Bucky O'Hare (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
1,141A playthrough of Konami's 1992 license-based action platformer for the NES, Bucky O'Hare.
Just like it did in arcades, throughout the early 90s, much of Konami's home console output focused on games that were based on licensed characters from popular television shows and comic books, and like their arcade counterparts, these titles all tended to be popular thanks to their exceptional quality.
Bucky O'Hare, like TMNT, The Lone Ranger, or Rollergames, fits this same pattern nicely. Based on the cartoon Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars, Konami's NES interpretation of the license offered players one of the tighest, most refined platformers to ever appear on the NES.
Unlike the arcade game of the same name, Bucky O'Hare on the NES opens with a structure similar to that found in Mega Man. You are given the choice as to the order in which you'd like to tackle them, and on each planet you'll find a crewmate that becomes a controllable character once they are rescued.
The crewmates each have a unique ability that makes them well suited to specific tasks: Bucky can charge his power to improve his jumping abilities, Blinky can hover and break blocks, Jenny has a mind-controlled projectile attack, Dead Eye Duck gets a Contra-style spread shot and the ability to climb sheet surfaces, and finally, Willy gets a chargeable shot similar to the Mega Buster.
You can switch out your character on the fly, and many levels will require you to swap them out regularly in order to make it past the obstacles put in your way. The stage design is incredibly diverse and makes impressive use of the NES hardware. The game is extraordinarily fast (at moments it even approaches Sonic-levels of speed), and is changing things up constantly: after a standard ealk-and-shoot stage, you might be catch a ride on enemy warships floating overhead, while in the next you might be on a rail cart ducking lethal spike traps overhead at breakneck speeds. It's very good at keeping you on your toes, and even though it's significantly longer than most 8-bit games of its ilk, it never becomes dull or stale.
It's also excruciatingly difficult. Bucky O'Hare will test the skills and the patience of even the best players - it thinks nothing of killing you without warning for the slightest mistake made in judging the timing of a shot or a jump, and each boss feels a mountain to overcome until you learn the timing and patterns to beat it. The game is not impossible, but it requires a ton of practice and some finely-honed twitch skills.
Thought Battletoads and Ninja Gaiden were difficult? Just wait until you take a crack at this one! It's unforgiving but fair, and it was incredibly satisfying to finally conquer it after a couple months worth of practice.
The graphics and sound do help ease the pain quite a bit, though. The game looks incredible by 8-bit standards. There's little slowdown or flicker, and there are all sorts of tricks at play that allow huge sprites to zoom all about the screen without a hitch. Smart use of color and fake parallax scrolling abound, and the character sprites all retain a lot of the personality as their TV counterparts exhibited. Maegawa Masato (founder of Treasure) directed the project, and his influence is immediately clear. The music is also classic Konami through-and-through.
Bucky O'Hare in many ways represents the culmination of all of Konami's expertise developed over the life of the NES, and it's a real technical and artistic achievement. If the difficulty level doesn't blow you away, the fantastic gameplay surely will.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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