Bubsy 3D: Furbitten Planet is an infamous game. Even if you’ve never played it, chances are you’ve heard how it’s one of the worst games of all time, how nobody with sense actually likes it, how it’s a travesty of a video game.
The thing of it is…I used to really enjoy it when I was younger.
But not for the reasons you might think.
If you somehow have escaped talk of Bubsy 3D online over the past decade, let me first explain a little about what the game even is. It’s an early 3D platformer for the original Playstation, and attempt to break into the mascot platformer genre on a brand new system. It was developed by Eidetic, who were eventually renamed as Bend Studio, known largely for the Syphon Filter series. It stars the titular Bubsy Bobcat as he tries to collect atoms and rocket ship parts that will let him escape the plan Rayon, home world of the Woolies, who are mostly concerned with invading earth and stealing all of the yarn, because yes, we’re in that era of nonsensical platformer plots.
On the surface, it sounds like it should be a pretty solid game. Silly plot, but no sillier than that of most mascot platformers, with their cartoony collectathon nature. Developed by a team that went on to make a bunch of really great games (or so I’ve heard; I haven’t actually played any Syphon Filter games myself). Good timing to hit the Playstation before other mascot platformers have a chance to make their attempt.
So what went wrong?
THE GRAPHICS
Without context, this probably looks fine. It’s in 3D, everything’s identifiable, so what’s the problem?
The problem largely becomes clear with context. Bubsy 3D was in development around the same time that Mario 64 and Crash Bandicoot were, and Eidetic didn’t have the budget or team size that either of those games could bring to bear. All they could do was make the best game they could with the resources they had. Honestly, that’s pretty commendable. They knew they were in a bad spot, they knew their game couldn’t match the competition, but they did their best. Bubsy 3D was reaching for the cutting edge of 3D game technology for the Playstation, and even if they didn’t make it, they were still part of the initial wave that helped shape the genre for years to come.
Albeit in a, “Don’t do what this game did if you want to succeed,” kind of way. They knew the game was unfinished, looked worse than its competitors, and wasn’t going to do well in that kind of environment. I do wish I could say that game publishers learned a lesson about rigid deadlines and not releasing a game until it’s actually finished, but, well… *gestures broadly to the entire game industry*
So the graphics of Bubsy 3D were large, flat, and mostly untextured. Angular planes and bright colours everywhere you look make the game appear garish. Without good textures in the environment, it was occasionally difficult to tell what could be walked on and what couldn’t, what was meant to be interactable and what wasn’t. Bubsy has a shadow, but nothing else does.
Many people have said that the finished game looks more like an alpha version, where things are generally in place to test environments and interactivity but the details haven’t been ironed out and textures haven’t been finalized. The landscape is barren, stripped of anything but the barest essentials of features that a 3D mascot platformer might require. There’s no environmental storytelling. There’s barely an environment!
You might not know it to look at it, but Bubsy 3D‘s graphics are actually HD. Ironically, this is why everything looks so terrible. HD graphics ate up a lot of the Playstation’s limited memory, leaving no room for more nuanced textures, shading, or other objects that could make the world and its environments feel more complete. None of that could be there if they wanted the game to actually run at something beyond 2 FPS.
But that’s not the worst of Bubsy 3D‘s problems. Let’s move on to…
THE GAMEPLAY
To start, Bubsy 3D uses tank controls.
Tank controls.
In a platformers!
Just take a moment to let that sink in. In a genre where precision jumps are often a core mechanic, where enemies need to be jumped on and their attacks avoided, Eidetic decided that tank controls would be the best way to explore that space.
When Bubsy runs, it takes a moment or two to really reach top speed. When he stops, he needs to skid a little bit to end his momentum, which, again, spells trouble in a platformer. You will often over- or under-shoot your goal, leading to running into enemies or tumbling off cliffs.
When Bubsy jumps, the camera swings from right behind his head to directly overhead. This allows the player to see a bit more clearly where Bubsy’s going to land (which wouldn’t have been obvious prior to jumping due to the lack of textures and the camera position), but as this happens with every single jump, it’s constantly disorienting to switch perspectives.
Doing platform sections with instant death traps below, such as water, is a nightmare. You jump to a new platform. The camera swings wildly above you and then back down again once you land. You slowly turn on your heels to line up for the next jump. Tap forward a little bit so you don’t accidentally speed up and run off the edge. Jump. Rinse. Repeat. It’s slow, plodding, and requires precision of a type that doesn’t make for fun gameplay. It makes for tedium and nausea.
And to make matters worse, the camera shift doesn’t happen until you jump. So if you’re high up and need to jump down to a lower platform, you’re either going to have to make a leap of faith, or else jump in place so the camera swings overhead and you can actually see what you’re supposed to be jumping down to. It slows gameplay to a crawl. A jumping dizzying crawl.
WHY DID I DEFEND THIS GAME?
As a child, I hadn’t played too many video games. Oh, I’d played a few. Duck Hunt. Sonic the Hedgehog 2. Keith Courage in Alpha Zones. But my experience with them was very limited. I wasn’t really aware of what constituted a good game or a bad one. And I had the charmingly naïve idea that a video game wouldn’t be released unless it was exactly what the developers wanted it to be.
Thus, Bubsy 3D was a perfect iteration of itself, the absolute crystallization of an idea. Any problems I had with it, like disorientation while jumping, or struggling to get past the first couple of levels, or repeatedly dying to certain bosses, those problems were all because of me. I wasn’t good enough at the game. I had to get better at it. It definitely couldn’t have been related to deficiencies within the game itself, no no no. The problem was entirely me.
After all, Bubsy 3D was as perfect a game as any other, right? It wouldn’t have been released if it wasn’t the best it could be, right?
As I said earlier, in many ways it was the best it could be…given the constraints upon it. A small team with limited resources and a strict deadline working in an unfamiliar and fast-changing genre couldn’t have had the easiest time with it, and I do respect what they were able to get done. There were a lot of reasons that Bubsy 3D failed, and it probably was the best the dev team were able to do. By the time they realised they couldn’t compare to games like Mario 64, which proved to be the benchmark for what 3D platformers could and should be, they were already too far into development to make any real changes, and so they had to plow ahead with what they already had.
But I didn’t know any of that as a kid. I just knew that I was bad at the game, and with my naïve beliefs, me being bad at a game could have nothing to do with a game’s design, its controls, or anything outside myself. The game was good, I reasoned. I was just not good at playing it.
This is both the joy and downfall of limited experience. With limited experience in something, absolutely anything can be good. If you’ve never played a video game before, then whatever you play first is going to be the best thing you’ve ever played. It’s only with wider experience that we start to measure games against each other, to form mental rankings of what’s good and what isn’t, and to understand that sometimes we’re bad at a game because the game itself is working against us. We learn what works and what doesn’t.
Bubsy 3D, unfortunately, doesn’t.
Quadnines 
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