Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle 4: Yikes! Indeed

In 2000, just a year after the release of the black Crazy Castle 3 cart, Kemco put out a fourth Crazy game, this time in a clear cart, forgoing the backwards Game Boy compatibility. You’d think this also signifies a significant gameplay complexity boost. You’d think wrong. Bugs Bunny in Crazy Castle 4 is yet another redundant iteration of the original 1989 release. As Bugs’ wooden plaque on the cover aptly states: Yikes! Indeed.

That’s not to say that Crazy Castle 4 doesn’t mix things up compared to its predecessor: it simply mixes things up the wrong way. Every new element added also adds frustration to the already less than joyful average puzzle platformer. Here’s a short overview of what changed:

• Bugs runs faster. Great, right? Well, nope, as this isn’t even fast enough compared to the painfully large levels we’re served.
• Since Bugs runs faster, taking stairs should take longer, does that make sense? According to Kemco, it does.
• Below the staircase entrance/exists, previous games displayed a clear up/down arrow. That’s gone. The black hole without stairs is supposed to be the way down and I can’t count the number of times I was wrong and got myself killed because of that. Aesthetics over Gameplay?
• Remember the annoying doors introduced in Crazy Castle 2? Well, here, instead of just finding the key inside the stupid door, you first have to open up a chest which takes another second and a useless animation loop.
• But wait, it gets worse: some doors hide not one but two chests, of which one will be a fake one that bites you. As if you weren’t frustrated enough.
• Since the levels doubled in size and now even chests can kill you, bugs now has three lives. That’s a huge difference compared to the one-shot-kills from Castle 1, 2, and 3—but as you might have suspected, this feels like an obligatory addition precisely because the gameplay loop has been prolonged ad nauseam.

In essence, Kemco made an attempt to spice things up but at the same time wanted to stay loyal to the original game and its gameplay. To me, it doesn’t feel loyal, it feels lazy. The result is a broken game where the short and sweet pick-me-up-and-play levels of the previous games are gone, and instead, you’ll find yourself running around and opening doors again and again just to make it to another level that’s just as stupidly large. For other puzzle platform games like The Lost Vikings or Toki Tori, this might work, but for Crazy Castle, it clearly doesn’t.

Other changes like the way the stage progression screen is rendered (see the right screenshot above) look cool but has zero added gameplay value: you can’t navigate and choose anything, it’s just a static intermission screen. And am I the only one who things there’s a giant phallus protruding from the left caste wall?

I wish I could say something about the soundtrack instead, but besides the catchy tunes of the first iteration, there was little audiovisually speaking that kept me wanting to play more. The archaic password system that feels like a cheap way to not have to install a RAM chip on the cart—especially for 2000 GBC releases!—doesn’t help either.

There is little else to say about this fourth instalment. It was released half-way 2000 and received generally unfavourable reviews—what did you expect, Kemco? This is a year after the Bugs Bunny: Lost in Time PS1/Win release and a few months behind Wario Land III also on the Game Boy Color. While Crazy Castle 4 still tries to re-dress a 1989 Famicom game, other game developers genuinely attempted to create something compelling for the GBC.

But we’re not there yet… There’s a fifth game, this time on the GBA, featuring not Bugs Bunny but… Woody Woodpecker? Why?

I’m starting to realise why the series is prepended with the word Crazy…