All games deserve to be treated with dignity and respect instead of being relegated to meme fodder. Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection is a strong example of treating a series with a certain weight to it, as if it belongs in the same conversations as Half-Life and Super Mario Bros. Now I’ve always been a Bubsy fan. He was a funny looking orange bobcat. That was enough for five-year-old me. Beyond that, the games do have a certain charm to them with their puns, attitude, difficulty, and aesthetic. But even if these games were terrible, Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection still shows how to treat retro games with respect, something the internet hasn’t always done.
Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection is a similar collection to Sonic Origins and Atari 50. You have Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind for the SNES and Genesis, Bubsy II for SNES, Game Boy, and Genesis, Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales for the Atari Jaguar, two versions of Bubsy 3D, and a rare Japanese 16-bit version of Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. This latter version has the dialogue fully dubbed in Japanese and doesn’t feature references to American pop culture.
There is a Meowseum with advertisements, box art, design documents, merchandise, manuals, official art, and videos including interviews with designers Ken Macklin, Faran Thomason, the press preview build of Bubsy 3D, and the cartoon pilot. The soundtracks are available as well. With each game, you have cheats including infinite time and invisibility, CRT filters and borders, rewind, and one save state per title.
Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, released in 1993, is Bubsy’s debut platformer. Available here on the SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy, the best version here to start with would be the SNES version. The music and graphics are far superior to the Sega Genesis. Bubsy plays a lot like Sonic as in he moves fast, which wouldn’t be a big deal if the game wasn’t punishingly hard. One-hit deaths are common, whether from touching water, hitting a wall, or falling. The difficulty is reined in here by the option to rewind, save, and use cheats so you can just speed through the game, but the more you get the hang of the game’s controls and memorize the stage layouts, the easier the game gets. The challenge here is amplified by the not-so-great game design, but the charm of Bubsy’s 90s edgy humor is worth the price of admission.
Bubsy II on the Sega Genesis plays similarly to the original, but with more elaborate stage design. Most importantly, there’s no longer one-hit-deaths which brings the game’s challenge down dramatically. Bubsy II on the Game Boy has significant slowdown and is missing the colorful graphics of the console versions due to the system’s limitations. Worst of all, Bubsy struggles to come to a complete stop, making it very difficult to avoid taking hits. This is one of the very worst game design features of this era in platforming and makes the experience excruciating. Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales on the Atari Jaguar is my personal favorite of the series. It doesn’t show the Atari Jaguar’s capabilities very well, but I love the music and the fairytale themes for the levels.
The much-maligned Bubsy 3D is here with both the original version and the refurbished edition with updated controls. We all know Bubsy 3D is considered one of the worst games of all time. The controls are frustrating, the graphics and stage design feel incomplete, and the whole thing feels like a strange fever dream of what a 3D platformer should be like. But I still find it charming enough to recommend for even an hour of gaming if you can make it through the frustrating controls. Bubsy’s meta humor in the game is entertaining enough and the game is an interesting relic of early 3D gaming. Its addition to this collection in a refurbished format gives reason enough that games considered the worst of all time should get a second chance to shine.
Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection is an excellent example of how to do a retro compilation the right way and give a better life to one of the most notorious gaming mascots of the 90s. Look past the memes and the jokes about this character and you can find some serious fun here. Hopefully Bubsy gets a new audience and can move past his ill-deserved reputation. Even the very worst games should be preserved like this so future generations can make up their own minds as to their value for themselves, and those who played them at release can revisit them.
All games deserve to be treated with dignity and respect instead of being relegated to meme fodder. Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection is a strong example of treating a series with a certain weight to it, as if it belongs in the…
All games deserve to be treated with dignity and respect instead of being relegated to meme fodder. Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection is a strong example of treating a series with a certain weight to it, as if it belongs in the same conversations as Half-Life and Super Mario Bros. Now I’ve always been a Bubsy fan. He was a funny looking orange bobcat. That was enough for five-year-old me. Beyond that, the games do have a certain charm to them with their puns, attitude, difficulty, and aesthetic. But even if these games were terrible, Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection still shows how to treat retro games with respect, something the internet hasn’t always done.
Bubsy in: The Perfect Collection is a similar collection to Sonic Origins and Atari 50. You have Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind for the SNES and Genesis, Bubsy II for SNES, Game Boy, and Genesis, Bubsy in: Fractured Furry Tales for the Atari Jaguar, two versions of Bubsy 3D, and a rare Japanese 16-bit version of Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind. This latter version has the dialogue fully dubbed in Japanese and doesn’t feature references to American pop culture.
There is a Meowseum with advertisements, box art, design documents, merchandise, manuals, official art, and videos including interviews with designers Ken Macklin, Faran Thomason, the press preview build of Bubsy 3D, and the cartoon pilot. The soundtracks are available as well. With each game, you have cheats including infinite time and invisibility, CRT filters and borders, rewind, and one save state per title.
Bubsy in: Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind, released in 1993, is Bubsy’s debut platformer. Available here on the SNES, Genesis, and Game Boy, the best version here to start with would be the SNES version. The music and graphics are far superior to the Sega Genesis. Bubsy plays a lot like Sonic as in he moves fast, which wouldn’t be a big deal if the game wasn’t punishingly hard. One-hit deaths are common, whether from touching water, hitting a wall, or falling. The difficulty is reined in here by the option to rewind, save, and use cheats so you can just speed through the game, but the more you get the hang of the game’s controls and memorize the stage layouts, the easier the game gets. The challenge here is amplified by the not-so-great game design, but the charm of Bubsy’s 90s edgy humor is worth the price of admission.
Bubsy II on the Sega Genesis plays similarly to the original, but with more elaborate stage design. Most importantly, there’s no longer one-hit-deaths which brings the game’s challenge down dramatically. Bubsy II on the Game Boy has significant slowdown and is missing the colorful graphics of the console versions due to the system’s limitations. Worst of all, Bubsy struggles to come to a complete stop, making it very difficult to avoid taking hits. This is one of the very worst game design features of this era in platforming and makes the experience excruciating. Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales on the Atari Jaguar is my personal favorite of the series. It doesn’t show the Atari Jaguar’s capabilities very well, but I love the music and the fairytale themes for the levels.
The much-maligned Bubsy 3D is here with both the original version and the refurbished edition with updated controls. We all know Bubsy 3D is considered one of the worst games of all time. The controls are frustrating, the graphics and stage design feel incomplete, and the whole thing feels like a strange fever dream of what a 3D platformer should be like. But I still find it charming enough to recommend for even an hour of gaming if you can make it through the frustrating controls. Bubsy’s meta humor in the game is entertaining enough and the game is an interesting relic of early 3D gaming. Its addition to this collection in a refurbished format gives reason enough that games considered the worst of all time should get a second chance to shine.
Bubsy in: The Purrfect Collection is an excellent example of how to do a retro compilation the right way and give a better life to one of the most notorious gaming mascots of the 90s. Look past the memes and the jokes about this character and you can find some serious fun here. Hopefully Bubsy gets a new audience and can move past his ill-deserved reputation. Even the very worst games should be preserved like this so future generations can make up their own minds as to their value for themselves, and those who played them at release can revisit them.
by Kayla Merritt
