Bucky O’Hare for NES is a Saturday morning treasure

destructoid.com:

I was first introduced to Bucky O’Hare through the NES game. This was back in 2010, long after the cartoon was off the air. It’s an interesting game, which I’ll get to in a bit. However, I quickly grabbed the cartoon to watch and maybe gave up after two episodes. I know that two episodes is a pretty brief amount of time to try and form an opinion on a show, but I couldn’t stand it. It was a horrible maelstrom of bad attempts at wordplay and nauseating self-righteousness.

The ship that the eponymous Bucky pilots is called the Righteous Indignation, which really tells you all you need to know about the show’s tonality.

The cartoon was based on a comic from the late ‘70s, but it’s one of those shows that were pretty obvious in their intention to sell toys. However, it did wind up with a couple of video games by Konami, one for the arcade and the other for the NES. Fortunately, both are a lot more tolerable to me than the cartoon. So let’s look at the NES version.

The Super Famicom was released in 1990 in Japan, followed by the 1991 SNES release in North America. Publishers were quickly abandoning the NES and Famicom in favor of the new platform, but there was still a number of quality games that were released before the last official NES title dropped in 1994.

During the waning years of the NES, Konami, in particular, did a number of mostly licensed titles that were of unusual quality. These were games like Monster in My Pocket, Zen: Intergalactic Ninja, and Bucky O’Hare. None of these were particularly great licenses. None of them really survived the ‘90s. But if you were expecting a crap game to go alongside them, you’re in for a surprise.

I’m not saying that any of these games are great. It’s just they’re a lot better