BUBBLEGUM CRASH ENGLISH TRANSLATION
Since Bonknuts was cool enough to let me beta test this, I thought I'd write up a review. I played through the game in one sitting, and it was pretty damned fun, not the best digital comic I've ever played, but definitely worth playing through for any Turbo fan. I didn't encounter any bugs (there are a couple he warned me about that are in the actual HuCard so I was able to avoid those) fortunately, and I spent a fair chunk of time just f*cking around moving and trying different things to see if I could get it to crash.
The game plays out like an episode of an anime show, it starts out with a bank robbery and it's up to your chick (and her friends) to get to the bottom of what's going on. The story is pretty predictable and the digital comic parts really hold your hands, but you can interact enough that it doesn't feel like you're just watching the proceedings. Everything unfolds like a typical game in the genre- you move between locations talking to people and uncovering clues, showing items, solving a few simple puzzles, etc. After an hour or so of that, you are treated to a weird motorcycle chase thing where you have to catch up to a mech. The game concludes with the classic Wizardry-style maze where you are attacked by robots as you try to hunt down the last boss. This was really the only annoying part of the game since you can't save in the maze (set aside at least an hour or so to beat it).
The graphics are decent enough for a HuCard, although it does have that NES look to some of the backgrounds (I assume they were saving memory for the bike chase part and the fight scenes later on). One thing that the game could have used is some more art of the main girls or at least bigger portraits, I felt like I barely saw them by the time I had finished. The maze part has the nicest graphics in the game in my opinion, it actually looks pretty cool, although it could have used more than 2 different robot types to fight and maybe a palette swap or something on the different floors.
I also feel like I should mention the music is pretty bland. Not a single song stuck out, they were all very generic and sounded like they came as examples with the PCE dev kit sound library or something. They weren't offensive or anything, just forgettable.
I definitely recommend all you homos get the translated ROM and play through it, and since it's only about 2 hours long you really have no reason not to.
