71. Bucky O'Hare

(Nes, Konami, 1992)
"From another, dimension. Another time and space, a parallel universe is falling on its face. When out of, the chaos, who else could it be? but the animal adventurers from S.P.A.C.E. BUCKY! CAPTAIN BUCKY O'HARE! He goes where no ordinary rabbit would dare"
and so forth...

Bucky O'Hare And The Toad Wars was a short lived animated series in the early 90s, based on a series of comics. Bucky and his crew fought intergalactic battles against an empire of evil toads, led by a super computer called KOMPLEX. After a 13 episode run, the show disappeared.
Even though only around for a short time, the merchandise machine acted fast, with the action figures, bedsheets etc. hitting the stores almost simultaneously with the show's debut. After the Ninja Turtle's super success, Cartoon merchandise was the cash cow to milk during this period.

Two Bucky games were produced, an arcade brawler, similar in style to TMNT or The Simpsons and this platform romp for the Nes. Almost unashamedly, the game borrows heavily from Capcom's Megaman series in control, level design and action. The player takes ahem.."The funky fresh rabbit" through various planets to rescue his crew members from danger. Once rescued, the player can switch characters as and when they desire, utilizing each characters various weapons and abilities to overcome obstacles. Once re-assembled, the team head into the Toad mothership for the final confrontation.

Bucky O'Hare is a quality NES game. As a blatant Megaman clone, it suffers the peaks and pitfalls of that series, It has fast action and a nice variety of weapons and levels. However, it also suffers from Megaman's graphical glitches, slowdown and, of course, its insane level of difficulty, usually in the shape of pixel perfect jumps, ungenerous restart points and powerful bosses.

Bucky O'Hare falls into that NES classic platform canon, alongside games like Ducktales and Chip'n'Dale, but it most definitely plays more like Megaman than anything else. That's no drama, Megaman is a fine series. So if you're the masochistic type who likes their cutesy platformers painfully frustrating, hop on board the Righteous Indignation and blast your way through the anthropomorphic Aniverse.
Who knows where it might take you?