Captain Bucky O’Hare was a 90’s Saturday morning cartoon character that I watched a few times growing up. He was certainly unique – a green rabit with monster sideburns. He and his team (made up of a multi-armed duck, Blinky the robot, some animal women, and a boy from earth wearing a gorilla costume) battled the evil toads. That is about as much as I remember anyways.
Enter this gem of a video game I played over the christmas break. It is a 2D platform game from Konami. You play as Captain Bucky O’Hare and are tasked with rescuing your friends from the evil toads. Similar to Mega Man, you can select which stage to go to but unlike Mega Man, you actually need to do the levels in order (for the most part) because you need the abilities from your friends to move through the levels!
Upon completion of each level, Bucky is able to switch to his other team members at a moments notice to take advantage of their abilities. Blinky and shoot things that destroy ice and hover, animal girl can shoot lasers from her head, and Bucky can do super habit-like jumps.
Each stage is broken up into numerous sections (see various sections in the first level above) and boy is it ever hard! You do have a fairly generous life bar but there are so many ways to instantly die it makes it almost an afterthought. Nevertheless, even though this game is hard, you respawn at the start of each section of the level (even after a game over) which makes it very fair. I actually did not really get frustrated with this game because each time I died it was my fault and I got to try again right away without being sent back to the start of the level.
Gameplay is tight and satisfying. Level design is also excellent – each act of a level tends to have a theme which makes it interesting. For instance, in one level you need to ride a mine cart through a star base, while other ones have you moving through ice worlds. See below for an example of the different acts of the Green planet level. Graphically this game looks excellent with awesome colours and environment to explore. In terms of the sound and music – its excellent – have a listen in the gameplay video at the bottom of the review!
Overall this game is awesome with good graphics and nice sound. It’s really hard but with frequent respawn areas in stages, it makes it really satisfying when you actually make it through a tough spot. Overall I give the game a 9/10. Must play for NES platform gamers.
FINAL SCORE: 9/10
RetroGame Man 
This game is absolutely amazing. I discovered it’s greatness only in this year. I have never played it on a real console and have beat it recently in winter this year.
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