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Name: Boogerman
Developer: Super Game
Release Date: 1997?
Platform: Famicom/NES
...Early 90s teen culture was stupid.
I know that makes me sound like an old curmudgeon, and that I should be sitting out on my porch, screaming at kids to get off my lawn, but I mean it in a slightly different way than you're probably thinking. Yes, teen culture has ALWAYS been stupid. From age 13 to about 20/21, our minds suddenly open up to the fact that there's a whole world out there and we're no longer restricted to our house, our yard, or even our parents' rules! It's a time to get out and EXPLORE, try everything that you didn't even know existed, or that straight-up scared you off when you first saw it at the innocent age of 10! Who cares if it's dangerous or bad for you? Your brain's not in charge. Your hormones are, including those blasts of pure adrenaline! Having to work for a living is a long way off, so you can put off completing that test and go party! Get out there and drive that car, or listen to that rock/electronica music at full blast, or bungee jump from that bridge, or graffiti that wall, or download all this porn that you're suddenly craving after wondering why people even want to make babies after you were given "the talk" a few years ago. Laws don't matter. Warnings don't matter. All that matters is what YOU do, and what other people in your clique are doing. If it annoys your parents, do more of it! You'll deal with the consequences later! Now's a time for endless, mindless fun and avoiding everything the older generation tells you you need to do! This has been the norm for the teenage years since 1958(BCE), and what happens to nearly everybody around the world at some point. ...Until they reach adulthood, their minds finish developing, and they suddenly realize "...WHAT DID I JUST DO?! I'd better work mindlessly at my job and start a family so that I can forget I was ever that stupid!" ...If they even manage to make it to that point...
So yeah, teenagers have ALWAYS acted stupidly, and we eventually pay for it as adults(fitting punishment for all the torture we put adults through.) ...However, in the early 90s, teenage culture seemed to be built around the very CONCEPT of stupidity!
From roughly 1991 to 1997, the world suddenly got a lot LOUDER, in all meanings of the word! Colors became wild and flashy, purposely clashing with each other to create the most disgusting, yet attention-grabbing combinations possible! Fashion took a severe step back, as it was suddenly "the norm" to wear the baggiest, most ill-fitting clothes you could find, all worn in the wrong way and for the wrong time of day and year and with huge rips and stains a MUST! Grungy was the new "hot", and the stupider you looked, the more the opposite sex* would fawn over you!
*Remember, this was before people were OK with gay.
The music we listened to became a lot uglier, while still remaining as loud as the hard rock and metal from the 80s. This was the age of Alternative, Grunge, and Gangsta, where groups like The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Primus, The Butthole Surfers, Macy's Playground, The Notorious B.I.G., Dr. Dre, Ice-T, Tupac Shakur, Beck, Green Day, and, of course, Nirvana belted out song after song lacking any recognizable rhythm or uplifting traits. This was the age of nihilism, where nothing mattered anymore and everything seemed to be going fine, so who cared what they sang about? There was nothing going on in our heads, so why should the music try to put something in there?
Movies started getting bigger and grittier, abandoning setting and plot to give us raw thrill! Cliffhanger, Demolition Man, Goldeneye, Bad Boys, Starship Troopers, Desperado, Air Force One, Independence Day, Point Break, Speed, The Rock, all movies that kept us on the edge of our seats with mindless violence, screaming action heroes, and scantily clad men and women walking away from huge explosions. Meanwhile, Pauly Shore, Steven Baldwin, and "Ernest P Worrell" were demonstrating how you didn't need brains or good looks to be in movies. You just had to withstand a heavy brick to the head(BEFORE appearing in a movie.)
Television made a turn for the surreal, abandoning shapes and carefully scripted stories for complete sketchy madness. Animaniacs, Ren & Stimpy, Rugrats, Duckman, The Simpsons, Tales From the Crypt, and all the shows on MTV's Liquid Television block all taught us that story has no place in our media, as long as we're continually fed the most disgusting, formless, fleeting, and/or bad taste images anyone could imagine! ...Actually, we couldn't even imagine them. That's what TV was for!
This was when our greatest philosophers and role models were two sex-hungry, idiot, stoner man-children who poked fun at music videos and played baseball using frogs while shouting that they "needed TP for their bunghole!"
Sports also took a turn for the XTREME, with wheeled sports like skateboarding, biking, and skating taking center stage with how many "mad trickz" athletes like Tony Hawk could pull off, while wrestling promotions like the WWE(then known as the WWF) let us rejoice in how hard The Ultimate Warrior and Hulk Hogan could powerslam their opponents! Skydiving, bungee jumping, and fast car racing all became a part of our lives in our desperation for that adrenaline high. So what if we got killed? We were too stupid to know that we SHOULDN'T die!
And, of course, video games followed the trend of being flashy and "KEWL" over actual gameplay or innovation. Sure, Nintendo was churning out state-of-the-art games that took full advantage of the console's hardware and still hold up well to this day. ...BUUUUUTTTTT* the Genesis and PlayStation were giving us games with fast action, anti-authoritarian themes, and characters with cool shades, as well as delivering those XTREME sports to our living rooms in the form of Rock n Roll Racing, NBA Jam, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, WCW vs. The World, Gran Turismo, etc. This was when a blue hedgehog wearing racing shoes became a worldwide icon, and when first-person shooters, especially those with a nameless marine blowing demons from hell away with a BFG, or a blonde guy with shades quoting 80s movies while blasting away at aliens, were suddenly seen as the next big game genre!
*Heheh. Butt. Heh. Heheheheheheh. Yeah.
Things started to calm down towards the end of the decade, with movies, games, TV, music, and fashion all becoming more mellow and atmospheric, but stupidity still reigned in one form or another. These are the years that brought us Will Smith's adult film and music career and the "Macarena", so we still wanted stupid, just a different flavor of stupid.
And then the 2000s rolled around, all kinds of bad things happened, and we're now eternally depressed and paranoid and just waiting for the end while we troll YouTube and play Fortnite on our smartphones. ...But that's another story.
I bring all this up because it's essential to know* just what sort of social climate allowed this certain game not only to exist, but to become a CLASSIC! Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure, was developed by Interplay(the same people behind Earthworm Jim, the early Fallout series, and a handful of Star Trek games, as well as the distributors of the Baldur's Gate series), and released for the Genesis in 1994, with a SNES port the next year. Gameplay-wise, it's a lot like most other cartoony platformers that made up most of the library of 8- and 16-bit consoles; get to the end of the level by jumping on things, avoid unkillable obstacles, collect various weapons and powerups to use sparingly, fight increasingly-difficult bosses at the end of each zone, and eventually save the day. Add the mascot trope of the early 90s, and you have a game that would normally sit comfortably next to Aero the Acro-Bat, Mr. Nutz, Bubsy the Bobcat, Rocky Rodent, Titus the Fox, Skunny the Squirrel, Awesome Possum, and Mohawk & Headphone Jack, to name a few other similar attempts at failed game series.
*Ok, it wasn't, but it was still great talking about the mindless fun the 90s gave us! ...Wish we still had some of that today...
However, what sets Boogerman apart from other platformers, as well as nearly every other game out there, are its aesthetics. As you can probably glean from a title like "Boogerman", it is UNREPENTANTLY gross! The hero destroys his enemies by flicking boogers, belching, and letting loose "atomic butt-blasts". The levels are covered in snot, with snot strands being used as ropes and zip-lines, and plants grow whole body parts. You collect plungers, unearth Porta Potties for checkpoints, and use nostrils and toilets as portals to other sections of the levels. Monsters include living turds, slime piles, toilet paper golems, inbred hillbillies, and other unidentifiable monsters that explode in clouds of pus when destroyed. And it's all animated(REALLY well, especially for the Genesis console) in an uncomfortably cartoonish art style that would fit in well with MTV or Kids WB. It's a game that knows it's gross, and pulls no punches to show you just how gross it is!
I've NEVER seen a game more proud of its gross, irreverent attitude than this! The only other commercially-released console game I can think of that's solely based around the theme of toilet humor is the obscure Japan-only Xevious clone Toilet Kids, for the PC Engine/Turbografix 16. ...However, I don't think it fits in the same category as Boogerman, because, well, JAPAN!
I guess there's "Poo Mountain" from Conker's Bad Fur Day, which is the only mainstream game I can think of that comes close to the same ironic aesthetic as Boogerman, but even then, the area keeps the fact that it's made out of crap mostly subtle, to the point you start to forget it's made of poo. ...Come to think of it, Boogerman is a game all its own! Nothing else has tried to recreate the same universe this game has!
Of course, I don't know if anything today could or should have the same aesthetics, because, as I mentioned, this game was a product of its time. We just liked gross, weird stuff in the 90s, with wild linework, thinly veiled innuendos, hyper-realistic stills, and lots and lots of toilets. It was an art form at the time to master the humor of the butt! Today, we're a little smarter(or we like to think so, anyway) with our stories and jokes, and poop jokes are usually greeted with a *groan*. Only in the 90s was this brand of comedy a huge hit, and only in the 90s could a game like Boogerman take off!
Which is probably why, despite its high ratings and sales, and its cult following that continues to this day, Boogerman is the only game starring the eponymous hero. His only other appearance in a game has been as a secret character in Clayfighter 63 1/3. ...Not the finest of farewells for this character...
However, in 2013, creators Mike Stragey and Chris Tremmel announced an HD sequel/remake to the game for eighth-generation consoles, being funded through Kickstarter with a goal of $375,000 and an expected completion date of 2014. This project would have also seen Earthworm Jim, another Interplay character, in HIS first original game appearance in over a decade(his 2010 remake doesn't count)! ...Unfortunately, the crowdfunder only raked in $40k, and the project has since been dropped. Boogerman is a character who will likely forever be left behind in the 90s. ...Mostly because he STILL hasn't learned how to use a tissue...
However, Boogerman's lack of series success hasn't stopped those wacky pirate game companies over in China from developing THEIR versions for the Famicom! Such as the one I have today, which was made in 1997 by Super Game.
Super Game was a short-lived Chinese game developer. In their short time, mostly in 1997, they released a handful of titles for the Famicom that were all demakes of Genesis/Mega Drive games, including the GEN/MD versions of Aladdin, The Lion King, Mortal Kombat, and, fittingly for today's subject, Earthworm Jim.
As well as a demake of Disney's Pocahontas. ...The original of which I didn't even know existed until I heard they demade it...
While they didn't last that long, they could be considered the "sister company" of the more prolific Gamtec, mostly known for their Genesis/Mega Drive titles(The Lion King 2, Squirrel King, Legend of Wukong, Tiny Toons 3), and who either developed, or hand a hand in developing, a large amount of Famicom games(most notably the "Pocket Monster" platformer.)
Distributing the game was parent company Realtec(aka BIC), a slightly more legitimate company than most similar developers and distributors. They mainly distributed Famicom versions of British studio Codemasters output, though it's debatable if they had permission to do so.
They DID develop a Famicom version of the Game Genie, though! When everything else is long forgotten, that'll be their lasting claim to fame!
As a final note, it's probably worth mentioning that there's ANOTHER demake of Boogerman by the Taiwanese company Rex Soft, called Boogerman II: The Final Adventure. Unfortunately, I can't find a copy of this one, otherwise, I'd be featuring it here as well. I should probably be amazed that TWO companies made versions of Boogerman for the Famicom. ...But I guess it's snot that surprising.
Nothing to really say about the cartridge. The label's simply a low-quality printout of a portion of the boxart for the SNES port. ...Despite this being based on the Genesis/Mega Drive port...
There do exist labels based on that version, though. ...Unfortunately, unlike a lot of other pirate Famicom games, we're not given any labels displaying the distributor's clear ignorance of the subject material. ...Sad. I REALLY wanted a label where they called Superman "Boogerman"!
The game starts up, as with all Super Game games, with the Super Game logo, just to remind you who's taking the blame for this. And giving you something to print out and throw darts at once you've sampled their programming...
Surprisingly, we're given an animated version of the title screen from the game, plus a rendition of the game's theme! ...It's a bad 8-bit remix of the music, lacking any bass and sounding so different that I had to listen to both versions a couple times to notice they're the same, but they bothered! Also, I'm not expecting a perfect recreation of the fluid movement from the original game, so I won't complain about the downgraded animation of Boogerman emerging from and flushing himself down the toilet. Once again, I'm just amazed they bothered to include it.
You may notice that, besides the tagline also not being present, the Password option is missing. Luckily, you won't need it. While the original game is over 20 levels long, this version is only 5, plus 3 boss fights. It'll take as long to beat this game as it'll take you to release your bowels after eating at a Mexican buffet. ...Or it should. I'll explain later.
We start with the opening text crawl from the original, bunched into fading paragraphs at the bottom of the screen, while "eccentric millionaire Snotty Ragsdale", disguised as a janitor to investigate the strange device that teleports pollution to Dimension X-Crement, endlessly walks left and right across the screen. They surprisingly included the entire story, and (poorly)redrew the background, so I have to give them credit again for bothering to follow the game's structure! ...Though they did include the words "out exactly where" at the end of the text before it loops. ...Were they trying to copy the manual and stopped three words in? It's not a demake without inexplicable text glitches!
Also, minus 69 points for including the same line twice...
The game starts off in the Mucous Mountains, originally the fourth zone in the original, where Boogerman must make his way up, up, and away, to the next level! And once again, and for what I think is the rest of the game, we get a rendition of the actual game music! ...I think... I've listened to both versions back-to-back multiple times, and I've noticed similarities, but if they are the same, the conversion to 8-bit leaves much to be desired. It's like they switched what's supposed to be the lead and what's supposed to be the bass, and they're playing a number of notes at least a semitone higher! It's better than the stock tuneless drek we're usually exposed to with these games, but it's a bit distracting listening to a track that's supposed to be the same, but isn't exactly.
This isn't the worst offender, though. ...We'll get to that one eventually...
So here's a shock that's revealed when the level starts: The controls in this game are actually really GOOD! ...Comparatively speaking, anyway. Usually in these pirate games, the controls are the main hazard, as I never feel like I have complete control of the character. They're always sliding around, or taking too long to respond to a button press, or there's some annoying quirk with how the character jumps(one button makes him jump in a different way than another button, you have to be running to jump, letting go makes him drop like a lead weight, etc.) Nearly every game, I've had to accustom myself to a new type of control awkwardness, which makes playing these games even more of a chore...
This game, on the other hand, controls like a decent platformer! Movement is tight and instant, actions occur when I push a button, Boogerman's not sliding around the stage every time I hit a direction, and he jumps like a regular video game character with height controlled by how long you hold the jump button! I feel like I can guide Boogerman around without constantly steering him off a cliff or headlong into an enemy! To have such NORMAL controls in one of these games is SUCH a relief! ...So much of one, that I hope I didn't just relieve myself...
Of course, the minute I say that, an ugly control glitch appears to torment me! Sometimes, usually on slopes, the Jump button will NOT respond, and Boogerman is left wide open to a wandering enemy! It doesn't happen that often, but when it does, it's infuriating! You'll take a couple of cheap hits this way, so I hope you weren't planning on a "No Damage" speedrun of this game...
Also, while the game runs surprisingly smoothly considering the amount of frames they kept in from the original animations, there's obvious slowdown EVERY time you jump! Apparently, the sky turns into pudding every time Boogerman leaves the ground and slows everything down until he completes his leap! ...I guess that's ONE power that we can give him over the real thing.
Speaking of which, Boogerman needs every power he can get, because he lacks nearly every special ability from the original game! No belching, no butt blasts, no fly-farting, no shooting fire out of his butt! The only skills that carry over are the ability to jump on enemies, and his namesake projectile weapon of flicking boogers out of his nose. The game gives you infinite nose nuggets to compensate, but a lot of the gross fun is missing from this distinguished hero's repertoire...
Also, considering the projectiles are black, I'm more inclined to believe that he's flicking chewed tobacco at his foes. ...Somebody didn't play enough Michael Jackson's Moonwalker in the arcades!
You can upgrade your boogers by collecting a bottle of... Whatever this stuff is. However, it just changes color and makes the snot fly forward, not doing any more damage than before. I guess it's trying to be a fire blast, but, again, it looks like he's spewing wads of tissue paper out of his mouth! ...And that's the less-disgusting interpretation...
Still, despite fewer weapons, powerups, enemies, and the obvious downgrade in graphic and animation quality, they've almost perfectly recreated the level! If you've played Boogerman before, you'll be perfectly familiar with the layout, with no unpleasant surprises, and a lower difficulty level due to the decrease in hazards! ...Or maybe it's the same difficulty due to the control glitch, I can't decide.
They even keep the hidden areas, reachable through these toilets in some levels! ...Of course, without the powerups, they're pointless, but it's amazing how much trouble they went through to recreate the area down to the smallest detail on the Famicom! ...Or maybe they just took the assets from the Genesis, traced over them in a graphics program for the Famicom, and used those, thus copying them with minimal effort. I don't know how it works, and, considering how these companies are long out of business, I likely never will. ...Though I wasn't curious to begin with...
This game also unfortunately shares a glitch with a lot of other Famicom/Genesis/Mega Drive pirates, where moving platforms don't even appear unless you slightly jump towards the direction they're coming from! And often, if you jump at the wrong time and make the screen scroll, it'll disappear from beneath you! Maybe it's a memory-saving method to not have the platform exist until the player comes to a certain point, because otherwise, HOW DO YOU SCREW UP A MOVING PLATFORM?! I'm no programmer, but I'm sure it would take maybe a dozen lines of code AT MAX for the script, and that's if you're programming from the ground up and not using existing assets in the software! For anyone wanting to play these bootleg/pirate demakes of games, be warned that the second most annoying thing about these platforming sections is making the platform appear to begin with! ...The first is trying to stay on the platform afterwards...
After getting through the first level, the game doesn't have a Results screen, so you're immediately taken to Boogerville, originally the third area of the game. Once again, it's a faithful conversion from the original game, so there's not much to point out.
They even included the Wanted posters of Boogerman! ...Though, with how compressed it is, it took me a while to realize that's who it was. I originally thought it was Cocoa Puffs' Sonny with sunglasses! Presumably to promote Cocoa Puffs' spinoff cereal: Booger Blasts! Flavored with real mucous! Made so your little brother blowing his nose on your cereal will become redundant!
The area does contain a few annoying sections they glanced over while (de)making this. The first is this part where you need to jump onto a platform. Normally, you jump on the monster right next to it, which gives you enough height to easily land on the branch. ...But, in the likely event you didn't know that and you killed it before making the jump, good luck finding where to jump to somehow glitch your way onto the branch!
Expect to fall a few times out of surprise that you made it!
The other annoyance comes from the last snot rope section, where you need to jump onto the platform above as opposed to dropping to the platform below, as you did with the other sections. However, Boogerman will NOT jump until he finishes his swinging animation, otherwise, pushing the button makes him fall! I legitimately thought he COULDN'T jump in these sections, and spent a good amount of time running around the level, looking for a path I missed! I think I eventually found the solution completely by accident by pushing the button at different times out of desperation. ...It's a rope made of congealed snot. Who WOULDN'T want to immediately jump off the first chance they get?! ...Who'd grab a rope like that to begin with?
After you've overcome those two little details, the level goes by quickly(provided you don't fall off a ledge, winding up on a lower platform and having to run through the level AGAIN), and you come to the game's first boss: Hickboy. ...And it's here that the game starts becoming unfair. ...At least, for the uninitiated.
In the original game, Hickboy's fairly easy to pass. Just jump over his chicken and eggs, jump to the other branch when he charges you, and hit him with one of your bodily functions when he's between actions. Fairly easy boss, which is why he's the first one you encounter. Besides, few can disagree with the thrill of beating up an inbred hillbilly by flicking boogers at him.
This version, on the other hand, is unfairly difficult if you don't know what to do. There's a lot less space to move around in the demake, and the boss moves slightly faster, so jumping over ANYTHING without taking a hit is EXTREMELY difficult! Especially since the hit detection is so poor, Hickboy and his projectiles can hit Boogerman even if he's nowhere near them!
Add to that the fact that Hickboy in this version doesn't have as recognizable a pattern! You have very little opportunity to know what his next move's going to be, and no time at all to dodge it! Mostly, he likes to run from one side of the screen to another, hurting you whether you're on the ground or sitting on a branch! ...So THIS is one of those invincible, "next step of mankind's evolution" inbred hillbillies the Wrong Turn franchise warned us about!
And die
And die
And DIE!
And this is one of THOSE games, where, once you've depleted your life bank, you're kicked back to the title screen! No continues, no passwords, no Level Select, not even a Game Over screen! Lose that last hit, and you START ALL OVER! And getting extra lives in this game is HARD!
In the original, you collected these plungers(which I thought were nails the first time I played this) and stomped on little pustules to reach a certain score to grab an Extra Life at the end of the level. Here, plungers and pustules only grant points, which are added to the oversized score counter at the bottom of the screen.
Which you can easily max out by the end of the game.
The ONLY way to find 1-Ups is to dig through each trash pile and rarely, VERY rarely, find one hiding. In a normal playthrough, you'll be lucky to find ONE, maybe two, of these hiding somewhere in the game! And you can just forget about replenishing life, because the Capes from the original are nowhere to be found! You need to get through 6 game levels, taking as little damage as possible, with only 6 lives maximum! ...By the time you've made it, you'll feel as dirty as if you just bathed in Boogerman's... This joke is already getting old...
So, just like Hercules 2, you need to stop treating the game like it's an actual "game", and exploit the weaknesses of the programmers. In this case, stand on a branch and repeatedly flick boogers at him. Every time he's hit, he runs from one side of the screen to the next, then back again. If you can hit him right when he gets back to point A, this pattern repeats. As long as he's just running, he can't hurt you when you're up on the branch.
Repeat enough times(hope your controller has Turbo capability), and he goes down for the count! Hopefully, you've stopped Wrong Turn 7 from happening! ...And if you could go back and stop the series from starting in the first place, I will worship you like a god! ...Actually, the series isn't even worth getting mad over, so I'll just say "Thanks".
Next is a very purple Flatulent Swamps, Level 4, originally the first area of the game. ...But they matched up Level 4 with the level you're currently on, so that's something! ...Though it's likely they chose Level 4, because it's the most straightforward and they didn't want to design all those trees and smiley faces.
Unfortunately, starting with this level, I don't have that much to point out. Mostly because I don't have footage for it. Normally, I like to record each playthrough, in case I discover something new or there's a funny glitch or it just looked better than the previous footage. I might stop recording until I reach a new area if I've played the previous levels enough times, but I always like several different takes to compare when I'm taking screenshots for the review and to splice together when I'm making the video.
However, in Boogerman's case, something prevented me from getting footage past Hickboy. For some reason, whenever I enter this level, my TV goes apespit, constantly losing signal and glitching out! It's clearly the signal converter I use to funnel the signal from the game into my video capture device and back to my TV, so I can play in real time, but this is the ONLY game I've had this issue with! It works when I plug it into my TV directly, and the footage recorded during these points comes out fine, but, for some reason, this game REFUSES to be simultaneously recorded and played! Like it's ashamed to be seen in public! ...Because a game called Boogerman knows the concept of shame...
Though if it happened with Rayman Legends, I would have forgiven it.
It happened so often, I thought this was a game I was unfortunately going to have to give up on(or switch to using a camera to record it directly off my TV screen like an 8-year-old who just learned about the concept of video uploading.) It even tried to fry my converter box, and I had to struggle to get it working, so I was SCARED to try again! Thankfully, at some point, Jupiter aligned with Mars on the night of a blue moon, and it allowed me to record this level without any problems. It happened ONCE, and never again, so I only got ONE playthrough out of this level! ...And since it was a successful run, and I don't remember the two dozen other times I played it without recording, I don't have any anecdotes or crucial advice for most of the rest of the game(until the end boss.) Take that however you want.
Not that there's much to mention about this level. Originally being one of the first in the game, and, like I said, the most straightforward, it's a very simple layout. Go right, jump up, go left, jump up, go right again, and you've reached the end!
After you've been snorted by a giant nose, of course! ...Which took me a few minutes to realize WAS a nose, and not a rock they forgot to program solidity into! ...Maybe I should have played the real game BEFORE the pirate...
This area ALSO has a hidden area in a toilet! And it ALSO has nothing in it! ...I have a good joke concerning empty toilets, but I refrain from using the stronger expletives in my reviews, so you come up with your own jokes, and I'll let you know if one of them matches mine. ...Actually, the majority will probably be funnier than mine.
After getting through the purple forest of purpleness, the pirate game finally starts following the same structure as the original with Nasal Caverns. ...Which has a blue sky in the background. ...Must be one of those ultra-rare caves with its own sun and sky. Either that, or an over-ambitious film crew turned all the walls into a bluescreen so they could film "on location" while hiding from angry fans and producers. ...Probably the crew behind Slender Man...
The major problem with this level is that you're never sure where to go! There are sections that require a leap of faith, since the camera doesn't scroll that far, and unless you know EXACTLY where you're going, you can expect to blindly jump off a cliff!
Or is the major problem that they suddenly decide to introduce solid platforms, meaning that if you step off these platforms, you can't jump back on, and you're forced to take a route so crammed with monsters, you'll die before you launch a booger!
No no, I got it. It's these bats! As soon as you leap to snot rappel, they fly right at you and ruin your jump! Unless you INSTANTLY move to the right and grab at the ropes again, you'll fall, and likely end up in a pit! ...But the bat's waiting for you, so I hope you can VERY quickly either shoot a booger at it or jump on it! ...Which, to be fair, IS the recommended way to fend off bat attacks. ...I think. I've never tried it myself...
Whatever annoys you most, you'll EVENTUALLY overcome it, leading you to the second boss fight: Deodor Ant. ...And again, this is a boss fight made tougher than it should be.
In the original game, you simply dodge Deodor Ant's barrage, then hit him and dodge the rocks that inexplicably fall from the ceiling. Pretty simple, and arguably easier than Hickboy!
Here, you don't need to worry about Deodor Ant's attacks, since he immediately submerges when he's hit, AND he's always in one of two places, meaning you can just flick boogers where he's going to be, and he's not even given a chance to attack!
The PROBLEM is with the rocks. In between every hit, a random number of rocks fall from the sky to a random part of the screen. In the original, you were given a bit of leeway, but here, the boulders fall almost instantly, their pattern is completely random, AND, unlike the original, the DEBRIS hurts you as well! On top of that, the screen is again much smaller than the original, AND the boulders are much bigger, so a boulder falling ANYWHERE on the screen has a chance of hitting you! It's all up to random chance whether you survive one of these barrages!
The best strategy I found in this situation is to crouch down at the very edge of the screen when the rocks fall. This will cause most of the rocks to miss. ...MOST! There's really no way to get past this stage without taking at least one hit. ...That's REALLY bad programming, guys, when a win/loss isn't based on the skill of the player, but chance! ...Unless you're a roulette program. ...Which you're not. ...I'm going to need to play some low quality casino games soon, aren't I?
Eventually, if Luck decides to show her head around your place, you'll deal enough damage to Deodor Ant before your health bar depletes. You're done for, Deodor Ant! Go back to your grandma's basement, eat microwave burritos, and complain about games nobody cares about! ...Why do I suddenly feel really bad about myself?
And that brings us to the penultimate level: Pus Palace! This is also where my converter finally decided it liked the game again, since I could record footage of these last few leaps without any trouble. HOORAY! I get to see myself failing over and over again! And I get to share it with you!
I hesitate to call this a "level", as there's barely anything to it. There are two enemies on the bottom, two on the top, and the rest of the level is just jumping from rope to rope, platform to platform to reach the final boss in the top-right. It's one of the most boring levels in pirate game history. ...Though it's welcome at this point to recover from all the junk you've had to go through...
However, if you're especially unlucky, you'll start the level FALLING THROUGH THE FLOOR! I don't know what needs to happen in the previous level to trigger this, but it WILL often happen, it leads to instant death, AND it will repeat until all lives have been lost! All that work you put into making it to this point? All those pits, boogers, monsters, ultra-rare extra lives, TWO other bosses? All gone! If the game decides that one byte should be in another place, you arrive, ready to take on the final boss, and you phase through the floor like Everlost! ...Keep those spare controllers on hand, and maybe order another copy of the game to replace the one you've smashed against the wall...
If you're lucky enough to avoid this minor glitch, the only thing you have to worry about is how to even get up there! The trick is to leap at these ropes and continually jump up them. If Boogerman goes into a hanging animation, you need to leap down and try it again! It's annoying, yes, and it'll probably take you a few minutes to realize that's what you need to do! ...Or it would have, if I didn't just tell you. You're welcome!
Once you've climbed to the top level, it's time for the final boss: Booger Meister. Now you'll show him the error of his ways for trying to... What was his plan, again?
This is the first boss where his pattern is considerably different from the original. In the real thing, he bounces from left to right, drips out living snot, and occasionally shoots gas out of both ends. Again, pretty easy to take down, especially for a final boss!
In the pirate game, he's virtually IMPOSSIBLE! I know I like to use that word a lot with bosses in games(as well as bosses in real life), but that's just how poorly designed they are! Here, Booger Meister Meister Booger will let off a speedy and endless stream of straight burps and diagonal farts, guaranteed to hit you wherever you are on the other side of the room! They come at you too quickly to dodge, unless you know EXACTLY where to stand for them to miss! Once you think you have a handle on the speed and direction, you can then run to the edge of the column and flick a booger at him! ...Only to have him jump in your direction and continue to launch stomach and butt blasts at you, and, from his new position, they're now EXTREMELY difficult to dodge!
So now you need to jump over him and continue your assault from the other side! ...However, with how quick his attacks are it's likely you'll make it over, only to have a cloud of methane erupt in your face... Skull The Troll has NOTHING on the amount of gas this guy releases!
This boss is FRUSTRATINGLY difficult, with no clear indication of where to stand or what to do. It's even difficult to know if you're hitting him or not! He moves when you hit him, but he also moves on his own, sometimes? It's never made clear. And with how fast and large his blasts come, it's VERY hard to learn where to stand, and even harder to find a window of attack! Ironically, this is an area that's LARGER than the original game, with SMALLER sprites, yet you STILL don't have room to maneuver.
Until you find the pattern, expect to die
And die
And... You get the picture.
And, once again, when all lives are lost, the game resets, meaning you'll need to traverse 5 levels, 2 bosses, and a LOT of broken platforming before you have another shot! This was one of the most frustrating boss fights I've encountered from one of these games, and I had to take a long break before I came back to try again. Otherwise, I would have literally EATEN the cartridge and have had to deal with sharp plastic fragments in my... Well, I'd regret it later...
Eventually, after a LOT of trial-and-error, as well as game-stopping migraines, I FINALLY cracked the code. Here's what you need to do.
1. Find a spot where you can duck from his blasts and get your bearings while you ready yourself for VERY quick reflexes!
2. When you're ready, carefully inch yourself to the edge of the column and start to flick boogers at him. If you've done this right, his blasts should BARELY sail over your head, allowing you to hit him without being hit yourself. He has to be hit at PRECISELY the right time, when he's in between attacks, so your first hit might not work. If you've shot a number of boogers at him with no effect, carefully reposition yourself and hit him from that angle.
3. He will jump into the center of the room, making his blasts unavoidable where you currently are standing. IMMEDIATELY jump to the other side of the room to the other column.
4. If you did this fast enough, he should have launched his burp blast right when you land. IMMEDIATELY drop down to the floor right before he launches a fart blast right at you and throw your snot in his direction.
5. If you acted on time, he should have jumped to the other side of the room. Jump up to the column above and sit it out, readying yourself for another strike.
Repeat steps 1-5 until he's finally down and out. But, most importantly, HAVE PATIENCE! It takes about 40 hits to finally bring him down, but you can only take 9! You can take as long as you'd like preparing to hit him, but once you start, you'd better be quick, committed, and accurate, or you'll take a hit! You'll likely also take a hit if you land too close to him when you drop down for Step 4, due to how wide the hit detection is. Even if you know what to do, you're not guaranteed a victory on your first try. Have a pillow on hand? Bubblewrap? Ibuprofen? Receipt for the controller? Good.
Eventually, EVENTUALLY, you'll take down Booger Meister, thwarting his plans to... Burn children's toys? ...No, that was another Meister. Make it snow in the South, warm up the North Pole, and star in a stop-motion YouTube series featuring constructions of brick sets and the occasional original sketch? ...No, those were "Misers". ...Well, whatever his plans were, he can't do them anymore! HOORAY!
In the original game, Boogerman flushes Booger Meister down the toilet! And, considering how much they've tried to match the Famicom's animation to that of the real thing, I can't wait to see how their interpretation looks!
...Actually, they just replay the opening text crawl... Not even a still frame, credits, or even a "Congratulations" screen, officially making this the laziest ending for a game we've seen yet. ...Those 4-5 hours of mindless trudging, super-fast reactions, and luck-based levels have been well rewarded!
That was the demake of the Genesis/Mega Drive Boogerman for the Famicom! ... Guess I'd better show it the respect it deserves.
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Design: Standard Famicom cart with existing box art slapped on it. Not even a lazy Photoshopped "2" or "3" anywhere to be seen...
Controls: For the most part, they're surprisingly good, and especially above-standard for a pirate game! They're tight, responsive, don't send the character off a cliff with every press, and I legitimately feel like I have control of the character! However, the glitch that occasionally prevents an action from happening can get annoying, plus how needlessly difficult it is to jump off or climb up one of the snot ropes. Still, I at least feel like I'd be making these complaints with a "real" game, so they're not poor pirate port-exclusive glitches like I've seen in a good amount of these. They're fine, they just have slight issues.
Graphics: As with Donkey Kong Country 4, seemingly all graphics are ripped from the original game, just compressed and given a simplified color palette. Again, it's impressive to see how much they were able to leave in, especially from such a graphics-intensive game as the original, which has some of the smoothest and most varied animation I've ever seen for a Genesis game! They obviously needed to severely cut down on the amount of frames used, but I'm impressed that Boogerman has several frames for walking, jumping, getting hurt, flicking boogers, getting sucked into a nose, etc. The monsters even retain a good amount of frames for their walk cycles and some of the unique death animations are still here, including one of the monsters comedically exploding when he's jumped on. The palettes they chose for each of the stages are WEIRD, especially with how much purple they used for the Flatulent Swamps, and a blue background for the Mucous Caverns, but they at least keep the overall design of the background elements and, unlike certain stages in DKC4, I can tell what stage it's representing. I'm especially impressed with how many details they were able to leave in for Boogerville and Pus Palace, including keeping the pictures and the doorways shaped like Booger Meister! That full-length portrait inn the final boss battle might be the most impressive thing in the game! Also, I'm impressed with how they didn't have to shrink Boogerman or the enemies that much to prevent intense sprite flicker! It's still obviously there, and there are fewer enemies to put strain on the processor and make it unbearable, but it's not as bad as DKC4 or Tom & Jerry 3. However, the heavy compression and simplified colors do make certain sprites unrecognizable. Boogerman and most of the generic monsters get away fine, but the bosses, I can barely tell what I'm looking at! Hickboy looks like Quasimodo in farm gear trying to pay tribute to the Baltimore Ravens, Deodor Ant looks like if Santa Claus got even fatter and shaved his beard, and Booger Meister is barely more than a purple-and-yellow blob! Still, I've seen MUCH worse sprite compression with these demakes, and this is still top-tier when it comes to that! So even if I can't give them high marks for creativity, I can give them points for effort. ...Maybe higher points if they remembered to make Boogerman's snot green...
Music & Sound: Again as with DKC4, the music seems ripped from the original game, just downgraded to work with an 8-bit soundchip. Unlike DKC4, it doesn't sound as good, with what should be the backing layers sounding the loudest, and the frontal layers sounding like they blend into the background! It's probably due to how bass-heavy the original soundtrack is, and how the Famicom/NES didn't process bass that well, but, unlike DKC4, none of the tracks sound recognizable on weaker hardware. It's better than the stock tracks a lot of other games give us, but in terms of mood-setting and memorability, I'd forget it as soon as I turned it off. There are more sounds in this game than most other pirate games, or even regular Famicom/NES titles, and each action has a unique sound! I can tell the "bouncing on enemies" from the "flicking boogers" from the "trampoline" from the "losing hit points" from the "flinging a chicken like a boomerang", etc. It's all stock, but I can at least tell what's going on just from audio alone! Maybe a few tracks are taken from the original game, but they're so compressed, I can't tell. However, and this is just me being picky, I wish they tried to incorporate at least some of the voice acting from the game. I know that these cartridges have memory capacity your handheld AtGames Genesis/Mega Drive is pointing and laughing at, but how cool would it have been if, at the end of at least the boss fights, you heard a highly compressed "BOOGER"?! It wouldn't have sounded good, especially compared to how well they got it to play on a Genesis cartridge, but it would have been hilarious! Overall, I guess they did what they could with what they had for memory less than 1 MB. I just find myself missing the actual game soundtrack...
Gameplay: It plays almost exactly the same as the original game. The level layouts are exact copies, the monsters behave the same way, attacks and powerups follow the same rules, and they even leave in some of the side areas you find through the toilet portals! The only major intentional change is that there's significantly less of the game here. Fewer items, fewer enemies, fewer powers, and, of course, fewer levels make the game a little blander and a quicker jaunt than the original. However, the most noticeable difference between this game and the original is how much harder the bosses are! The areas are shrunken and the attacks are much faster, leaving you very little room to dodge what are already hard-to-avoid patterns! If not for the exploitable glitches that let you escape mostly unscathed from the first two bosses, getting past these sections would challenge even the most hardened 8-bit champion! Booger Meister is the only section of the game where they clearly changed the pattern and layout, making the room bigger and giving BM a different pattern that's REALLY hard to follow! Overall, we have regular levels that are almost insultingly easy compared to the real thing, while the boss fights are unfairly hard if you don't know what you're doing! It's a pretty unbalanced game, compared to the original, and, seeing as how it directly copies the original's layouts, they don't add enough to make it stand on its own. ...They don't group levels together and make you play them all before getting a password, at least...
Replay Value: The game can be completed within 25 minutes, and with how many times you're going to be replaying the game up to the last boss fight, I think you'll have it memorized by the time it's over! There are no alternate routes or ways to complete the game, so what you'll have played in your first playthrough will be what you see in all subsequent playthroughs. Besides, why would you want to play this game more than once, when you can easily grab a copy of the ACTUAL Boogerman and play that?
Overall:
Like DKC4, Boogerman feels like an experiment in how well they can get a game made for more advanced systems to run on a previous generation console. The animations are impressive for what they managed to squeeze in from the original, the layouts are recognizable, it controls well, and the music and sound isn't awful, especially for a demake. However, it's a bare shell when compared with the original, and there's nothing that sets it apart as its own game. You could play the real thing and get MUCH more out of the gameplay, without having to worry about the inconsistent difficulty of the demake. It's a curiosity for anyone wondering how these games play on older hardware, but that's it. If you're one of those curious people, maybe play it once. Then go back and play the original Boogerman to remember what you're missing. Some grossout humor is WORTH coming back to!
