Retro spotlight: Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose!

Konami took their licensed games seriously, and it shows in this platformer based on a kids' cartoon.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Licensed games can be a minefield, but there are classics within this territory, just like any other kind of game. Konami was one developer/publisher combo that had plenty of success with licensed titles a few decades back. Why, exactly, they were so determined to make licensed Tiny Toon Adventures games to the point that Japan received Buster Busts Loose! a couple of months North America did is unclear, but the wait was worth it at least. Not that any of the kids with a Super Nintendo were necessarily aware that Japan had received a Tiny Toons game for the Super Famicom already, but you get the point.

Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster Busts Loose! feels more like an arcade platformer than a console one in some ways, such as its short length — that’s not a negative, just an observation. Short or no, it's satisfying, with mechanics that go beyond running and jumping, varied level design, and between-level mini-games that focus on skill, luck, or a little of both to get extra lives. It’s a game for kids, being based on Tiny Toon Adventures in the first place, but just like with the show, the game will still make you crack a smile as an adult more often than not. And it’ll push you on that top difficulty setting, too, since you can’t afford to make a single mistake without giving up a life. The true ending only appears if you complete Buster Busts Loose! on Hard, which gives you just the one heart container to start rather than three. You can upgrade health in each level if you find the proper carrot statuette item for it, but those hearts reset to one after every stage, too, so each one is a bit of an uphill climb.

Tiny Toon Adventures, like with Animaniacs, came out of a partnership between Warner Bros. and acclaimed director Steven Spielberg. Given Spielberg’s interest in video games — Boom Blox, anyone? — it’s neat to see a video game based on one of his projects come out as well as Buster Busts Loose! did. And this isn’t just me or my memories of playing this game again and again as a kid saying so, either: Buster Busts Loose! has made appearances on a few Top 100 SNES games lists, all somewhere in the 90s. Maybe it’s not a universal opinion that it’s that good of a game, but between showing up on lists from outlets like IGN and Complex, as well as the high-8s and low-9s review scores of the time, it speaks to the fact that everyone overlooked its runtime because it was just a good and replayable game. Which is how these things should go.

It helps that Konami seemed to understand the spirit of the show, which was very much about referencing not just Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies, the properties the in-show universe were based on and part of, but also the entertainment world at large. So, you get some subtle-ish moments like when you’re using a mine cart to try to outrun a train that’s coming at Buster and Montana Max, who were on opposite sides in this stage right up until the train threatened to run them both down. When the mine cart reaches 88 miles per hour, it goes flying off of the screen so fast that it leaves behind a trail of fire to represent its speed. That number wasn’t picked at random, but comes from Back to the Future and the speed its famous DeLorean had to travel to do its time travel thing. (And yes, the Japanese version of Buster Busts Loose, which uses kilometers per hour instead of mph, also directly references the speed within the Japanese language version of Back to the Future, 140 kph. Thanks for the research on that, Clyde Mandelin.)

And there are also far less subtle moments, like the very obvious Star Wars parody stage. Which, to Konami’s credit, was also a bit on the show itself, and not just playing around with the very loose, very wild west licensing rules of the day’s video games.

Of course George Lucas was going to let Stephen Spielberg’s cartoon use Star Wars likenesses! Their Hollywood partnership is how the world ended up with Indiana Jones, what’s a little parody between pals? Whether Disney would fight whether this is fair use or not in the present is more of an open question, but hey, it’s also not one we need to ponder beyond my making sure they catch a stray here.

Buster Busts Loose! has six stages, all themed in some way, and gives you some pretty simple methods for handling the various challenges of them. No two levels play exactly the same, due to the environmental bits inherent to their themes, but you can use the same basic mechanics in order to progress through each, adjusting for those environmentally unique parts. You play as Buster Bunny in this one, and your main attack is a flipping dropkick. You can’t land directly on enemies with your standard jump, but if you dropkick them in the head — or anywhere on their bodies — you’ll defeat them or cause damage, depending on the foe. You also have a dash which will allow you to slide into enemies to defeat them, or run up walls. It can help with longer jumps, and so long as your Dash bar has some charge, you can keep going. You can wait for it to fill up, which it does simply by not being in use, or you can collect Gogo Dodo statuette items that refill it. There are some platforming sections where the key is to continue collecting those refill items in order to perform an extended, lengthy run: you’ll have to nail the timing and jumps of those challenges in order to keep at it.

The mini-games between levels are an enjoyable diversion. The “Wheel O’Comedy” (also from the show itself) makes an appearance, with five different games possible from its spin, each represented by a characters’ head. There’s the Mystery Weight Challenge, where you get five characters to arrange in order to be weighed against five characters your opponent has: your goal is to outweigh the competition in as many rounds as possible. Calamity Coyote will outweigh Sweetie Bird, and so on. Hungry Boy Hamton has you trying to create a path by switching tiles around, in order to direct Hamton J. Pig to eat as many apples as he can before falling on his face because the road ended. Plucky Duck’s Go-Go Bingo is just a game of Bingo, featuring characters from the game on the card. Furrball’s Championship Squash has you hitting a squash ball against a wall again and again, with 15 consecutive and successful returns resulting in an extra life. If you hit various characters running in front of you during your volley, you’ll earn bonuses, like the 60-second clock stopping or slowing the ball down (though, whether you want to do that is a question, given it could mean fewer chances at extra lives in the end). And last, you play as Babs Bunny trying to free her friends from cells in Elmyra Duff’s maze-like basement.

Each of these grants you extra lives based on how well you accomplish their specific goals (each apple, each rescued friend, etc.), so while it doesn’t necessarily matter which you end up playing in between stages, you’ll certainly find your favorites for racking up those lives. And don’t think that the mini-games are going to save you in the game’s Hard mode, since they’ve been tweaked to be more difficult where possible, like with having just 15 seconds instead of 30 to rescue Babs’ friends in her game. Less health, fewer chances for extra lives: that’s why it’s the hard mode, kids.

That dumpster wasn’t there until after Buster lost all his health and flew up into the air. Cartoons, baby.

Buster Busts Loose! plays a little loose with what’s “real” and what’s scripted in the game. There are some stages where what you’re playing through is clearly a production of some kind put on by these students who are learning their craft in school so they can grow up to be the next Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and then there are others that seem to just be part of their day. Having to fight Duck Vader and rescue Princess Babs from an army of stormtroopers with helmets shaped to allow for a duck bill inside? Pretty obviously a work of stage. Needing to score a touchdown before time runs out so Acme Looniversity can win the big game? That’s an extracurricular activity. And the opening, with Buster Bunny having to stop Dizzy Devil from wrecking the cafeteria so that other kids can have a shot at lunch? Well, that’s just Tuesday.

That the game switches from theme to theme helps in a number of ways. A platformer that lasts for about an hour might not need to shift gears so often in order to stay fresh, but Buster Busts Loose! does it anyway, and it’s better for it. The shifting themes — school, western, haunted house, football game, up in the clouds, in spaaaaaaaaace — make for some fun visuals and consistently changes the enemy types as well as whatever environmental bits you interact with. That football game, especially, makes for a real shift, as it combines the game’s standard platforming mechanics with football in a side-scrolling form. Your goal is to score touchdown before the clock winds down, and keep getting first downs before you lose a life by failing on a fourth. You do this by choosing Run or Pass, and then you have to avoid “enemies” — the opposing defense — who will come at you from up high or on the ground level. Your dash is locked while in the football stage, and you’ll need to focus on correctly running underneath or jumping over the opposition until you can score that TD.

It’s got some weirdness to it, sure, like trying to catch a football requires you go the wrong way at least briefly in order to give the ball time to arc through the air to its landing spot, but it was an ambitious play to put a sidescrolling football game inside of a platformer, and to marry it with the game’s platforming mechanics like Konami did. And even better, it works!

Buster Busts Loose! looks great, with fluid animation, detailed sprites, and an obvious effort put into making sure each level both felt and looked different. The animation was especially important to nail, given that this is based on an actual animated show, but between the looks and the attention put into, say, Buster’s idle animations, Konami passed that test with aplomb. Here’s a short gif clip of Buster running, jumping, and then taking damage and falling, that shows off quite a bit of how smooth this all looks. (Clip via Gamerworld at Imgur, and given the precarity of that whole thing these days, it’s embedded below.)

Konami was likely happy to have the cash-in opportunity of a licensed title, but it’s also clear they wanted this game to be a good time, and to have more licensed Tiny Toon Adventures titles to develop in the future. Ah, to take pride in one’s work. It can’t always be said about every licensed game, but when you get someone who cares about the source material and about making a game that expands the enjoyment of it, that’s the good stuff. Some licensed games suffer because they’re on a tight schedule to align with a particular release date tied to the product, or because a mega publisher is pushing around a developer just trying to get their start or some extra cash to make the games they really want to, but Konami developed and published this, and didn’t seem to be on any kind of accelerated timeline or under pressure from Warner Bros. Which benefited the game and anyone who’s bothered to play it in the 30 years since its release.

This newsletter is free for anyone to read, but if you’d like to support my ability to continue writing, you can become a Patreon supporter, or donate to my Ko-fi to fund future game coverage at Retro XP.