Game:

The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle (1989)

Duration: 1:09:53

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Let me tell you about the craziness of the Crazy Castle series.
It all started in the late 80s with the production of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Kemco managed to snag the rights to produce a game for the Famicom Disc System.
They decided to loosely base the plot on the movie and made an Action/Puzzle game.
The problem was when they decided to release it outside Japan...
LJN had snagged the Roger Rabbit license outside Japan, and had made Rare produce a game for them.
So Kemco bought the rights to use the Looney Tunes franchise and turned the game into Bugs Bunny's Fun House.
Which they changed to The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle.
Meanwhile they produced a similar and yet different game for the GameBoy about Mickey Mouse being trapped in a castle, simply called Mickey Mouse. Their Who Framed Roger Rabbit license gave them a backdoor into getting a Disney license.
This castle was different, and you had to collect keys to open doors. But it used the exact same password system as the Bugs Bunny game, and it had more levels than the Bugs Bunny game... which results in some Special Stages and some broken unfinished stage in the Bugs Bunny version if you tried the extra GameBoy passwords.
This was another Japan Only-license, so they decided to use their Looney Tunes license and turned it into The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle in both NA and Europe.
They made a sequel named Mickey Mouse 2 which once again got turned into a Looney Tunes game and released as The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2 in NA.
This is where the fun starts.
It was swapped with Hugo in Europe. Hugo is an European media franchise with an interactive television show that was pretty popular and got tons of games on multiple platforms. Basically you are a troll that tries to rescue your wife from a witch. Hugo would later get a GameBoy sequel named Hugo 2, which had nothing to do with the Crazy Castle games.
And... it was later rereleased as Mickey Mouse in Europe. Yes, the European Mickey Mouse is the Japanese Mickey Mouse 2.
And... they released a compilation of the first two Mickey Mouse games as Bugs Bunny Collection exclusively in Japan as well.
Mickey Mouse 3 was released on the Famicom, but they had lost their Looney Tunes rights so they decided to create a whole new franchise called Kid Klown, and name the game Kid Klown in Night Mayor World in NA. Europe didn't get this game.
Kid Klown would get games released on the Snes, Playstation and GameBoy.
Mickey Mouse 4 returned to the GameBoy and it was released in NA as The Real Ghostbusters and in Europe as Garfield Labyrinth.
Getting confused yet?
Mickey Mouse 5 was another GameBoy game that was actually released as a Mickey Mouse in the rest of the world, as Mickey Mouse: Magic Wands!
...some European versions was named Mickey Mouse 5: Magic Wands!
Remember Kid Klown from earlier?
He had a GameBoy game called Soreyuke!! Kid: Go! Go! Kid in Japan. Which they changed into Bugs Bunny: Crazy Castle 3 and made into a Super GameBoy title, which also got rereleased in Japan.
Their next game in the series was simply called Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle 4 in the whole world.
And after that... they lost their Looney Tunes rights again.
But they got a Universal Studios license and made Woody Woodpecker in Crazy Castle 5 for the Gameboy Advance.
Shortly afterwards they released Crazy Castle for mobile phones in NA without any licensed franchise.

As for the game...
...it is not bad...
It gets more hate than what it deserves, mostly because of that old AVGN review. Sure, you got no real variation in music or graphics, but the controls are good and it will take some time before you complete it.
There are better games out there, and much worse.

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