Playing every PS1 game - Bubsy 3D, Buggy, Bugriders, Bugs Bunny

Bubsy 3D - Furbitten Planet

There are a handful of games out there which have achieved the unenviable feat of being widely known specifically for being a terrible example of the medium. Along with the likes of E.T, Superman 64 and Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing, Bubsy 3D is one of those where the only fact most people know about the game is that is apparently very bad, and they couldn’t tell you anything else about it. I was the same until now, too.

Despite the lack of textures and low polygon count, it really chugs along.

And I can confirm that the deep lore is right - Bubsy 3D is rubbish. But at least now I can say I’ve developed the opinion after some first-hand experience with the game and a controller in my hand. It’s a game that seems like it was built by developers who had never done anything in 3D before (after looking this up, it appears true) and simply had no clue what they were doing.

The blue-ish coloured floor tile is water. Touch it (or accidentally auto-run forward into it) and you die.

The game concept makes little sense to begin with, and the audio was too quiet and compressed for me to properly understand any sort of plot exposition that was being front-loaded. Suffice it to say you proceed through a series of platforming (at least, I’m surmising this is what it is supposed to be) levels, picking up tokens and jumping on enemies and whatever.

It’s trying to be a kid’s game, but it’s too broken for any child to get through it.

The untextured scenery doesn’t look aggressively ugly so much as it seems excessively garish and bizarre. There are many worse looking games out there. The real war crime is - it’ll shock you - the control system, which fails in every department and renders the game near enough unplayable. You - very slowly - turn in place, then run forward and backward, pressing a face button to jump, at which point the camera goes into a short epileptic seizure. For reasons unknown, when you jump, the camera tries to move into more of a top-down view. When you land, it returns to the floor-level third-person view. Do it in quick succession and chaos reigns. The most inexplicable aspect of the controls is the fact that once you let go of the ‘forward’ button, Bubsy will keep running for a few extra paces to gradually come to a halt. Why would you do this? Sonic played like this too, but in a 2D environment with responsive controls, it worked. In Bubsy, it just means you fall off platforms and die, or run into water and die.

Can we at least respect the draw distance? …No, not really.

So yeah, it’s a hopeless game. But is it actually the worst game on the PlayStation, like everyone says? No, it isn’t really. Of the games I’ve played in this process so far, discounting the Midas Interactive slop that at least weren’t actually trying to be proper games (and were priced accordingly), Batman Beyond is probably still worse. I’ll also throw Bomberman in there as well, but in its defence it doesn’t fail at anything it tries to do in the way Bubsy does; it’s just a crap game. I don’t think there is a singular overriding reason why Bubsy 3D has the reputation it does, as opposed to something like Batman Beyond, or one of the other, highly numerous bilge games on the console whose punishment was to be totally forgotten, rather than still appear in online listicles and YouTube brain rot 30 years later. When put this way, I actually feel a bit sorry for Bubsy 3D.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 2/10

Buggy

A weird one from Gremlin Interactive. Buggy is a very unambitious remote-controlled car racing game. There’s really not much you can say about it beyond that.

I can’t be the only one who thought about the Windows 98 maze screensaver.

The feeling I got while playing was that this came across as the sort of thing that might have been given to a few junior developers to knock together as a sort of new starter training task. It has all the depth of a 2000s flash game. If AI coding agents grow in sophistication over the next few years, I feel like if you gave one a simple prompt along the lines of ‘build a simple racing game’, it would go away and come up with Buggy, leaving you to wonder whether the AI literally naming a piece of software ‘buggy’ is some sort of ghost-in-the-machine joke.

On some stages the game really struggles to maintain a frame rate.

In standard racing game form, you pick an RC car based on some simple stats and a colour scheme, and you are then dropped into a strange sort of hub level to drive around and find portals to races in which to compete. Buggy is very dreamlike in its execution. Who is controlling these RC cars? What are they competing for? Why do some tracks give the impression that you are driving genuinely tiny toy cars a la Micro Machines? The music sounds like the sort of stuff you get when you would press ‘demo mode’ on an old 90s musical keyboard, but is actually frustratingly catchy.

The theming is strange.

Buggy is absolutely nothing special, and the car handling is pretty ropey, but you can get the hang of it after a while and I found myself thinking that this is actually quite diverting, in the way that taking your phone out of your pocket and checking WhatsApp while stood waiting for the kettle to boil is a mind-occupying diversion. Until I can set up Buggy to jump straight to a race on my phone while brewing my tea, I don’t see myself ever playing it again.

Kept my attention for: An hour
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Bug Riders - The Race of Kings

You have to laugh sometimes and wonder just where in God’s name some of these game ideas come from.

Yep.

I thought Bug Riders would be something like Buggy - some derivative kart racing game of sorts. The subtitle The Race of Kings should have nudged me in the right direction - Bug Riders is actually, hilariously, a crude horse racing simulator, but with horses swapped for giant flying insects. In a medieval fantasy setting (with giant insect labourers), the local king has coughed his last, meaning that the nation’s next ruler can only be decided by whoever comes out as the winner of a sort of megabug Grand National. It plays this madness completely straight, too. It’s one of the wildest game concepts I’ve come across.

Choose your warrior based on some simple stats and how disturbing you find their insectoid mount.

Each playable competitor has his or her own ludicrous backstory and tuned-up inflated insect upon whose back [insert invertebrate joke] you ride in each race. The actual ‘racing’ (and I’m putting that word in inverted commas for reasons that will hopefully become clear) involves more or less hammering the X button to twack your insect with a riding crop in an effort to gee it up. You can sort of see the idea, but rather than in a more recent horseriding game like Kingdom Come Deliverance or Red Dead Redemption where the gee-up mechanic is used as a tool to raise and lower your mount’s speed and give the occasional reminder, in Bug Riders you are required to flay your hapless bug to within an inch of its week-long life to even get going, and you must continue to do so to maintain a pace. If you do so too much, however, you risk making your bug cry out and slow to a crawl, leaving you start the process again. It means you have to spend a lot of time watching the ‘speedometer’, which also works as a rather cruel monitor of the insect’s pain threshold.

It’s garish.

Having to watch the speedo so closely might make you think that you risk losing sight of where you are going, and fly off the track. Not really. You see, the ‘racing’ element of Bug Riders isn’t really racing at all - it has more in common with an on-rails shooter. If you don’t tap a direction, your bug will stick to the course anyway. Your primary concern (aside from thrashing your bug with a riding crop) is manoeuvring up, down and laterally to orient your bug through rings which add short bits of time onto your arcade-racer-esque countdown clock. It’s harder than it looks and if you miss too many in a row, you WILL run out of time and be eliminated from the race. The other thing you need to do is line up your bug so that you can mash the triangle button to fire energy balls and other odd-but-cliche kart racer weapons at your entomological competitors. So there’s a bit going on on screen.

The low bar on the right is telling you that you aren’t thrashing your bug hard enough.

The density of the world-building, while totally insane, is actually fairly engaging, but I don’t know whether any of it really pays off as I got fed up of being timed out in the final race. The gameplay itself is nothing special and there’s not too much that’s fun about the X-mashing. I want to say they got that bit wrong, but given your mount more or less races itself, if you take out the X-mashing, what’s actually left?

Kept my attention for: An hour or so
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 4/10

Bugs Bunny & Taz - Time Busters

Something I was aware of but never properly realised until I played Bugs Bunny & Taz was just how much of a plague 3D token-collecting platformers were on fifth generation consoles. Super Mario 64 started things off, but in truth what we ended up with on the PlayStation were endless clones of Spyro the Dragon with its free-form 3D collect-a-thon format. Some of these were half decent, none of them were amazing, but they were just everywhere - they were the ‘Ubisoft open world quest checklist simulator’ of the 90s. Developers attempted to continue the trend on the PS2, but it never really clicked (see why Crash Bandicoot died a death), as players started thirsting for ‘realism’ which couldn’t be satiated through the means of running into inexplicable floating-and-rotating icons.

You’re force-fed a tiring amount of exposition at the beginning of the game.

Bugs Bunny & Taz is just another one of these Spyro clones. The gimmick with this one is that you can seamlessly switch between the control of Bugs or Taz to traverse the level and fight enemies, or work together to solve puzzles. It wouldn’t be the last time we’d see this pretty dull co-op mechanic.

There are a few different set pieces which mix things up, but the level design makes it easy to lose track of where you are.

You control either one or the other at any one time, and the cartoon character you aren’t controlling will just stand around stoically while enemies just ignore him. It means that really the idea of co-operating and providing player choice is an illusion, as there are only minor variations in abilities between Bugs and Taz (with Bugs being required to do almost everything and Taz barely anything), and really it just comes down to which character skin you wish to play as.

Endless, endless collectable tokens.

These games are just boring. I feel like their popularity was feeding off the novelty of controlling a character in 3D in a slick enough setup - it’s mainly running about, trying to line up jumps, and constantly wrestling with the camera. I didn’t get far before getting fed up.

Kept my attention for: An hour or so
Did I finish it?: No
Overall: 3/10

Bugs Bunny - Lost in Time

If the name didn’t give it away, Lost in Time is part of the same series as Time Busters. Actually, if you ignore Taz, it’s more or less exactly the same game. They even re-used the time travel concept.

It’s actually impossible to be that close to Miami and that close to Paris at the same time.

This one came out a year before Time Busters, though it’s impossible to tell. You still collect carrots (and a load of other floating tokens), unlock levels, jump around, solve simple puzzles, and engage in janky combat with repeating enemies. I found it more fun to play than the one with Taz, mainly because the hot swapping thing was an obviously silly gimmick that didn’t improve gameplay.

[Giant swiss roll joke]

I didn’t get particularly far before getting bored. It’s more of the same stuff. The visual and audio design is nice, but it’s a very safe game. Going from Bubsy 3D to Bugs Bunny in sequence was interesting, as you can see the jump from an extremely rough concept where the developers couldn’t really work out how to pull it off in Bubsy, through the formula being perfected in the likes of Spyro, and then finally - in Bugs Bunny - derivative mediocrity and market saturation. There’s a world where Bubsy and Bugs swap release dates and legacies. After all, Bubsy 3D isn’t really that far away from Lost in Time as a game.

Kept my attention for: A few days
Did I finish it?: Yes
Overall: 5/10