 Sssssssssss That's drunk! As many of you know, if you've been following this channel for the past while, I got a Super Nintendo in Christmas of 1991, and along with that, we also got Super Mario World and Final Fight to keep us busy. But after that, my brother and I had to venture into the wild world of video game rental. We quickly identified the kind of stuff we liked. For him, it was mostly adventure and RPG style games, like Ys3 and Final Fantasy IV. And for me, it was mostly action stuff like Contra 3 3 and Legend of the Mystical Ninja. However, my tastes skewed much younger than my older brother, so I was still drawn to certain games like Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage, Mickey's Magical Quest, and Roadrunner's Death Valley Rally made by iCom and published by Sunsoft in November of 1992. I remember renting this one and really looking forward to it because it looked so good. The art style and sprite animation was pulled straight from the cartoon, and hey, playing an interactive Looney Tunes cartoon like this was pretty dang novel. This game was even featured on the cover of Nintendo Power, so I was really psyched. Then it came time to play the game, and uh, I'm not kidding when I say this was easily the biggest disappointment of my young gaming career at that point. I'm not saying this game is that bad, it's just a massive disconnect between what I was hoping for and what I was expecting, and what I ended up getting was a game that looks the part and sounds the part but does not play the part. To get the basics out of the way first, you get a health meter with three lives and no continues to get through five levels, split up into a few stages each with no battery save or password system. The whole idea here is to pass through a series of checkpoints before getting to the exit, all while dodging enemies and traps, and of course, Weil E. Coyote, who is chasing you the entire time, on rocket-powered roller skates, in a green Batman costume, in a jacked up car, in a train, all of course generously provided by the Acme Corporation. However, if you sit down and actually play this one, you'll realize within about five seconds what the big problem is. Controlling Roadrunner is like controlling a bus. He's this big long, awkward sprite that slowly bounces around, taking damage from all over the place, with one of the absolute worst jumps you'll ever see in a game. Now, I don't know about you, but when I play a platformer like this, I don't usually expect to play as a freaking car when I'm supposed to be a famous cartoon character. Seriously, just bouncing around with this terrible jump while dodging traps in a 2D environment like this is just awful. The ideas of what they were going for here between how Roadrunner controls and how Weil E. Coyote shows up out of nowhere, they just do not work together. It's not just difficult to try and dodge stuff with this huge ass Roadrunner sprite, it's annoying. In addition to that, this game tries to do the Sonic-style level design, where it's just a mantle of leaning into the right path, going fast and using your speed to destroy anything in your way, but this game doesn't seem to understand that. Instead, the game punishes you for going fast by having random stuff pop up in your way and causing damage. It's like the game can't decide, dude, which is it? Do you want your character to go fast, or do you want to be a hop and bop platformer? Or do you want to be an exploration platformer? I can't tell. This game is proof that you can't do any of those things at the same time. Why would you want to do that? It's just a total failure all around. And that's really too bad because this game gets just about everything else right. The visuals are great, the backgrounds are straight out of the cartoon, the music is perfect, and seeing Wile E. Coyote show up in ridiculous costumes is always good for a laugh. I grew up loving these cartoons, so I'm practically predisposed to love this game, but good lord, the controls are so bad here, and the game doubles down by coming up with this awful level design that just does not make any sense. 90% of the time, you end up just flailing out of control with this terrible floaty jump, taking damage from stuff appearing on screen out of nowhere, like this construction site level here. You're supposed to run around and look for flags, which unlocks the exit, but Roadrunner's slow-motion jump is infuriating. Then you get the coyotes showing up on rocket-powered roller skates, and there's no way to avoid them. Seriously, there's no place to go. What does the game expect you to do? Ugh. So yeah, like I said at the beginning, I really wanted to like this game as a kid, but holy crap, what a disappointment. I think if they shrunk down the Roadrunner sprite, made the jump a little more responsive and cleaned up the level design a bit, this game could be pretty good, but as it is, there's absolutely no way I can recommend this one. It's easily one of the most frustrating games I can remember playing, and it really should be a much better game than it is. All right, that's all for now. I want to thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.