The Adventures of Bayou Billy (NES) Playthrough
735A playthrough of Konami's 1989 action game for the NES, The Adventures of Bayou Billy.
0:40 Practice mode
6:36 Game A begins
Having just destroyed the Red Beans 'n Rice Warehouse, the front for an international crime syndicate headed by the cigar chomping villain Gordon, Billy returns home for some quality time with his lady friend, Annabelle. Gordon is not pleased with the disruption to his business, however, and kidnaps Annabelle in retaliation.
"It's up to you to rescue Annabelle! Do you have the courage to fight Gordon and his men?"
-Crocodile Dundee in New Orleans- The Adventures of Bayou Billy is one of the best known examples of Konami's multi-genre, "everything but the kitchen sink" approach to game design that the company leaned into in the NES's later years.
Bayou Billy starts out as an arcade-style brawler. Setting out from his swamp hut, Billy punches and kicks his way through waves of thugs, ninja, scuba divers, and hungry gators.
Before long, Gordon's crew of paramilitary goons show up to gun Billy down, and the gameplay shifts gears by becoming a first-person rail shooter. With the Zapper or a d-pad controlled crosshair, Billy has to fend off several waves of baddies and an attack chopper.
After another short beat 'em up stage, Billy hops into a Jeep and speeds down the highway toward New Orleans, kicking off a 3D combat racing segment. The Jeep, which tops out at an impressive 180 mph, is equipped with a front-facing gun that can wipe out cars and obstacles on the road, and Billy can toss dynamite to bring down incoming planes.
Once he has made it to New Orleans, Billy does a bit more brawling and light gun shooting on Bourbon Street before finally arriving at Gordon's plantation estate where Annabelle is being held.
There's a lot to see and do in The Adventures of Bayou Billy, and the variety in the gameplay modes does a great job at preventing any tedium from setting in over the course of the game's nine stages. The beat 'em up sections play well despite suffering from slightly dodgy collision detection, the light gun segments are fast and fun takes on the classic Operation Wolf formula, and the driving stages control well and the faux scaling effects are smooth.
It's a quality game with top-notch graphics, sharp controls, and a kicking soundtrack. It stands out as a real achievement for the NES hardware, and the US release even sports a few upgrades over Mad City, the original 1988 Famicom version. The graphics were touched up (especially in the driving stages!) and some digitized speech was tossed in to spice up the presentation.
Unfortunately, that's not all that changed during the localization process. The alternate endings and the quiz minigame were cut, and the difficulty was "rebalanced."
And by rebalanced, I mean that it was hiked up so far that it upended the entire experience for a lot of people. Enemies have triple the hit points they had in Mad City, and in the driving stages, road obstacles were added and the life bar was dropped in favor of one-hit kills. You also get less ammo in the Zapper stages: the original starts you out with 150 bullets, while the NES one gives you just 50.
And that sucks, because Mad City was excellent. Bayou Billy isn't nearly as hard as, say Solar Jetman or BattleToads, but it asks for way too much, and once you've made it through the long and arduous process of learning the game inside-out, all that's left is the mindless repetition of a few simple patterns. It's playable, but it's not nearly as fun as it once was.
If you find yourself wanting to like The Adventures of Bayou Billy, do yourself a favor and check out Mad City. It's a worthy Konami classic.
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