Bebe’s Kids

I remember a long time ago, for Nintendo Power's 100th issue, Bebe's Kids was chosen as hands-down the worst Super NES game of all time. This was the only time I'd even heard of it, so I didn't know it was actually based on a movie.

The fact that Paramount is still around is proof that someone must have sold their soul to the devil.

I've never seen the movie, and I considered hitting up the library and nearby rental places (so I'd be able to compare the movie to the game) until I realized that any time spent watching Bebe's Kids could be better spent by literally doing anything else at all. The same could be said of playing the game, doubly so in fact, but I don't usually think that far ahead and that's why I play bad games and blog about them instead of actually having a job.

So I get to the title screen and press Start, and I'm presented with a choice of two characters, who I assume are Bebe's titular Kids. I kind of didn't want to pick either of them because I hate both of them and they both look like horrible unlikeable cretins but I ended up picking Kahlil for reasons I no longer remember.

Look at the scowls on their faces! And those cans of spraypaint! That's how you know they have attitude.

After that, I'm told to "observe the rules while in Funworld" and the game begins. Immediately I notice the enormous signboard detailing these rules. Well actually they're just the same two rules repeated over and over again and neither of them make any sense whatsoever.

 

Bevis may have gotten banned from Funworld, but Butthead managed to get away scot-free.

The game itself is kind of like Final Fight. That is, if Final Fight were programmed by heroin addicts who coded the engine by taking turns hitting the keyboard with a chair. As far as I can tell you have two attacks, a punch and a kick that are equally useless. They do almost zero damage each and I'm pretty sure that upon being hit, enemies step back and laugh at you instead of staggering in pain. It'd be pretty discouraging if the bad guys retaliated in any way whatsoever. Well actually, the guys in non-rat suits pick you up by the scruff of your neck, which drains your life until you mash buttons to flail your arms around like a doofus and break free. And it's still pretty discouraging.

If you want a picture of the future, imagine a little boy punching a rat-man in the groin - forever.

The game barely gives you enough time to get to the next area. In fact I died three times because I didn't punch rat-men in the junk quick enough, and when I did get to the next level I literally had maybe three seconds left. Immediately I was accosted by a man demanding to know where Peewee was. I thought maybe he was Bebe but then I remembered that's a girl's name, and if her kids being horrible delinquents is any indication then Bebe is probably in jail somewhere for holding up a liquor store.

STOP SNITCHING

Now, I hate for this to happen in such an early entry on this blog but I could not get past the next area and so I could not beat the game. For the life of me I couldn't figure out what to do. The guy from the cutscene caught glasses being knocked down by who I assume was Peewee but there was nowhere to go and nothing to do except listen to the same four notes play over and over again and get hit by the falling glasses and die, which is exactly what happened. To make matters worse the game threw me all the way back to the start and expected me to punch rat-men again. Well, eff that, I said.

You have got to be frikkin' kidding me.

There are lots of things I like to pretend are actually secret government programs to determine who is too stupid to allow to breed. I like to imagine that people who watch American Idol and buy Tim and Eric's Awesome Show on DVD are secretly being kidnapped and taken to some facility in the desert where they're studied to determine what makes them so dumb. At first I knew this was my way of coping with how asinine our world is and it didn't really happen, but think about it. I don't know anyone who had a physical copy of this game and neither do you, so maybe there's something to my little hypothesis.

Battletoads

I used to think Battletoads was a good game.

Someone at Nintendo must have thought so too, because this game got the big push in Nintendo Power back in the day. There was a huge section dedicated to it, complete with level maps, game tips, and even a comic.

Back when I was a kid, getting a new game was a big deal that only happened on Christmas and my birthday. Battletoads was never a huge enough blip on my radar to ask for because I wanted games like Mario 3, TMNT 2, and Little Nemo; however, it was part of my regular rental rotation alongside games like Punch-Out, Super C, and TMNT 1. Eventually I would go on to beat those games (except Punch-Out, because Tyson is impossible), but I never could beat Battletoads until I played it for this review, and now I remember why.

The first couple levels are actually pretty fun, and I could see why someone who never got further than that would like Battletoads. The first level plays like your standard beat-em-up, and you can do stuff like beat robots to death with their own legs and commandeer a dragon. It even has a really neat boss battle against a giant robot that plays out from the boss's point of view.

Sadly, the second-person shooter never really caught on as a genre.

The second level is a little different, you rappel down a giant crater and punch birds and robots out of the sky. It's a bit harder than the first level but it's still fun.

Then you get to the one level where most people quit. At first it's like the first level: standard beat-em-up action, but harder. Bad guys start hitting you for two damage apiece, even though the health-restoring flies only restore one. Also there's a new familiar-looking enemy that attacks you by flying up to your health bar and physically stealing bits out of it.

I wonder where I've seen these guys before.

But eventually the fun ends, and you get to the bikes.

Just this screenshot is enough to make grown men weep tears of despair.

The bikes are ridiculously hard, and I am sad to report that the game never quite recovers. Unless you're abusing emulator savestates you will die repeatedly until you memorize the entire damn layout, and even then it won't help much. What's funny is that in Battletoads there are warp zones (including one on the first level) but you have to be insanely quick to find most of them… except this one. Near the end of the section with the bikes, walls start coming at you insanely fast, but one of them has a warp zone right in front of it, and it's actually easier to hit this warp zone and skip the next level than it is to beat the level legitimately. So that's what I did.

Here's a screenshot of me careening head-first at breakneck speed into the next level.

I forgot to take screenshots of the next two levels. The first one was a surfing level and the other had giant snakes I had to climb around on, neither were that remarkable.

After that was a familiar-looking level. I didn't think much of it until I got to a certain part, at which I believe I audibly swore.

SON OF A BITCH

After this was a vertical level that started out okay but quickly devolved into ridiculousness. The robots that shoot electricity and kill you in two hits were bad enough, and the things that shoot gas that kill you in one hit are even worse, but the main offender was the lame scrolling deaths.

So I jump up on this spring…

Whoops, missed the jump! Surely the screen will scroll five pixels back down instead of killing me!

Wait what

I came across a level after this where I'm sure the dev team thought nobody would ever get that far, so they just stopped trying. Seriously this level is complete bullshit and unless you know what's coming in advance you can't possibly have enough lives to feel it out.

For example, there are a few sections of the level where you're being chased by a giant gear. Outrunning it is no problem, but deciding where to stand after reaching the endpoint is. Seriously, look at these screenshots.

Do I stand next to the wall or in the water?

I chose… poorly.

Secondly, damn near every jump you take is a blind drop, and unless you know what direction to fall in, you're going to land in spikes that kill you in one hit.

Do I go to the left or keep falling down?

Hey look, I died again

Stick to the left or right of the giant spike ball?

Okay, seriously? How is this fair at all

And then at the end, just to be dicks they laid down a bunch of spikes that you can't possibly avoid unless you know it's coming, because the game doesn't give you enough time to react to it.

Why does this even exist

If you thought this level couldn't be outdone then you are very mistaken. The second-to-last stage involves you riding a clinger-winger (at least I think that's what it is, the level was called Clinger-Wingers) and it's the single most damning piece of evidence that nobody at Rare actually played this game before releasing it yet.

If you and a friend managed to beat Battletoads's back-ass-wards two-player system together up to this point, that would be all the evidence I'd need to prove both you and your buddy are robots and there wouldn't be a jury on Earth that would put me in jail for shooting both of you to prevent the robot insurrection. But for the sake of argument, let's say that the planets were aligned correctly and against all odds, you and your friend managed to get this far in Battletoads together. This stage is where you'd have to stop, because you can't beat it by yourself if your performance is anything less than perfect, and the chances of two people managing to not die and screw it up for the other guy so that both have to start over again are so low that I can't even think of something funny and unlikely to compare it to.

I hate this level and everything in it.

The deal with this stage is that you have to drive a clinger-winger to outrun the glowing swirly orb of doom because Rare ran out of ideas for enemies. See the arrows on the road? If you aren't pressing the control pad in that direction and only that direction then you die because you're moving at a snail's pace and that orb is gonna run your ass over. You don't press a direction, you die. You press diagonally in anticipation of a direction change, you die. You don't change directions fast enough, you die. Even at top speed the orb is slightly faster than you, so any mistake means you die. The best part is at the end when you get off your vehicle and just beat the shit out of the orb. Why I couldn't have done that before the impossible death race is beyond me.

Finally, the last level. The final level is actually kind of cool, nonsense scrolling deaths notwithstanding. The entire stage revolves around a tower, and I can't really show the effect off in a screenshot but it's pretty neat.

I bet I'm the first person to actually get this far.

The final boss, the Dark Queen herself, is ridiculously easy and further evidence that the programmers just stopped caring because she has like three frames of animation.

A truly epic ending

Despite what I can only conclude as Rare's best efforts to prevent it, Battletoads became popular enough to spawn a Super NES sequel, an arcade game, and even a crossover game with Double Dragon. If you really want to play a Battletoads game, I recommend playing any of those games above this garbage. Yeah, the Battletoads series is known for its legendary difficulty but at least all the other games in the series are legitimately difficult instead of just being complete horseshit.

The First Post

Remember those video game classics? Games like Super Mario Bros., Sonic the Hedgehog, Final Fantasy? Those were a lot of fun, right?

We're not here to talk about those games.

For every game that you loved as a kid there were ten that were unplayable garbage. Uninspired knockoffs, movie tie-ins, horribly lame ports; the list goes on. And it's those games we're writing about here at Lame Games.