 Ssss... That's drunk! Magical Cat Adventure is one of those... Oh no, is this a Bubsy game? Did I get tricked into playing a Bubsy arcade game? Well, no, not quite, but yeah, this is one of those games you stumble across and can't help but ask, What the hell is this? It's not Garfield, it's not Heathcliff, and surprisingly, it's not Bubsy, although strangely, both Bubsy and Magical Cat Adventure were both released around the same time. Although the latter was strictly an arcade game made by a company called Wintekno. There's quite a bit of mystery surrounding Magical Cat Adventure, and it starts there. This was the only game Win Techno made, period. I have no idea where they came from or where they went, but they showed up for a little while in 1993 and cranked out this game and vanished off the face of the earth. Thankfully, the game itself is actually pretty fun. It's a typical arcade platformer where you play as a cat that looks way too much like Bubsy for my liking, and he runs around shooting stuff with tons of different weapons. There's magical stardust, fireballs, knives, bombs, this weird two-headed dragon thing. There's whatever this is, I guess it's some kind of ghoulish cat face. There's at least eight different weapons you can find. You can't keep them or switch between them, unfortunately, but there's more than enough opportunities to find practically any kind of weapon at any time. Conversely, you can accidentally get stuck with a weapon you want nothing to do with, which kinda sucks. One token gives you three hits on three lives to get through six levels, but what strange here is that this game is incredibly forgiving for an arcade game. If you lose all your lives, you'd expect to start way back at the beginning of the level, right? Nope, not here. The game puts you practically right where you died. It's honestly kinda jarring. It makes Magical Cat Adventure super easy to finish, but it doesn't make it any less fun of a playthrough. The controls are perfectly okay, and the gameplay is about how you'd expect. The levels are pretty big and allow you to wander around a bit, as long as you're cognizant of the time limit, and there's plenty of extra lives and stuff laying around. The enemy design here is… okay, I have a soft spot for it. I mean, come on, look at this cute little penguin hopping around. Are this guy who summons baby chicks of all things? Or this adorable giant skeleton that tries to slice your head off with a sword projectile? I was just darling. But yeah, it's weird. I really dig the look of this game, all the environments and backgrounds and enemies. But the Magical Cat itself is just… it's just too much like Bubsy, I'm sorry. I know that's a me problem, but I mean, it's just so confusing. Is it a total coincidence? I mean, what if it's not? Why would anybody rip off Bubsy of all things? It's like if you started a band and decided to deliberately rip off Creed. Even more interesting is when this game came over from Japan, they left out all the story. There's no dialogue or cutscenes here, but they are in the Japanese version of the game. It shows what looks like a character out of Demon's Crest, plotting to turn this mountain into a jack-o'-lantern, I guess? Then having his pirate friends over for a party at this castle. And then this guy shows up, and then not Bubsy shows up and says, even though I'm almost Bubsy, I'm not nearly as incompetent and can totally kick the crap out of all you guys. And that's when you start your adventure. I don't want to oversell the game here, it's just okay, as far as run and gun style platformers go, and some of the weapons kind of suck. A lot of the time I'm getting Ghosts and Goblins flashback where I'm like, get the knife, get the knife. It's easily the most effective weapon here since this game allows you to go all Rocket Knight adventures here and just bounce around and throw projectiles at random. It looks kind of ridiculous, but it's actually kind of fun. And yeah, there are some annoyances that pop up here and there, like the fact that treasure chests can hurt you? What's with that? I'd also mention that this game is two-player, but it's alternating turns. The second player just plays as a slightly less orange cat. But yeah, Magical Cat Adventure is just one of those weird little obscure curiosities. It's the only game the developer made. It was somehow localized here in the West, yet hardly anyone's ever seen it and nobody talks about it. If an arcade cabinet falls in the woods, does it make a sound? In this case, I think it does. It's a perfectly okay platformer that's good enough to kill 30 minutes for ya, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. Alright, I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.