Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales (Jaguar) Playthrough
225A playthrough of Atari’s 1994 mascot-platformer for the Atari Jaguar, Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales.
Bubsy's Jaguar-exclusive outing surfaced in December of 1994, following just six weeks behind the release of Bubsy II for the Super Nintendo and Sega Genesis.
In late 1993, Atari struck a deal for the rights to bring five of Accolade's Genesis games over to the Jaguar, including Barkley's Shut Up and Jam!, Brett Hull Hockey, Hardball 3, Jack Nicklaus Golf (https://youtu.be/7vX-MD1aM4Q), and Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind (https://youtu.be/yVngvbQfkk4).
The Bubsy game was the only one of the bunch to see the light day on the Jaguar. According to Faran Tomanson, the producer on the project, Atari and Imagitec (the British development house that handled the heavy lifting on the project) were handed access to Bubsy 1's Genesis source code. They felt that it would've looked bad if they'd just ported the game directly to the Jaguar, so they decided to create a brand new game built on Bubsy 1's source. (Check out doctorclu's interview with Tomanson here: https://youtu.be/LxfuLRX9oRA)
In this adventure, Bubsy has to save the children of the world from a collection of "fractured furry tales," so there are levels based on Alice in Wonderland, Jack and the Beanstalk, 1001 Nights, 20000 Leagues Under the Sea, and Hansel & Gretel.
The desire to do right by the franchise was admirable, but the end result was somewhat less than ideal. Scores from magazine reviewers were about as middling as they come, and the passage of time hasn't made the game any easier to appreciate.
Though they do little to take advantage of the Jaguar's hardware muscle, the graphics are fairly nice and mark a definite improvement over the 16-bit Bubsy titles, and the music is okay most of the time. (That first stage theme though... that hideous attempt at a guitar solo makes me think of the sound of cats yawling in heat. Not great.)
The gameplay feels like Bubsy 1's but with some additional crust. The game moves along at a nice pace, but the collision detection is maddeningly inconsistent, the momentum physics are super wonky, the levels all feel like haphazardly thrown together labyrinths, and they're pumped full of blind jumps and unfair enemy placements.
People often call it a difficult game, but I disagree. The one hit kills, the constant cheap shots, and the way the way the game actively punishes you for moving more than two pixels at a time without checking what's ahead with the "look" button are all frustrating, to be sure. The designers seemed to be aware of this, though, as the game hands out extra lives so often that Fractured Furry Tales becomes more a battle of attrition than of skill. So long as you can stand listening to those same one-liners again and again, you'll eventually get through it.
There were a few fleeting moments when I'd catch myself thinking, "this isn't so bad," only to have a bee attack me out of nowhere or to land on a bed of spikes that I couldn't see. Even better is when you run out of time - good luck finishing a stage when the game restarts you at a checkpoint with only one minute on the clock!
Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales isn't the worst game ever. It's not even the worst Bubsy game. I mean, Bubsy 3D did happen. However, while I don't mean to be excessively harsh, I don't think that it's any big loss that the game remains a Jaguar-exclusive to this day.
Random afterthought/question: the game apparently saw an official release in both Europe and Japan in 1995. Am I the only one shocked to learn that the Jaguar was sold outside the United States?
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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