Naively, i stuck with this pathetic game to its end in the hope of some redemptive conclusion. It never came.
The objective is to rescue Bunny, from the clutches of Demon Dan, who randomly abducted her just before your appointed date together. She’s your “sassy but lovable girlfriend”. Unfortunately, if you have any sense, you’ll eventually realise she’s actually an annoying, insulting, ungrateful damsel in distress and should be left to die. The premise of this game is very uninspired. As you complete each level, a cut scene of her pleas to you for her urgent rescue ensue and she becomes progressively nastier, hurling insults at you and your lack of competence/manliness. As a girl gamer this made the game doubly hard to bear. In addition, this game is also infamous for rather perversely having Bunny’s clothes gradually decay off her body as she rots in Dan’s lair until finally she is just moping about in her underwear. This game is ridiculously patriarchal and sexist. But I digress.
The dull and repetitive onslaught of villains takes the form of evil clowns (yup, coulrophobics beware), piranhas, ninjas, sumos, Elvis-types (shaking hips and puffy hair included), surfer dudes, and of course your final climactic battle with Demon Dan. Yeah, what a tryhard name.
Your only weapons are bottles, bombs, frogs and walking fire hydrants. Okaaay. Annoyingly, none of these are actually in you arsenal or anything; you simply have to rely on others to hurl them at you and then you can reuse them against your opponents. And occasionally you can steal the balloons of evil clowns to lift yourself up a platform. So basically the only thing you really reliably have is your trusty, “souped-up” skateboard. Whoopee. Sadly sliding around gets boring, and even springs and jumps can’t spice it up, rather the opposite; they make maneuvering the skateboard through the obstacles challenging for all the wrong reasons. One cool little oddity however is that button-mashing prolongs your hang-time and that is mildly amusing sometimes. Oh, I’m just clutching at straws now. Oh wait, in the level overrun with Elvis impersonators, you can have the fun option of kicking switches with your skateboard as you roll by. The result is a black screen and the occasional aural stimuli as you flip about in oblivion, wishing this was a better game. As for the graphics, the sprites are nothing special, but the Elvises do shake their hips, and the rolls of fat on the sumos actually tremble with their sickening laughter, which is a nice, if grotesque touch. The sumos are very difficult to kill, as they are a bit too smart for their own good and evade your carefully laid bombs and being the hulking bullies they are, if you’ve received no bombs from your stingy severed-arm supplier, then too bad, you will simply be cornered and squashed. Often the only surefire way of killing these fellows is to lay a bomb ad stand on top of it and the two of you go down together (melodrama). At least once you’ve died defeating an enemy, they don’t return next life.
Sound effects and music are tragic and mute-worthy. You will protect your precious ears if you know what’s good for you.
In my naïve optimism, I only stuck with this pathetic attempt at entertainment to its conclusion hoping for redemption to come. It never did. This is one of the most obscure games in my collection, and rightly so. It’s a waste of time. You’d really rather you went skateboarding for real than play this one.