Bubsy 3D in retrospective
Bubsy 3D stands no chances against Crash Bandicoot or Spyro released for PSX.
When Bubsy 3D was presented on E3 1996 in Los Angeles it was shown to the audience together with the first Crash Bandicoot game.
Crash got praises. Bubsy 3D instead wasn’t that well received. You can imagine the reaction of Bubsy’s game developers.
Crash was a technological masterpiece and a pivotal game for the whole platformer genre.
No one expected a game like Crash to appear because to make such a game you needed extremely talented people who are able to go beyond standard development tools provided by Sony for PSX.
Instead of following the rules they set their own for PSX hardware by directly accessing it and increasing game performance as the result. They made their own layout of data on CDs to make the fast streaming of big level chunks possible.
But if take Bubsy 3D alone, was it really such a bad game?
Would be hard to say no. But if look deeper it would be unfair to say yes.
Bubsy 3D is not on the same low level as Superman 64. It has distinct, sometimes even polished gameplay. It has a learning curve. Better skill is applicable to game mechanics. It has humor. It has consistent visual design.
If you try to play it you’ll notice that developers tried to make a fun game. Maybe with just slightly (or sometimes not slightly) annoying parts of it.
From the game design standpoint Bubsy 3D is trying to do things right but fails to make them good.
Bubsy’s abilities and gameplay
As many games of its era Bubsy 3D is using tank controls. And I would say overall controls don’t feel this bad until you die from inertia. Yes, when you start running and then release the forward button Bubsy will move forward for noticeable amount of distance. And even longer if you direct the character to the sides.
You can still block inertia by jumping. In Bubsy 3D in any weird or challenging situation jumping is usually the best option you can perform.
During a jump the camera changes an angle and a level becomes much more readable. Even more – in the difficult situations jumping becomes much more precise than running. When you jump, directional pad makes Bubsy to move in the selected direction instead of turning and that’s convenient.
Bubsy has an iconic ability to glide over the air. But it uses left and right buttons to turn Bubsy instead of moving the character in selected direction. You need to memorize this difference between gliding and jumping to use them comfortably.
Even more, when you jump using the glide button Bubsy will use jumping directions while moving up and then switch to turning.
As a weapon aside of jumping Bubsy is able to shoot atoms. Sometimes you even collect bonuses that give you atom ammo so you can spawn and throw limited amount of atoms. We’re on the other planet anyway, why not to shoot atoms?
Meanwhile it’s difficult to shoot them precisely but enemies have large hitboxes exclusively for this attack. Developers tried to make player’s life slightly easier. Sadly the radius of atoms’ collection feels too narrow. It’s a pain to collect all of the atoms, especially by running around. And jumping is easier than running even to collect collectibles.
Mario in comparison has variable collection radius depending on situation specifically to make it less frustrating. And Mario 64 was presented at the same E3 as Bubsy 3D.
Bubsy also has 3 underwater levels. And I must tell you: they are pure suffering. Instead of gliding underwater Bubsy uses the forward dash that kills enemies. It uses oxygen and that in theory should prevent you from abusing it.
Developers gave you a striking dash. But together with this they gave you much more capable and fast enemies. The right timing to strike an enemy here is on another difficulty level. Enemies approach you extremely fast and you left with a very narrow time window to react.
Your goal in the game is not just to complete levels, but also to collect the rocket parts to build a rocket and leave the planet and reach Earth (Bobcats are from Earth).
Getting rocket parts often requires good attention from you towards walls. Because they might give you a visual signs of being destructible. And you will need to shoot an atom into such a wall to clear the path. That’s the main way the rocket parts are being hidden.
There are 18 levels in total. 3 of them are boss fights. Other 15 levels contain 2 rocket parts each. 30 rocket parts in general.
Because of it there are two endings – one if you collect all the rocket parts and a slightly different one if you don’t.
Graphics
Instead of usual boxy looking limbs, developers of Bubsy 3D decided to go with polygonal shape morphing. They tried to be technologically advanced, but there is a caveat that makes it look ugly.
Morphing means that you have frames in a 3d model. Each frame has information of a different shape, but the same amount of polygons.
This way a character looks solid instead of being cutout of different, separate blocks like in many games of its era. Direct example of such technique would be first Quake. Quake 2 uses the same approach but adds smooth interpolation between frames.
Crash uses this approach as well but it has interpolation and animations don’t feel like running at low framerate. Unlike Bubsy. Other PSX examples would be Silent Hill and Legacy Of Kain: Soul Reaver.
The only reason why Bubsy has such a low framerate of animations I can think of is that developers didn’t come up with a way to make interpolation run fast enough. Sadly.
Levels are made in the simplest way possible – just a simple terrain with heights, some boxes and some more complex shapes for platforming sections. That’s it.
Most likely it has been done this way to avoid streaming of the levels. Bubsy 3D just loads the whole level instead of a part of it and it makes game programming of vast worlds much simpler.
Soul Reaver or Crash Bandicoot on the other side rely on streaming and load parts of the level on the go. Their levels look more linear because of it so it is a limitation of this approach on PSX hardware.
Conclusion
Unlike modern games Bubsy literally had no 3d platforming inspirations – the game was presented at the same E3 as the games that became 3D platforming inspirations of the future.
I completed Bubsy 3D when I was a teen without collecting all the rocket parts. Can’t say I liked it, can’t name the reason why I played it so much.
And after I played the game now I can say I didn’t have a lot of fun. But I didn’t hate it.
Platforming and exploration are enjoyable at first but levels look more or less the same. There are a lot of enemies and all of the ways to deal with them are slow. And for some reason blowers that lift you while gliding also apply damage if you touch them.
I completed several first levels and a boss fight and collected all the rocket parts aside of the first underwater level.
I don’t want to continue to play it but I can’t say that experience was frustrating. Let’s say it was somewhat frustrating but partially enjoyable.
I have games that I would prefer much less than Bubsy 3D like Mario games. I don’t enjoy them completely. And I know games that I would prefer much more than Bubsy 3D like Spyro or Bubsy 4D, or even Yooka-Laylee (but this one is questionable). Read my review of Bubsy 4D over here.
So Bubsy 3D is somewhere in the middle of the list.
It feels like this game has everything to be a game, but with rough edges in gameplay loop that break the experience. There is also nothing in it to hit the sweet spot and make me say “This is really cool and fun”.