Beavis and Butt-Head
Beavis and Butt-Head had a lot of moments of smart satire. Considering Mike Judge was also responsible for Office Space and Idiocracy, no real surprise. But most of its mass appeal came from the two stars acting like idiot delinquents. Cable was pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable on television, so I think a lot of the show’s success came down to fascination with what early episodes were able to get away with. You never saw Wally and the Beaver huff paint thinner and write “MEGADETH” on the side of the Donaldsons’ house.
So no, I can’t say B&B was secretly a show for smart people. But there’s definitely more to it than it seems. This carried over to the show’s video games, where all of them (except the straightforward SNES side-scroller) lean in an adventure game slant. Just like Virtual Stupidity on the PC, the Genesis game is all about collecting items and figuring out where to use them. They’ve just grafted that onto the controls and tropes of a console platformer, in ways that don’t always blend well.
Some opening stills lay out the plot. It’s show canon that the boys love GWAR (themselves a satirical send-up of KISS and Ozzy’s most infamous stage antics). The alien freakazoids are in town for a concert, so our heroes are there, dude. Through a series of mishaps involving dog vomit and Tom Anderson’s lawnmower, their tickets are diced into ten pieces and scattered on the wind. Beavis and Butt-Head ain’t missing GWAR, so you’ll guide them through six different spots around town to find and reassemble the pieces. It’s a reasonable goal for an adventure game and certainly authentic to the show.
Getting the pieces requires you to either directly recreate moments from early episodes, or to pull off similar, original vandalism. Some pieces can be spotted as you wander the stages, setting up the puzzle of how to get it. One piece sparkles from inside a pet shop bird’s cage. Another floats and lands directly on Principal McVicker’s head. Others are going to require some knowledge from the show. You’ll probably need to have seen Couch Fishing to even know to try it in the game. You can cook up fries for an impatient Burger World customer, but you can’t serve them. You’ll get no clues that you should also drop a dead rat into the fryer, other than knowing that Beavis did it one time in an episode.
Despite playing on a console and looking like an action side-scroller, I can’t stress enough that this is also a hardcore adventure game. You will scour levels for items you can pick up – usually with no clue why – then find zany ways to use them that usually require powerful leaps of logic. Going back to the bird, there’s a tiny key atop the cash register. If you try to grab it, the shopkeep stops you. You’ll need to find a way to distract him. A sign says he’s selling snakes for $.50, and once you scrounge up enough money, he offers to wrap up your snake (huh huh huh). This gives you your opening, plus a boxed snake that will come in handy elsewhere. Most of the game will play out in scenarios like this.
Town stages are all self-contained and navigated through the TV in Beavis and Butt-Head’s living room. Both boys have their own inventory (3 items each) and their own life bars, encouraging you to swap between them to divvy items, or to switch when the other’s about to die (like in Ninja Turtles for the NES). If you have a second player, you can control both at the same time, with all the chaos that sharing a screen brings. About the only downside is you can’t trade weapons. You can only try to find a second copy elsewhere. Same with the TV remote – whoever grabs it is now in charge of navigating levels for the rest of the game.
From the living room, you can head to the bedroom to safely drop and store items – items dropped out in the world will go back to where you found them once you change screens. The bedroom is also where you get your password. This saves ticket pieces earned, items in the bedroom, and each lad’s current health. It’s a long and elaborate one that you’ll have to re-enter every time you die, and it’s here where the game starts to derail. See, any time either Beaver or Buffcoat runs out of health, it’s a hard Game Over. Meanwhile. the game’s as serious about killing you as any Sierra adventure, but without the quick and easy reloads that the PC affords.
At least three puzzles aren’t going to reveal themselves until they spring a trap and kill you. One finds you in a laundromat with a sleeping grandma. When you try to open her washing machine (with a ticket piece inside, natch), the door squeaks loudly and she shanks you with a sewing needle. You can’t escape from the corner you’re pinned in and can only die, now with the knowledge that you need to deal with a squeaky door. But that means inputting a tedious password and walking back from the house to where you left off, repeating fights against all the enemies along the way. It also assumes you just got a fresh password and have lost no progress.
Similar hassles come from fairly difficult platform sections. There’s a sewer with deadly gaps you have to jump over, while damaging goo drips from pipes or shoots up like fireballs. Once you run this gauntlet, there’s a junkyard with biting mice and swooping eagles. When you pick up the item at the end, you find there’s no exit. You now have to make your way all the way back through both sections, and if you’re low on health, you’re not going to make it. Now you’ve wasted all the progress you just made and are back to wherever your last password was.
There’s just one way out of these situations. If you hit Start to pull up the menu, there’s a “Sucks” button. Hitting it warps you back to the living room, but it doesn’t refill your health and it drops everything you had on you. All collected weapons, all items, all gone back to where they were found. It saves whatever’s in the bedroom, but so does a password. If grandma’s about to give you your last stabbin’, I suppose “Sucks” might be better than death. But that assumes you don’t have anything valuable on you and that your last password was hours ago. Most times, the password will be the better of two terrible options.
If you can save and load emulator states, the game’s a ton more manageable. But as designed, restarting from frequent deaths is a huge hassle. There’s another section where you steal a medical scooter (recreating yet another episode) and must avoid obstacles on the ground. There’s a lot of them, and you can only hit a few before crashing. You don’t restart at this minigame, oh no, your whole game is over. It took me probably 40 save state reloads – even saving partway for incremental progress – to finally pass. Now imagine having to enter a password every time and trek back to the hospital, while on the way, likely forgetting every obstacle you’ve tried to memorize. I can safely say I wouldn’t have bothered in 1994.
Various enemies get in the way as you explore the levels. Some must be jumped over (skateboards, mice, angry women) while others try to block you (guards, Todd and Earl from the show). Everything does a lot of damage when it connects – probably to keep you switching characters – while enemies respawn when you scroll past that area. You can hold A to run past nearly everything, but you’ll accumulate tons of damage while you try. You really feel weak, while keeping both boys’ health up is always a concern.
Luckily, health isn’t too hard to get. You’ve got a gracious window of invulnerability when jumping, while all defeatable foes drop health items. Two free hot dogs respawn outside Burger World every time you leave and return. I’d frequently drop by to refill before new areas. Weapons (spit shooters, dart guns, farts) also stun-lock most enemies pretty easily. There’s a line of four guards outside the mall that aren’t hard to defeat, and the food they drop is more than enough to get back to full health. It’s just a hassle that you have to do it – I wish you could just sit Buford and Bernardo on the couch to watch TV while their health refills – but overall, gaining health isn’t too hard for a platformer.
But this really hits on the game’s split personality. If you’re a fan of adventure games, then exploring the levels is going to feel a lot like the “action sections” of adventures that everyone hates. Enemies aren’t forgiving – Earl just kinda mobs you and racks up damage, while those damn shopping carts and bowling balls never stop coming. The sewer section and its precision jumping will be your personal hell. Weapons like the dart gun, or the fishing minigame, require jamming on the C button so fast that a turbo controller isn’t a bad idea. Getting to the actual puzzles is going to feel like an awful chore.
If you’re a fan of platformers, there’s no shortage of hardcore adventure puzzles that will make no sense to you. What am I doing with these chemicals? Why am I throwing a bomb in this one specific area? I definitely wandered back through areas with different items equipped, having no clue what the game wanted and just trying everything. “Use” and “attack” are both on the C button, so I spent screens hammering C to try and find items, but was instead just walking around and farting everywhere. Add to this the usual suspects of objects you can pick up blending into the background. It’s all annoyances a PC adventure wonk will have seen before, but are probably brand new and confounding to a console player.
Graphics match the show at least as well as Virtual Stupidity. There’s not enough pixels to get TV animation detail, but everyone is recognizable. Cameos can be easily identified while Butthole and Joe even manage to pull some authentic expressions. The only real disappointment is with the new characters created to fill out the roster. I’m not sure what’s up with the abstract yellow shopkeep, while the police officer’s exaggerated reactions don’t match the style of the show.
The graphics also aren’t quite as detailed as they need to be for an adventure game. Dialogue or narrator text is very rare (cartridge space, I’m guessing), so there’s surprisingly little prompting. Going back to the pet shop bird, a normal adventure game hero would call out that the ticket was in the cage somehow. Here, there’s just the graphics. You’ve got to look for a slight sparkle effect, or the red and blue ticket colors. Like the first King’s Quest, the graphics are asked to do all the heavy lifting without fully being up to the task.
That’s not to say that there aren’t any hints at all, because there definitely are. Van Driessen will offer up some good ones if you visit his classroom. You make money by selling extra items to a pawn shop – if it’s needed for a puzzle, the owner won’t buy it, while usually giving a clue about where to use it. These help, but every puzzle doesn’t have a hint and its easy to feel lost. You have to get all the ticket pieces to win, so even one unsolvable puzzle will block you from GWAR.
Sound effects are limited, but authentic. There’s quite a few speech clips, but it’s all just color. Huhs and Hehs, catchphrases like “we’re there, dude,” and Beavis calling Butt-Head a “fartknocker” if he toots on him. I like that B&B do a celebratory “duh-na-na-nuh” guitar riff and headbang when they pick up a ticket piece. Music, of course, is generic rock. Only GWAR is licensed, with one of their songs (“Jack the World”) recreated about as well as it can be. The rest are synthy Genesis background tunes that are quickly ignored.
I can both see and appreciate what they were trying to do here. But I can also see how this game’s two distinct flavors that just don’t mix. Fans of the show who are just in it to see Beavis get kicked in the nads aren’t going to put up with frustrating adventure game tropes. Adventure fans are going to be better served by Do U and all the benefits a PC offers, while avoiding endless enemies and tricky action sections. If you’re in the very narrow slice of gamers who appreciate both styles, then this is easily the more entertaining console game. But I think most people are just going to wish they were playing the SNES side-scroller instead.
The Good
An attempt to do something new with adventure games, that works reasonably well if you’re also skilled at platformers. As true to the show as a 16-bit game can get. Tons of call-backs and cameos from the first two seasons.
The Bad
Death from challenging platform sections or adventure game traps just comes too easy. Passwords help (no way they were paying for battery saves) but the game still asks a whole lot of you. If you’re not a fan of adventure games, don’t bother. If you don’t like the show, not much for you here either.
Butt-Head: Huh-huh. Pull my finger.
Beavis: Heh-heh. No way!