Bucky O’Hare (Arcade Review)

Bucky O’Hare was slightly before my time, though I did have a few VHS tapes of it as a child. It wasn’t my favorite, and besides the slappin’ theme song, I honestly don’t remember anything about it. It must have had a following, since when I played the NES game a few years ago, people said “oh yea, Bucky O’Hare! I remember that!” Konami had rotten luck betting on other cartoons that could have been as successful as Ninja Turtles or Simpsons. I already looked at Moo Mesa, but Bucky O’Hare was even less successful. It ultimately only had one season of thirteen episodes. Ouch. I have no idea how successful Moo Mesa or Bucky O’Hare were as arcade games. I just know that neither seems likely to ever see the light of day again. Or, maybe not. I mean, how much can it cost to license these failed properties. Because that’s what they are, right? Cynical, soulless attempts to ride another scorching-hot property’s coattails.

It LOOKS like it’s going to be fun. Oh, it’s not. It’s really, really not.

Bucky O’Hare: the NES game is a poor man’s Mega Man and very overrated itself. Bucky O’Hare the coin-op keeps the pew-pewing, but instead, it’s structured like a brawler (and probably used the same engine as Simpsons or Turtles in Time) except fisticuffs are replaced by shooting. It’s a run and gun game, but not like popular run & gunners such as Contra. No, the levels and pacing are still engineered exactly like TMNT or even Capcom’s brawlers. Waves of cannon-fodder enemies walk in and, instead of drilling them with your fists, you shoot them with your laser guns. And it’s boring. So incredibly mind-numbingly boring that I ain’t surprised they didn’t bother bringing this home.

Bucky isn’t very generous with health or hit points, but, the quick deaths allow you to bank the powerful bombs faster. When you lose a life, you get two more bombs every time, regardless of whether you used the bombs previously.

The issue is there’s no OOMPH at all to the combat. Neither the death animations or the sound design are built around making the laser escapades a fun and satisfying experience. At least in a brawler, you have the satisfaction of imagining yourself shattering the bones of the poor SOB you’re blasting the face of with an uppercut. You don’t have anything resembling that here. In fact, when you DO physically swing your arms at someone (if they’re in close range) it still underwhelms. All that’s left is to shooting with the four characters (and if there’s a difference between the four, I really couldn’t tell) and the guns just feel really weak and pathetic, even when you upgrade them.

Bosses are ultra-generic. If these come from the TV show, well, suddenly it makes a lot of sense why this never found an audience. On the plus side, they’re significantly less a chore to fight than I figured they would be.

Oddly enough, baddies aren’t as spongy as you would think. The one thing I can give Bucky credit for is the game skips along at a surprisingly blistering speed. Enemies might take as little as one shot to finish, and bosses don’t just suck up bullets either. I wasn’t expecting that. There’s also a much wider variety of moves than I figured. Like a brawler, you can jump and do jump kicks.. sometimes. I couldn’t consistently pull this off. But, I could do the “special attack” every single time with minimal issue. It’s done just like TMNT and other brawlers where you hit the jump and attack buttons at the same time. There’s no penalty for it and you can spam it as much as you want. Maybe that wasn’t so wise, as I kept doing this over and over. Bucky does very little to encourage you to play with finesse.

Don’t let the big, flashy set-pieces fool you: this is a complete chore to get through.

I was kind of peeved by Bucky O’Hare. It’s competent but so bland and vanilla that it feels like a game nobody wanted to make. And, no, I didn’t play it co-op. Co-op is NOT a cure-all for uninspired gameplay. Saying that co-op improves an experience like Bucky O’Hare is like saying turning a couch into to downhill street racer and then crashing it in spectacular fashion is better if you do it with friends or family. Of course it, because everything is better with friends. Yet, I bet if you tried telling these chucklef*cks they had a better time because at least they mangled their bodies with their friends, they might object to your definition of a “better time.”

Then, my annoyance with Bucky O’Hare, a complete nothing of a game, really went into overdrive. After five levels of pure nothingness, something happened. You hop into a spaceship and the game begins to scroll quickly, and.. hey wait, is Bucky O’Hare suddenly a space shmup oriented like a brawler? That’s new and different. And even worse.. holy crap.. IT WAS FUN! Like, very fun! That’s so frustrating because to get to the one section that’s worth playing, you have to slog through five miserable stages. Yet, that one level is one of the better times I’ve had in gaming in 2023. And it made me kind of angry.

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That should have been the whole game! Why not? At least it would have been original. Sadly, that’s the one and only level you can say that about. Thankfully, that level does last a lot longer than the car sequence from that automobile and prehistoric giant chicken game I reviewed earlier this year. But, once it’s over, it’s back to the same old walking and shooting with one pitiful upgrade to your gun. Bucky O’Hare is really a cartoony version of the 1990 Konami Aliens arcade game that was trying to appeal to the TMNT fanbase. It failed. Unlike Simpsons or Ninja Turtles, Bucky O’Hare didn’t have the slobbering fanbase that was starving for content. Yet, this game has fans. Some people just really like their games to be bland and lazy, I suppose. Imagine walking into an arcade in 1992 and the best time you have is playing Bucky O’Hare. How boring a person are you? I can’t believe such a thing happened. Especially since I figure such a person would be the type who got their lunch money taken.

Bucky O’Hare is not Chick Approved.

Bucky O’Hare was developed by Konami