Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland (NES) Playthrough
293A playthrough of Konami's 1993 license-based action game for the NES, Tiny Toon Adventures 2: Trouble in Wackyland.
Coming two years after the first hit Tiny Toons NES game (https://youtu.be/ZQGm0gSAVSk ), Trouble in Wackyland brings the after-school cartoon stars back for one last hurrah on Nintendo's 8-bit console.
Construction has just wrapped on Wackyland, a brand new amusement park in Acme Acres. The news has everyone abuzz, so Buster Bunny eagerly accepts when he receives a letter from a "secret admirer" inviting the Tiny Toon crew to check it out.
Once they get to the park, the guys are given ten tickets that they can spend on the rides, but if they want to see park's star attraction, the Haunted House, they'll have to earn four gold tickets.
These gold tickets are won by "completing" (read: surviving) the park's four other rides:
Babs Bunny goes for the rollercoaster. She has to flip the cart around the track to avoid being violently maimed by physics. And brick walls.
Plucky Duck takes the bumper cars. There are three stages, and in each, Plucky has to bash the other players into the giant holes that litter the track.
Hamton picks the western-themed train. He has to run across the roof of the train while fighting the bad guys to make it to the engine car.
Furrball heads over to the log ride, dodging hazards as he tries to avoid falling in the water.
And once the four regular rides have been conquered, Buster himself heads to the final stage, the haunted house, with the four gold tickets in hand.
Beyond the characters, Trouble in Wackyland doesn’t share much in common with the first game. The haunted house stage is the only part of the game that plays like a hop-and-bop platformer. This time around, most of the action is on rails. Literally.
The rollercoaster, train, and log ride stages are autoscrolling affairs that fling wave after wave of enemies and objects at you, while the bumper cars feel more like a bonus-style mini-game. The haunted house is more freeform, but it takes the form of a giant maze filled with tricky jumps.
The game looks and sounds great - the colorful backdrops are a big improvement over the first game's, and the upbeat music is fun and catchy in the familiar Konami style.
The gameplay doesn’t manage capture the spirit and fun of the show as well as the first game, though. It's a pretty mixed bag, overall.
The difficulty level is all over the place - the train and log stages are insultingly easy, the bumper cars rely on luck as much as skill, and the rollercoaster stage is one of the most obnoxious, infuriatingly difficult experiences that I've come across in an old-school Konami game. The haunted house is no cakewalk, either.
As short as the game is - about half the length of the original - it feels like the rollercoaster and haunted house were made so difficult in order to artificially extend its length, and I'd be amazed if any kid managed to finish it without cheating. It's a choice that cheapens the entire experience, and it sucks most of the fun out of this adventure.
It's too bad, because this sequel is the sole black mark on what was an otherwise great lineup of Tiny Toons games by Konami in the early 90s.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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