comics, it is based primarily on the 1992 Spirou cartoon. A good example is the character-design of the villainess Cyanure/Cyanida, who has her "tomboy" looks from the cartoon (in the comics, her looks were directly inspired by Marilyn Monroe).

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  • MobyGames ID: 987
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MAT.

Genesis, SNES added by Frederic Bibet. Game Boy added by Hervé Piton.

Additional contributors: Sciere, Pirou Julien, Zeikman, Rik Hideto.

Game added March 7, 2000. Last modified August 27, 2023.