43. Bucky O' Hare (Konami, Famicom, 1992)

Bucky O' Hare is a late-Famicom platformer from Konami. The director of the game, Masato Maegawa, founded the legendary studio Treasure after working on this game.

And given that pedigree, the game is pretty disappointing. Don't get me wrong, it's not a disaster or anything, but it's also not the cream of the crop. Coming from a future-Treasure developer, one would expect the game to have excellent gamefeel, but what we have is a fairly standard platformer reminiscent of a Mega Man title.

The jumping is fine. You can charge your jump for extra height, which is a cool feature, but the charging takes a little too long to make it a viable way to avoid enemies, so it ends up being used mostly just to reach higher areas. Boss fights are generally not terribly interesting. The first boss is a strange purple animal hybrid looking thing who just throws giant rocks at you that will kill you unless you stand right in front of him.

The game does have a central mechanic that is fairly cool and novel for a Famicom title: once you beat any level you unlock a new character who you can switch to during gameplay by hitting the select button. This is a welcome improvement over Sunsoft's character-switching game Hebereke, which forced you to pause the game to switch characters. Ultimately, though, the different characters in Hebereke or Little Samson are more fun to control than in Bucky O' Hare, and those 2 games also have much better art direction and animation. Bucky O' Hare is also very difficult. I was playing on the Famicom Mini with saves sates, so it wasn't too bad, but I could see playing the game on original hardware to be pretty discouraging if you weren't already in love with it.

3/5, some great jumping and character switching mechanics marred by frustrating execution.