Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Boogie Bunnies

Boogie Bunnies

Boogie Bunnies is deeply, deeply flawed. It's unfun on a primal level, uses a common new technique in the exact wrong way, and sucks all the life out of what is supposed to be a puzzle game and injects it with insipidness instead. It's a chore to play or play well, and "multiplayer" essentially boils down to yelling at your buddy over and over because you think you know better.
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What? Are you waiting for the "but, it's fantastic!"? There isn't one.

Boogie Bunnies does pretty much everything wrong en route to a traveshamockery of an arcade puzzle game. Even the load screen is terrible, overindulgent and mostly way too long. The graphics (never a key point in any puzzle game) are agressively bad. They're about on par with an SNES game, and while that wouldn't normally be a breaking point, the game makes central to its concept that these bunnies, who apparently are Extremist Muslims, as they are ecstatic to be blown up and sent to their final reward whenever three or more of them are together spend half their time dancing, spinning and chirping. Due to the quasi-3-D design, this causes you to be unable to tell which bunnies are in which row, and the color sceme (various pastels and cool colors like blue, purple and teal right next to each other) does you no favors. This 'visual pollution' is all the rage nowadays in puzzlers, and while there's a correct time to use it, Boogie Bunnies proves that there is also a worst time to use it, and that time is any time you are playing Boogie Bunnies.

The music is somehow even worse than the dodgy graphics, as there's a romping, jovial side-scrolling game's music wedged in as the default music. This song is forty-five seconds long, and then it repeats, while squeaky-voiced bunnies chirp through three or four sayings endlessly. The "boogie" part of the game comes in when, at seemingly random moments, they start dancing to a eurobeat sound that crawled out of 1999's butthole to torture your ears. Best of all, the bunnies all "YIPPEE!!" whenever their ranks are thinned via a combo or two.

Controlling the bunnies, when they aren't dancing and actively confusing your attempts to fire, is actually not terrible, and it's the one place this game innovates in a good way. You can move your bunny along the bottom to the column you want, or up the sides and fire into the row you want. It's a neat trick and handy for generating the long combos you're looking for to fill up your boogie meter and move on to the next stage, each time hoping it is the end of our long national nightmare of boogeying rabbits.

Overall, I have to say, there is definitely a market for a breezy, light game about retarded bunnies that dance like idiots. But that market is solely occupied by Rayman Raving Rabbids, and Boogie Bunnies isn't even on the same plane. If you're looking to set ten dollars on fire, just put a match to a Hamilton, tape it, and put the video on YouTube. It will be far more entertaining than actually playing Boogie Bunnies.

Graphics: Alternatingly retarded and infuriatingly incomprehensible. 1.
Sound: You'll wish your speakers were broken. 0.
Controls: Has some signs of innovation. 3.
Tilt: It's like Sierra made doo-doo butter in your mouth. 1.
Overall (not an average): 1.

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