Every time I look at this title I feel compelled to correct it, but no, this is THE Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle. The sequel is too! Not the third or fourth though, those are just Bugs Bunny: Crazy Castle 3 and…Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle 4? In? Featuring? These naming conventions are crazier than the castle itself!
This is neither the time nor place nor author to regale you with the entire history of Crazy Castle and its various brand affiliations. Someone else on the internet can do that for you. I’m more interested in focusing on the game itself. Believe it or not I’ve never actually sat down and played any of these for more than a fleeting moment on a system I did not own. You absolutely knew someone who had it, probably played it on a bus ride or something, but the rate of exposure was far higher than the rate of actual direct play. Extremely cousin-core cartridge.
This game, hell this entire series, has always been a bit of an enigma to me. Omnipresent and immediately recognizable, yet difficult to discern from one entry to another. Never loathed, rarely loved. I knew just how many of these were ahead of me so I figured I should get through one relatively early on in this project’s life, y’know? Figure out where I stand in the Crazy Castle Discourse. Turns out? Pretty alright! If you were purchasing a Game Boy in the year of our lord 1989, I’d even go so far as to say that this’d be one of the better choices!
The game design here is leaner than rabbit meat, to the point where our titular Bunny can’t even jump. Super weird! Bugs is forced to hoof it through 80 levels of slightly increasing difficulty, Scooby-Doo-ing his way through connected doors and pipes to collect all the carrots in the stage. Several other marketable mascots try to prevent him from eating his veggies. What does all of this have to do with the rescue of Honey Bunny, the stated motivation in the manual? Fuck if I know! She’s not even shown in the game at any point. I gotta imagine she was abducted for sinister Lolafication purposes and Bugs was just too slow to save her. Or maybe…maybe he didn’t want to? Gasp!
I said I wanted to focus on the game and yet here I am writing Lola Bunny fanfiction, exactly what Al Gore built the internet built the internet to do. It’s fun! It plays well! Movement isn’t exactly snappy but it is responsive, and little touches like continuing to run straight when you finish ascending or descending stairs shows a level of attention to detail in the execution that many games of this era lacked. I didn’t even mind the small set of jaunty little tunes that repeat throughout the thing! The levels are as varied as you could reasonably expect given that there are so many of the fuckers with so few mechanics, and I was surprised at how rarely I felt screwed by the fact that you can only see what lies ahead by scrolling the screen.
You know who deserves an entire paragraph? Sylvester. There are a handful of enemies and they all behave a bit differently in a Pac-Man ghost kinda way, but none of them compare to the Blinky-esque purrsuit this tuxedo’d toolbag puts you through. Once he has your scent he’s going to follow you at a reasonable pace forever. Much like a mall cop who spotted a teenager pillaging an unattended free sample tray, avoiding him is mostly a matter of having marginally better cardio and not getting distracted by the siren smell of Auntie Anne’s.
It’s somewhat telling that an enemy who can actually follow you represents the zenith of Crazy Castle 1’s difficulty. There’s a bit of reputation for challenge with this one, but I have to imagine those are childhood memories talking because it’s kind of a breeze. I never lost enough lives to require a password and only found myself using them to take breaks, because 80 floors is just too crazy for one sitdown, and the game saw fit to top my lives off when I did! Anybody could make it through this if their attention span holds. Admittedly this thing is repetitive and I wouldn’t fault anyone for dropping it, but I’m weak for arcady progression and there’s just enough tension in these carrot heists to make pulling them off satisfying.
Anyway, yeah! That game your weird classmate owned turned out to be pretty good, no matter how unmemorable it may be! My hottest take from it is that I’d rather play this than Lode Runner. In conclusion I just want to inform you that upon clearing level 80 Bugs just waddles onto a mostly blank screen from nowhere before exclaiming, and I am presenting it verbatim down to the formatting:
CONGRATURATIONS !!
YOU ARE
GOOD PLAYER !!
And you know what, Kemco? I am. I am good player. Thank you for noticing. I think this game has made me dumber.
Wack Game Boy Zone 