Bubsy 3D

* NA Cover
* PAL Cover

> "***Stunning**[ly agonizing]**... Original**[ly a torture method]**... Bubsy 3D climbs back to the top** [of the horrible games chart]**... Check it out**[at your own risk]**!***"
>
>
> — EGM, probably

***Bubsy 3D***, also known as ***Bubsy 3D: Furbitten Planet*** or ***Bubsy is 3D in Furbitten Planet***, is a 1996 platform video game released for the PlayStation. It's the sequel to *Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales* for the SNES, the fourth *Bubsy* game in the series, and was the last one for over 20 years until *Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back* was released on October 31, 2017.

## Plot

Bubsy's old enemies from the first game, the Woolies, abduct him and took him to their home planet Rayon. It's up to him to collect atoms, rocket parts, and to defeat the conjoined Woolie Queens, Poly and Ester, in order to escape. If Bubsy doesn't find all the rocket parts it malfunctions, leaving him stranded on Rayon. If he does find all the rocket parts, the rocket flies so fast it sends him to the prehistoric era.

## Why Everything Went Wrong

1. Very poor first impression. The intro in the game is nothing more than showing the plot in the form of a slide show displayed on the TV and presented by a Wooly named Poly and Ester. The intro can be so long that the player literally falls asleep with it.
2. The plot is confusing, nonsensical, and stupid. The "good" ending is arguably worse than the "bad" ending and regardless of which one you get Bubsy is still stranded away from Earth, meaning the Woolies are still free to invade it. To cut it short, 100% completion of the game is worthless.
3. Absolutely terrible graphics and presentation. While colorful, the graphics are akin to an Atari Jaguar game or even worse, SNES or Genesis 3D game. The platforms are just texture-less polygons and the floor is mostly in a checkerboard pattern or just a color as well as water and acid have no textures at all, and if they do, they literally look like something out of an NES game and the hills look like colored triangles; it really looks like the game was made in Windows 95. Even The Crow: City of Angels, which was released on the same platform and also on the weaker Sega Saturn had much better graphics than this game.
	* Speaking of the color palette, it is very bland, nauseating, and dull to look at.
4. Dreadful level design, to the point where sometimes game exploitation is required to beat the levels. The later levels can get confusing as to where you're supposed to go even with the arrows, which are plastered everywhere and really help show how bad and confusing some of the levels are.
5. Each level has two hidden collectible rockets but it's never explained how you're supposed to get them.
6. Speaking of the presentation, the in-game animations of enemies, obstacles, etc. are very sluggish with the feel of them moving at 8 frames or less per second. The characters look poorly designed (besides Bubsy since he's the best-looking model in the game).
	* Speaking of which, Bubsy's rendered in-game 3D model is ugly. While his cover art render of his appearance looks like a joke, his in-game design is a sight to behold.
7. This game tries way too hard to be funny, with all of the level names being cat puns of other pieces of media (and some puns with the levels themselves have nothing to do with the puns in the slightest) & tons of unnecessary fourth-wall breaking from the titular Bubsy.
8. Horrible voice acting, especially from the Woolies, whose voices are distorted, making them barely understandable. Bubsy's voice alone is no better (see WEWW#10).
9. Dreadful sound design; the second and third-level music consists of mostly annoying sound bites added to the first-level music, marginally high-pitched and having weirdly placed accordions in the third level. This is better shown when the music that sounds pretty off-putting or poorly made as well. The noises the enemies make aren't any better.
10. Speaking of unbearable voices, Bubsy's utterly unfunny, witless, and hyperactive one-liners are very annoying, and the most insufferable, downright aggravating lines of dialogue ever put to sound.
	* Lani Minella is a very talented voice actress, best known for voicing many characters such as Rouge the Bat from Sonic Adventure 2 and Luke Triton from Professor Layton, but the lines she was told to say along with having her talent being completely wasted as she was giving it her all, and as a result, it made it all so hard to listen to Bubsy's harsh & squeaky tone of voice when he says literally anything.
11. Very poor navigation: in order to beat the first boss of the game, you have to glide over the residue of the yellow energy balls the boss fires at you to fly higher so you can damage the boss, but you wouldn't know that without looking it up.
12. The controls are extremely terrible, unresponsive and even worse than in Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales or Street Fighter: The Movie: If Bubsy is running at full speed it will take him more than 2 seconds after releasing the D-pad for him to stop. You also have to turn yourself towards the direction you want to move to instead of holding the D-pad or joystick much like a tank, which is very uncomfortable, awkward, frustrating, clunky, and stiff for a 3D platformer. It also makes something as simple as getting the basic collectible item difficult. The jump controls are even worse since you might often move on the side making you miss jumps or enemy stomps, which can lead to cheap hits/deaths.
13. The gliding is uncontrollable as well, and if you look carefully, you will notice that you actually fall faster than when you're not using the gliding.
14. False advertising: The North American cover of the game states that it received a positive review from EGM. EGM actually gave it a negative review that was quote-mined for the cover, meaning that the developer of the game was using fake reviews to make players think that it has received another positive review.
15. The camera is uncontrollable and very clunky. Every time you jump, the camera always changes to an overhead view which makes platforming harder than it seems to be. On top of that, whenever you get hit, the camera spins round in front of the character, causing a fair amount of disorientation.
16. Some platforms are terribly distanced from each other, which is especially noticeable when there is water or acid under them, which means that after an unsuccessful attempt to jump to the second platform, the protagonist may die and the gameplay is frustrating.
17. The Woolies don't move, but they only shoot small projectiles which are difficult to dodge because of the horrible controls. The game continues to reuse them over and over without any form of variation aside from recoloring. Even though they don't move it's still hard to jump on them due to the controls and horrible hit detection. Some of them you can't even kill as well and some of them are invisible.
18. The enemies will even spawn from nowhere, causing more cheap shots on the player quite easily.
19. The European version's back of the case consists only of screenshots without any description, which is what every game case is supposed to have to explain the gameplay rapidly. To add insult to injury, the American version's back of the box actually has text along with screenshots, and this version was released months before the European version.
20. Attempting to jump on the enemy is quite a challenge, because you have to jump on the enemy's highest pixel, otherwise you will receive damage from him. What's worse is that attempting to jump over the projectile will result in Bubsy getting injured, which makes the game unplayable.
21. Since Bubsy is a cat, he has Super Drowning Skills, but because of the flat, texture-less polygon graphics, it's hard to tell what's supposed to be water. Even worse, every time you touch water, you are automatically forced to see about 20 seconds of Bubsy drowning.
22. If Bubsy runs off a ledge, he does not enter a free-fall so he can land on a lower platform, instead, he instantly dies (whether if you don't die or see a death animation). This happens a lot in level 2.
23. Bad soundtrack that gets annoying quick since all of it sounds repetitive and it doesn't actually fit the game itself since it sounds more like clown music or the squeaking of squirrels than anything else.
24. Even though collision detection might exist in this game, enemy projectiles can still go through platforms that don't make sense.
25. The engine used for the game caused some really bad depth perception, as enemies tend to be further away than they seem, and can mess up your jumps as a result.
26. Very few bosses, as there are only four bosses in the entire game, two of which are in the same level. The boss fights themselves are unfairly difficult due to the controls and the almost non-existent possibility of jumping on the opponent, making the game almost impossible to beat.
27. Boring and often bizarre animations that appear after death or when leaving the game for an extended period of time, especially when the protagonist dies; you always get to see clips of Bubsy dying, which feels pretty weird for a level completion screen.
28. Speaking of those cutscenes, the CGI animation looks like FMVs from any bowling alley.
29. The title screen looks very weird due to the fact that Bubsy's face is uncanny looking, depicting a big smile with visible teeth and creepy-looking eyes that would remind some people of the Joker from Batman. Also, the start game button is put in two places.
30. Some settings in the options do not work; for example, music, even if it is muted, will still play.

## The Only Redeeming Quality

1. You have the option to shut Bubsy up in the options menu by disabling Bubsy's dialog, and because of this option, it makes him less annoying and insufferable.

## Reception

Template:AVGNRatings
At release, critics gave mixed reviews for Bubsy 3D, as at the time very few 3D platforming games were published, with only two other games, Crash Bandicoot and Super Mario 64 being released in 1996.

Despite having many negative reviews, Bubsy 3D actually had a few good reviews with its release. Absolute PlayStation gave it a score of a 67%. DieHard, GameFan, and Next Generation, however, reviewed the game quite favorably as well. Contrary to popular belief, PSExtreme is a real magazine, and it did actually give the game a 93%, along with their "Gold X Award" as an approval to play the game (and is even listed on the EXcavate rating list from PSExtreme). However, due to the unpopularity of the magazine in general, a mistaken rumor suggested that the magazine and the award were fake, and Accolade simply used them as a way to promote the game.

However, retrospectively, Bubsy 3D received overwhelmingly negative by critics and fans alike, and it is now considered as one of the worst games of all time and even often compared to games like Superman 64, Action 52, Ride to Hell: Retribution, E.T. for the Atari 2600, Drake of the 99 Dragons or Shaq Fu. In fact, it has been said that even most Bubsy fans hate this game and considers as the worst Bubsy game ever, breaking through in the ranking Bubsy in Fractured Furry Tales.

Many critics called this a Mario rip-off as Super Mario 64 was released earlier in the same year, and say this game is worse than the movie Plan 9 from Outer Space and Battlefield Earth. Bubsy 3D's reception was so negative that Accolade went out of business shortly after its release in 2000.

The lead developer had said that the game was supposed to be an early 3D game, but no one accepted that excuse because other far superior 3D games came out before Bubsy 3D. Because of that, he tried to blame this game's failure on Super Mario 64.

When SomeCallMeJohnny and Nitro Rad reviewed the game, they both stated that it would've been passable had it come out before Super Mario changed the industry back in 1985.

Despite what was said on the cover, EGM stated they never said anything positive about the game and actually gave it a 3.25 out of 10. The quote was taken completely out of context from a preview article and twisted to make it sound positive. Said quote didn't even come from the review itself.

In his second wish list episode, The AVGN said the game felt unfinished and by that, he meant "it was barely started at all."

Surprisingly, the game found a rather interesting selling point which several YouTube game reviewers mentioned: It's so bad that it needs to be played to be believed. Caddicarus commented that it's a good thing that the game exists, as it serves as a good "How not to make a video game" example.

YouTube game reviewer The Retro Replay has "Bubsy 3D" as the lowest possible score in his rating system, and is his most hated video game. Once he stated, "The only thing worse than getting the Bubsy 3D rating, is actually being Bubsy 3D".

DX has declared it the worst video game of all time.

It is one of the lowest rated games by BartekGM In his series Najgorsze Gry Wszechczasów (Eng: The Worst Games of All Time), he gave a 0/10 score for both graphics, audio and gameplay, and as a result the game got absolutely PIERDOLONE 0/10.

## Trivia

* Coincidentally, the North American version was released on the Halloween of 1996, or October 31, 1996, exactly twenty-one years before the next Bubsy game.
* On the back of the box, they advertise having life pickups, which is a standard feature in most games.
* The game was originally going to be released for the Sega 32X, but due to the unsuccessful European release of the 32X, Accolade held back the rights, until the game would be released on a more stable platform.
* A Sega Saturn version of the game named Bubsy III, was planned but was canceled due to the game's poor reception. It was going to be based on the original 32X version.
* On the back of the UK version of this game's cover, there are no advertisements, just pictures, implying they even knew how bad it was.
* It spawned the death scene meme where Bubsy explodes, showing how memorable Bubsy 3D's death animations were.
* There was a scrapped Japanese release in the game, as in the files, there is an unused copyright screen for a Japanese release of the game.
* There is also an unused death animation with Bubsy falling through the ground and waving a white flag with an ! mark on the flag. At some point during development, fall damage might have been planned at some point.
* Bubsy 3D is remembered as one of three 3D platform games released in 1996 that established the template for the genre, along with Super Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot.
* In 2013, an indie developer named Arcane Kids released a sarcastic tribute to the game titled Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective. In the game, the player guides an effigy of Bubsy through a nightmarish simulation of the James Turrell exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
* A remaster of the game was released by Arcane Kids in 2017, featuring an additional epilogue to the story in which Bubsy reflects on the events of his experience.
* This game was the last game in the series for nearly 21 years until September 2017 when a new team released Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back for the PlayStation 4 and PC.
* Christopher Reese, the lead programmer of the game, actually admitted that the game was a disaster (especially after he saw Super Mario 64) and that he would have preferred to start over from scratch if Accolade had let him.
* The reason why the game looks bland was that they tried to do HD textures while other games on the PS1 had blocky textures only to find out that HD textures ate up a lot of memory which the PS1 didn't have.

## References

* Published under the Telstar Fun and Games label.

1. ↑ Published under the Telstar Fun and Games label.