Bubsy In Claws Encounters of The Furred Kind, or just Bubsy the Bobcat to the rest of us was a scrolling platform games on the SEGA Mega Drive. It was bright, colourful and very aesthetically pleasing in its presentation. Accolade, of Mortal Kombat fame, were clearly trying to market a new addictive platform game to grab the world by the bollocks the same way that the Super Mario Brothers and Sonic The Hedgehog did. Like the aforementioned, the aim was run about collecting objects, in this case balls of yarn. The storyline revolves around Bubsy trying to rid the world of some yarn stealing aliens called Woolies. Bubsy having the world’s largest collection of yarn is understandably pissed off that his extensive collection has been pilfered and goes off to “get his shit back” per se.

The appealing factor of this game is that Bubsy really embraces all the stereotypes of cartoons. Comedy eye popping, birds flying round your head when dazed, concertina effect when you fall a long way and shattering like glass when hurt are just some of the amusing cartoon homages which this game entails. The enemies are funny too, most of the aliens will dress up according to the level design ranging from clowns in the funfair level, to cowboys in the wild west level. All very nice to see, along a well designed backdrop.

Bubsy has two moves essentially, jumping and gliding. Jumping on an enemy will cause you to defeat them in a comedy dust ball like in Tom & Jerry and Bubsy does throw out some amusing quips in the beginning scenes. Being a cat and all, you do start the game with nine lives, which from the offset assumes that the game is quite easy, except it’s not. Remember how I said in Borderlands that  everything is hostile? Well it’s the same for this game, except everything kills you in one hit. Yes EVERYTHING. Water, aliens, gumball machines, dancing hotdogs, yes everything. You will collect quite a few extra lives via numbered t-shirts, but you will end up rinsing through your lives stupidly fast and you will need all the lives you can get before the later levels. It’s quite common to be doing very well before a speeding egg from off the screen obliterates you without prior warning. At first the cartoon “death” makes you titter, after the 8th time, it’s quite annoying.

All in all, Bubsy is a good game and for a 16-bit platformer, it has aged pretty well. It didn’t pretend to be anything more that what it was, a colourful, entertaining platform game which unfortunately had a rather steep difficulty curve. Worth a visit if you still have a working Mega Drive.

We have filmed a RetroLOL of this game here.