Tiny Toon Adventures

The Good
Tiny Toon Adventures is a platformer developed and published in 1991 by Konami for the FC/NES. Konami build it success in the 90's by making actual good games from a lot of American popular IPs from comics and cartoons like TMNT, X-Men, The Simpsons and here the classic Warner Brothers Looney Toons spin-off, Tiny Toons. Features beautiful graphics, rich in colour and details; funny and cute animations, if you leave the characters standing for too long each will show impatience in its own style, which for some reason I always loved to see back in the day. They could have animated just a couple of toons, but they give you variety of characters from this world that are just a joy to see (like the dodo stage screen). The music suits the game well, probably the worst song is the actual Tiny Toons theme but the rest are fine.

You always begin a level controlling Buster Bunny and you can pick from three other toons as a partner; each one has a unique talent: Buster runs very fast, Plucky Duck can swim, flap his wings and glide, Dizzy Devil spin attack breaking blocks and Furball can climb walls; to switch the character for your partner you must find and grab a "Change" Star Balloon in the level. Carrots and fruits acts as in-game currency and if you collect 30 of them you can trade them for an extra live (provided you can locate Hamton's secret room). There's even a secret bonus Duck Vader boss that rewards you with carrots if you defeat him.

The gameplay is fast, which adds to the challenge of platforming (frustrating but fun); the controls are responsive, though a bit slippery at times. In this aspect the best character to control by far is Plucky Duck; the gliding is such a helpful mechanic for platforming that makes everything else pale in comparison. At the same time, levels are designed to be cruised with every character, and of course that sometimes completely changes the experience. There are 6 areas with 3 stages per area (that's 18 total!) The enemies and obstacles, their movement and projectile patterns are surprising at every turn; requiring knowledge of the level and careful - patient running and jumping (which sometimes makes the time limit really your worse adversary). Bosses are varied and interesting and also Elmyra acts as a sub-boss, in a game where you must avoid her hugs, becoming harder with the inclusion of different platforms as the game progresses.

The Bad
I couldn't understand why people compared this to Super Mario Bros 3 (1988), some even calling it a "clone"... which seemed to me like a really silly thing to say, this being an original game doing its own thing, though of course as happens with every other platformer in the era showed its undeniable influence of Super Mario 3. And it borrows a lot! But apparently there are suspicions that SMB3 was reversed engineered by Konami and literally chunks of code were copied. It has a very similar Hud, and identical (to the frame) scrolling, running and jumping; the "theater" set up, with the curtains and end level screen, are the same, and even some minor mechanics like the gliding tanuki suit/ gliding duck that are very much the same... So, there's no official word but this sameness - exposed by a French retro game blogger - seems weird -offers some strong evidence of something very suspicious at play, but still doesn't completely convince me (might be because I like this game so much and really find it to be, contrarily to what is said - overall very original) Why would Konami risk to do something like this? - copy just a portion of it - in a game that is not just a cash grab? And what about Nintendo - one of the most protective of their own IPs developers out there, they didn't notice? just allow it?

The Bottom Line
This is a fantastic game, with excellent graphics, suitable music, enjoyable gameplay mechanics and level design, harsh difficulty, making one of the best platformers on the system. And it's kind of sad really because is already difficult for a licensed game to see a re-release for modern systems, but specially harder when its also surrounded by all these controversy. So, if you are able to see a hard copy in the wild grab it because that's probably the last we've seen of an official 8 bit Tiny Toon Adventures.