Bugs Bunny's Birthday Blowout

System: NES

Cheats Used: None

This was Kemco’s second and last Bugs Bunny game for the NES and it was released to coincide with Bugs’s 50th anniversary celebration (which I recall went on for a year and included a TV special and the first new Bugs cartoon in about 20 years). Like Crazy Castle, Birthday Blowout is simple yet challenging. Most of the challenge, though comes from some tricky platforming bits. The game is otherwise fairly easy because most enemies can be avoided and you rack up a ridiculous amount of extra lives by collecting all the carrots you see and using them in a bonus game after every level

There’s a good amount of variety in the environments you traverse and there’s a boss fight every two levels (although some of the bosses repeat). One particularly clever boss fight has both Foghorn Leghorn and Henery Hawk and the trick is that you’re supposed to hit only one of them with the other being a decoy. Also, in the later parts of the game, there were several levels that I had to try several times to get through, so it does provide some challenge. All in all, this is a nice alternative to Mario if you don’t feel like playing that one for the hundredth time. Thumbs up!