More castles, more hassles: Castlequest & The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle | NES Works 140
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- Опубліковано 22 вер 2024
- This episode, we look at two games that share a common theme (they both take place in castles!) and, unfortunately, also share a sort of thematic overlap (they're repetitive takes on the puzzle genre and a bit of a slog to play). In other ways, though, they represent diametric opposites. For one thing, Castlequest is the third name this game has worn (after The Castle and Castle Excellent), but this take on the material completely rearranges the layout and flow of the adventure. It's not quite a sequel, but feels like more than a mere remix. The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, on the other hand, is ALSO the third name this game has sported (after Roger Rabbit and Mickey Mouse), but its developers made zero effort to mix things up-and it would even be completely identical in its Game Boy iteration the following year.
Production notes:
Also! Available now an exclusively for preorder at Limited Run Games: The NES Era Vol. I, a comprehensive photographic atlas of every Japanese console game released from 1979 through the U.S. NES launch in October 1985. Take a deep dive into the prehistory of NES with this limited-edition oversized photo book: limitedrungame...
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NES footage captured from Analogue Nt Mini. Video upscaled to 4K with RetroTink 4X and 720p with xRGB Mini Framemeister.
Castlequest is attached to a very bad memory and experience in 8th grade for me. I grew up poor, and had a friend from the suburbs wanted to spend the night on a Saturday. I managed to not have my NES taken away, but unfortunately, had no lawn mowing money left over. My dad decided to foot the game rental from out local QFC, and my friend picked the game, which was Castlequest. He spent the whole night complaining about the game he picked, and ended up leaving early Sunday morning, because he hated being at my house. We ended up not being friends anymore, which hurt at the time, he was my best friend at the time.
I don't blame the game, I am grateful my father was kind enough to foot the rental. As an adult, I am glad it happened, because I ended up with two best friends that I talk to regularly, and are still dear to me
I can imagine Jeremy going full Pepe Silva when researching and documenting all the versions and licenses used for the Crazy Castle games through the years.
I never thought the Crazy Castle rabbithole would be more complex than it seemed-
don't you mean a woodpeckerhole
It's not even that the title and theme of each game was different across Japanese, US and PAL territories but that the actual numbering of the series is so confusing. The original Japanese titles are Roger Rabbit, then Mickey Mouse 1-5, and then the final three games released as Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 3, 4 and 5. So there are nine distinct games in the series but following which is which is incredibly difficult, even before you add the fact that each individial game in the series was released with up to FIVE different titles depending on which markets they were released in.
The Japanese game Mickey Mouse II, for instance, was released as Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 2 in the US, Mickey Mouse ONE in some PAL regions and Hugo in other European markets. THEN it was re-released in Japan, but this time as Bugs Bunny II not Mickey Mouse II.
The maddest reskin was probably Real Ghostbusters. Running around a castle dropping safes on enemies heads kind-of made sense for old 30s cartoon characters like Mickey, Bugs or Woody (or 80s homages to the same source material like Roger) but for a Ghostbusters game? That was clearly a case of Kemco having a new Crazy Castle game to sell, needing a cartoon licence to slap on it and not having enough cash to afford Disney or WB money, instead licencing a defunct Saturday Morning cartoon based on a decade old movie.
Oh, and that's before you get into the fact that Real Ghostbusters/Mickey Mouse IV/Garfield Labyrinth aside from being the fifth game in the Crazy Castle series is also an unlicenced port of an old C64/Amiga game called PP Hammer and his Pneumatic Weapon.
I love the sound pallet that Kemco Seika used, especially on shadowgate, uninvited, and deja vu.
Yeah, their composer(s) were arguably the company's best asset at this time.
I have to admit, I'm impressed. You talked about Crazy Castle for _much_ longer than I expected was possible.
Enjoyed it, though.
10 years since the last video, and we still haven't gotten a new Crazy Castle? Truly things have gone downhill.
I really wouldn't have been surprised if a terrible low budget Crazy Castle found its way onto the Switch, but nope, it's dead dead
Loved playing Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle on my NES as a kid. Can't say I ever beat it though.
The plague of Crazy Castle ran so much deeper than I thought. Someone at Kemco had a problem and everyone else there did nothing to stop it.
As someone whose mom bought him Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle on the gameboy and who played it religiously in some sort of Stockholm syndrome fugue state, my favorite things about that game are that the screenshots on the back of the box show hearts instead of carrots, and they show bugs bunny kicking an enemy with the word "kick!" flashing on screen, so they came from some beta build of the game that hadn't been fully converted. Also the instruction book mentioned several items and features that simply were not in the game (in addition to misspelling Wile E. Coyote's name as "Wiley Coyote").
The Who Framed Roger Rabbit nod. Such a brilliant and under appreciated movie.
How so? I thought it was widely known and beloved.
It was one of the biggest movies of the late 80s! What has hurt it in the public imagination is the fact we never got a sequel due to many factors over the years.
I had no idea that Japan used other characters for the 'Crazy Castle' set up. I'll be that 'Roger Rabbit' game was more playable than the one from LJN.
Thank you for your sacrifice by engaging with Crazy Castle.
Crazy Castle has the wildest series genealogy since Wonder Boy.
Hugo Crazy Castle. Europoor mind blown.
The Crazy Castle saga is genuinely fascinating. It's hard to imagine what was so compelling artistically or commercially about the games for Kemco to keep going back to that well and to continue devoting time and money to licensing more-or-less appropriate characters for them.
That's the thing! There's nothing artistically compelling about Crazy Castle. That's why Kemco was able to just drop whichever character they wanted in there. It's a generic boilerplate game, one size fits all.
@@JeremyParish I still feel like there's an absolutely fascinating story behind it all, one that has still yet to be discovered and translated...
@@JeremyParish Yeah, I guess I ought to be thinking about it as something they dropped cheap licenses into rather than something they licensed IPs for. :P
And nowadays they just pump out boilerplate JRPGs that are nearly as interchangeable. Such an odd company, I can't believe they're still around somehow.
When you can put together a game for three bucks and a case of instant ramen, you don't need to sell a lot to stay in business.
I remember first playing Crazy Castle as a kid and first thought was “wait…a rabbit that can’t jump?!”
Surprised I didn’t notice previously that they didn’t even draw in whiskers on the title screen . Yikes and gadzooks
I had the NES version of CC
it was the only game my grandfather liked
he played with the controller on a flat surface and using two index fingers
like a typewriter lol
Perfect!
We finally found who that NES "speed board" accessory was made for!
I did that for a month when I was 10, but only because I'd broken my thumb. But needs must, as they say.
Similarly, Crazy Castle was the only video game my dad ever liked. He otherwise had zero interest in gaming, but this game grabbed him for some reason. He would come home on his lunch break and play CC instead of eating sometimes. Something about the gameplay must speak to old boomer dudes, lol.
@@discostu1981 My brother and I each got Game Boys from our grandparents for Christmas in 1989 (after the NES sharing debacle from a year or two earlier), and I showed my grandfather Tetris, and a few months later _he_ had one and we'd play against each other sometimes. It was clearly in the same category to him as writing two random numbers down and doing long division by hand, or doing the crossword puzzle every week.
I have his Game Boy right on my shelf next to me right now, actually. When we played Tetris, I _usually_ beat him, but it was much later in life, probably when I was in college mentoring an awesome little kid and would go a little easy on him in Smash Bros or whatever, that I realized just _why_ I beat my grandfather 9 times out of 10. I don't think it was just because I was used to video games and he wasn't.
The decay of Bugs Bunny's relevance to popular culture is one of the key examples of how clueless Warner Bros. leadership is these days, even before the guy whose strategy was to burn _completely finished movies_ was put in charge. The classic Termite Terrace shorts are among the finest cartoons even made, even after you remove the ones that are questionable these days there's dozens of hours of finely drawn animation and hilarious humor there, but they're almost impossible to find! These should be filling our media landscape and preserving the legacy of Warner Bros. for the ages, but for some reason they zealously remove them from UA-cam.
(Note: you _can_ see Bugs Bunny cartoons on broadcast TV these days, on MeTV Toons. It's like they're keeping the classic shorts memory alive despite WB's efforts.)
I love MeTV Toons!
In Japan, Castle Excellent use the Famicom Data Recorder to save and load the game. Since no such peripheral was released in the west, the USA version Castlequest removed the feature and was released with 50 lives. Also the map screen has graphics for a witch, spaceship, skeleton and owl, but since censorship at the time, they were removed as well.
Did people like... do savescumming with slow cassette tape loading like a Commodore 64 game?
at first i wasnt a big fan of your dry presentation but it certainly grew on me. very chill videos
The transition from classic Looney Tunes with handprinted backgrounds to the trash animation of the Six Flags ad was jarring, to say the least
This workspace has gone 0 days since the last Hydlide reference.
That's why rentals were so important to gaming at the time. It was the main method to try out a game and see what it was actually like.
I cannot wait for the inevitable UFO 50 Works
Video Works 2024 is a ways out
One of my favorite NES games I never knew why there were so many Sylvesters and now I do.
how are you the only guy who has delivered the exact dry, almost parody-clinical retrospective style I didn't even know I wanted?
I guess other people actually want to make money
Personally, I consider the Mickey Mouse Kemco games to not be part of the Crazy Castle series, except for 1 & 2. No region used the Crazy Castle name and they had completely different game mechanics. Of course since Kemco really worked to maximize the confusion here, I wouldn't die on that hill.
Yeah, the third game/Kid Klown in particular is pretty different, but they went and numbered it as a sequel to the first two games, and then they brought Kid Klown into a Crazy Castle games. So this gets filed in the same pile as Wonder Boy et al.
@@JeremyParishthe kemco cinematic universe is really popping off
This video has triggered a crisis of memory for me. I am *CERTAIN* that I received this game for Christmas in first grade, which would have been late 1988. But this video (and Google) list it as a late '89 game. I know that game release dates were less set in stone back then, but there's no way my parents found a game ten months early. But at the same time, I vividly remember when I got the game. Low key freaking out over this personal discrepancy.
I remember seeing a babysitter okay this game and being really bothered that Bugs couldn't jump
The bugs bunny crazy castle series lore runs deep. I remember either playing or seeing one of the Game Boy ones once when I was younger, the person who owned it complained about it constantly. The fight in the AVGN episode is probably more entertaining than both games covered in this video combined
One more thing to add to your Crazy Castle legacy, Jeremy... Crazy Castle 3/Garfield/Real Ghostbusters was also outright stolen from a Commodore Amiga game called, P. P. Hammer. Even the level layouts are exactly the same. P. P. Hammer's creator was tracked down a few years ago, and he declared Kemco definitely never spoke to him, let alone acquired the rights, in fact it was the first he had even heard of it.
Oh, I remember this one, simce I rewatched that episode of Fact Hunt recently, about mascots changed between regions.
@@Lightgod87 Ah sweet, thank you! :)
Hugo (the Troll) is a fascinating story! There are some good videos online. Really something special!
Can't help think of the nerd...hahaha
Bb cc is an amazing game. I grew up with that damn game!! The music is so catchy! I never knew it was Rodger rabbit in Japan. I always wondered how the castle rooms fit into bugs world. Ha now I know
I kind of like the Crazy Castle games, regardless of which licensed character happens to be featured in any one of them. I had Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle as a kid, so you're right -- it's a Stockholm Syndrome thing. I got used to the format in my formative years, and now I find the games comforting.
OH DAMN! Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle used to be on lot of those pirated famicom/NES cartridges (we called them cassettes).
We played them on our famiclones (Nintendo never had legal presence in India, even today)
Quick Kkemco its the perfect time to announce Crazy Castle 6!
Dude totally just made a video about Crazy Castle. I couldn't be in less awe.
You must not be familiar with this channel. He covers every single NES game ever released. No matter how bad.
I will never stop being in awe of his dedication. Especially when he's also doing pretty much every other 8 bit and 16 bits system catalogue in history.
@@milkcarton6654 sure.........Not in less awe, meaning not more capable of the current level of I awe I was at when I saw he did an in-depth dive on a crappy game. Reading comprehension is haaaard
@@sneakyskunk1 Ok. Hmm. This is embarrassing. I can't believe i have to explain this but, read it again, "I couldn't be in less awe", means your level of awe is at the lowest possible level, it couldn't go any lower. It's self-evident if you read it. I don't have reading comprehension issues, you have writing comprehension issues. You were looking for couldn't be in more awe, your level of awe being so high that it's not possible for it to go any higher. English is not even my first language, what's your excuse?
@@sneakyskunk1
Couldn't be In less awe = Your awe could not be any lower.
Couldn't best in more awe: = Your awe could not be any higher.
@@milkcarton6654 It took you 10 hours to try to correct me, AND YOUR RESPONSE HAS A TYPO IN IT. LOL go home
Love your channel, binge watching to catch up and u have great coverage of retro games.
I unironically liked Bugs Bunny's Crazy Castle. My brother and I have fond memories of it. it was probably the first game he beaten on the NES.
My brother got Bugs Bunny’s Crazy Castle when we were kids. I believe I beat it, but I mostly remember it as being a slog of puzzle game.
My favorite memory was I figured out passwords for the 4 special stages by analyzing the password pattern for the 60 stages. They are essentially stages 61 to 64, however due to the special stage’s skip-3-stages or fall-back gimmick, it was possible to soft lock the game if the one (I forget which one) happened outside of the normal game flow.
I had Crazy Castle for NES back in the day. It was one of my favorites and the music still pops in my head to this day!
I played CastleQuest in 1990 and I loved it. Mainly, I loved imagining what each new room would look like and how to get there.
Another great video.
I did a ROMh ack called The Bugs Bunny Crazier Castle, which expands the enemies from 4 to 28 and adds 5 cutscenes. Because the original is based on FDS Roger Rabbit, it lacks enemy variety and some graphical polish compared to the later Game Boy games.
I had no idea the background lore of Crazy Castle was in competition with Wonder Boy for the crown of convolution.
Oh man I loved Load Runner back in the day. Some nerds at my school had it loaded on a 286 behind the computer lab.
Believe it or not, but there is actually another Crazy Castle game on GBA by Kemco called, Tweety and the Magic Gems. Its main gameplay is a mario party ripoff, but the minigames use the crazy castle sprites for Bugs and other characters, as well as two of the minigames playing exactly like Crazy Castle, with the pipes and all those mechanics. This game is a really strange oddity, that I recommend you to at least give a curious look lol.
Now I want to see an inpossible remake of Crazy Castle with ALL the regional licensed characters.
Castlemania
14:00 I think if there’s any association with Looney Tunes & falling safes it’s from a Mandela effect for people like me who generally haven’t seen the classic shorts in a while. Falling safes are just one of those tropes that’s become ubiquitous with the golden age of animation at least in terms of theatrical shorts
Also, buy this man’s book! The link is in the description.
Castle Excellent makes me think of Bill & Ted’s own little fiefdom
My mom loved Crazy Castle. We rented it several times.
"You didn't invent creativity; the invention of creativity occurred in 1988 when Robert Zemeckis directed Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and you don't look much like Robert Zemeckis." - Yahtzee Croshaw
Ahh, Castle Quest. I remember when my parents got that for me as a reward for a good report card. Yup, even back then, 10 year old me said, "Holy s***! This game f***ing sucks!" I can tell you this from first-hand experience. If you had played it back in the day, you would still hate it now. It is one of the worst gaming experiences I have ever had.
The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle 🏰 is great. 😀👍🐰🎮
"... the NES has discovered castle doctrine..."
* spits out coffee *
I will not stand for this Kid Klown slander! Even if his most notable game of Crazy Chase isn't that good either. Or that the Crazy Chase sequel never came out in America. Or the GBA port of Crazy Chase never released in Japan. Or how his PSX puzzle game The Bombing Islands excised him entirely and got ported to the N64 as Charlie Blast's Territory. Or how the US PSX market would finally get that Bombing Islands release three years later after the fact. Or that Kemco was going to slap him in a Super Famicom port of the Amiga game "VideoKid" before ultimately cancelling the whole thing.
Quite a history for a character made up as a solution to the "uh oh Capcom has the Disney game NES rights in America" problem. Also, minor correction: The character of Kid Klown's Japanese name is also Kid Klown.
Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle, Super Mario Bros. 2 USA and Yo! Noid, were all NES games that were re-skinned from Japan-exclusive Famicom game titles...
Castle Excellent is such a good title, way better than Castlequest.
> started the video expecting something about fencing
> ended it yelling "WAIT THAT'S ANOTHER OLD REFERENCE MOST PEOPLE WOULDN'T HAVE GOTTEN EVEN IN AMERICA?"
I actually really liked it back then. It has cool music and is decently fun. I finished it on a rental weekend.
I was pretty amazed at how the gameboy version sounded nearly identical to the NES version. Checo always had really good sound designers. Say what you want about Drakkhen, but the audio is fantastic.
I actually like the soundtracks for both of these games. Yeah, I'm weird. I know. I saw "Who Framed Roger Rabbit" in the theater as a kid and scoured the Jersey Shore Boardwalk for a shirt that I liked with him on it that summer haha He still holds up to this day, but I might be super biased.
9:16 which is a Danish franchise, the next game got a Bamse license (which is from Sweden) who looks much cuter but is apparently among the rarest gameboy games.
At last we deal with the serious issues of our time: why did the sequels to Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle end up being so... crazy?
Wow, 10 years since your original video on the 1st Crazy Castle game on Game Boy. Yeah, thanks for letting us know that Crazy Castle will return again and again on Game Boy. Castlequest and Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle definitely define that low tier of blah games that are not terrible but are boring middling experiences.
I was a kid when that New Woody Woodpecker Show was airing on Fox Kids, and I remember really loving it back then, and well, of course, I did run into that GBA Crazy Castle 5 game, albeit much later, it was my first ever exposure to that series, and well, I can say I was disappointed in it, but also not surprised, I was already quite aware at the time at how much of a mixed bag games based on TV Cartoons could be, though I suppose the odd gem did exist...
"Therefore we can safely conclude that Who Framed Roger Rabbit was the nexus of all reality and humanity peaked with the movie."
No lies detected. Fact check: true!
And now I have Arthur Q Bryant and Mel Blanc singing to each other over Vagner.
It's honestly kind of bizarre how Castlequest is better in context and execution on the choppy SG-1000. Over there, you're used to all scrolling being kind of clunky, so your protagonist moving along at a floaty pace is a lot more reasonable. It's much nicer over yonder and kind of a waste here, even if it's probably still more compelling than Hydlide in the post-Zelda world.
I wonder how much money Kemco actually made from all of these releases, especially that Woody Woodpecker one. The sales numbers must have been pretty good to keep things going for that long.
Crazy Castle 5 has the same look as fellow franchise-ender All New World Of Lemmings/The Lemmings Chronicles from 10 years prior.
Isn't it funny to think that Mickey Mouse IV was retooled into either a Garfield or a "The Real Ghost Busters" game, when the protagonists from both cartoons were voiced by Lorenzo Music?? And then in the live-action movies played by Bill Murray _yadda yadda yadda_
Did you read the instruction booklet for Castlequest? It's pretty neat. It has a full map of every level, with lines and arrows drawn showing which way to go. They have multiple very different paths to get through the castle, each shown by a line with a different colour.
Despite having a packed-in walkthrough and fifty lives, I've never beaten the Castlequest, haha.
the limited amount of differently colored keys with more doors corresponding to said key colors of castle quest seems to have been a design element inspiration for tower of the sorcerer
I tried to look through the SG-1000 library recently and I thought The Castle was actually one of the SG-1000's best games. If The Castle/Quest had been on the Apple //, and reached America when that was my primary exposure to video games, it probably would have been a lifelong influence on me the way Montezuma's Revenge was. But I expect, uh, more of the NES than I do of those other two systems.
I really like the main character sprite of Castle Quest and think he's cute... That's about it.
The Bugs Bunny cartoons now air on the MeTV Toons channel.
I've dropped a 200 lb. anvil on my foot and I can assure you that it is super fun. I was thankfully wearing steel toed shoes while getting it out of a car trunk.
Forgot to mention bugs even got a pinball machine, made by Williams I think
This is more of a tangled web than the Wonder Boy/Adventure Island saga but not quite as complicated as trying to emulate the Dragon Slayer games and play them in release order.
I remember when Castle Excellent was Tasmania's only website.
Thank you for this ancient deep cut from the nerd internet
15:43 So he's Bunnoic Commando without the grappling arm.
No surprise, he never got married so they couldn't make an arm for him.
Wrong, he did get married and his arm has Elmer Fudd's soul in it
@@JeremyParishSaw that tidbit of lore and even for me thought that too silly. Does that mean Bugs can now wield the Sword and Magic Helmet?
@@JeremyParishBugsxDaffy shippers in tears rn
Don't blame me, shippers, Bugs x Elmer is canon as of "Rabbit of Seville"
The story of crazy castle (as I see it):
They should've stopped there... BUT THEN--
(And loop that phrase about 3 times)
I think a Heiankyo Alien reference could have fit somewhere in there.
Despite having an unappealing character Kid Klown in Crazy Chase on SNES is something different and can but fun even though you have to repeat stages
That Crazy Castle 4 that became Ghost Busters and Garfield was based on an Amiga game called PP Hammer And His Pneumatic Weapon.
Also I think Hugo was still fresh by the time that version happened, they made actual ports of the Hugo games to the Game Boy in the following years.
Bugs Bunny’s Crazy Castle is a great arcade like game featuring the iconic Looney Tunes characters. I don’t care what AVGN says.
This castle quest game, seems a little bit like chips challenge with the multi colored doors and keys
I had a bunch of (GB) multi carts as a child and I think they all each had their own, so one had Hugo, one had Bugs, and the last had Mickey. I don't think kid me really understood that they were the same, but preferred the Mickey one. I don't know if I like the game, it's not bad but not very fun either, just a game I guess.
it really is odd just how many crazy castle games exist. I suppose it's a fairly simple concept and probably wasn't too difficult to reskin. But I can't imagine any other game series having like 20 different versions each with a different mascot associated with it. It does kinda end up reeking of one of those games you like, know you tried but don't actually have many strong feelings about it. I think I played it a couple times on a gameboy color multicart I had but went to play the godzilla puzzle game or "pokemon diamond" bootlegs much more often.
on castlequest I always found it intriguing, there was something about those exploration games I really enjoyed, so that one seemed at least interesting to me. personally I would've been happy trading 50 lives for a password system to make up for the lack of the cassette feature save from the Japanese version, but that probably would've been a lot of extra work. on Crazy Castle... well I don't know if I remember it on NES but likely fired up a ROM of it at some point. it's neat at least. I had heard the crazy castle series was all over the map in licensing!
'NEHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, WHAT'S UP, DOOOOOOOOOOOOC?!' (AVGN Smacks Bugs with A beer bottle)
I owned Castlequest as a kid and I am still salty about it. The box art and the *concept* of "Here is this giant map that came with the game. It is totally possible for you to plot out the winning strategy from here. GO." were compelling, but the actual gameplay experience sucked. Even with a Game Genie I never got very far. And yet I still want to revisit the idea! With smaller, discrete solvable zones and controls that don't feel like shit.
"We don't see Bugs in games these days"
uh........
Multiversus, several mobile games and the upcoming Looney Tunes basketball game all say hi. As does the 30 other games before that. It's more like Bugs Bunny has not stopped being in games since. Honestly he's in more games these days than you'll find Mega Man in anymore.
So Kemco released the same ish game over and over again with a reskin? Man I wonder what they are up to now?
Making RPG Maker RPGs for modern systems.
Screw it, I’d rather play Taboo. At least that had a good soundtrack.
Those tunes, though, am I right?
The hell? Is that Snarf, the irritating little busybody pet from ThunderCats, in Castlequest?
I rented crazy castle from the video store when I was a kid 30 something years ago and I still get the music stuck in my head its killing me slowly
Who Framed Roger Rabbit was GOAT, that's true; Jessica Rabbit is prob. even GOAT-er, too, and it had Christopher Lloyd as Judge Doom, soo spoopy!
Is this the correct take-away from today's episode?
Also, rest assured, I've watched all Gameboy World episodes, so I've seen the one in question.
DINO!
Will there be an episode about "Rescue: The Embassy Mission"?
Could the 'change' note have been written because the Crazy Castle series is all over the place?