Beetlejuice
Nintendo Entertainment System
Nostalgia Factor:
Despite the fact that I used to own this game as a kid, I don’t remember it very well. I remember getting it shortly before I got my Sega Genesis, which could explain why this game was so quickly cast to the side by me. I remember liking it, though, which is why I was a bit taken by surprise when I looked the game up online a few weeks ago and saw all the negative reviews for it.
“Worst Rare game ever! The LJN curse lives on! A disgrace to the movie!”
I don’t remember it being that terrible. Like I said, I kind of enjoyed it.
Now that I have a RetroPie, it was an easy decision that I was going to sit down and revisit this game. Would it be as terrible as the reviews made it out to be? Let’s find out!
Story:
This game very loosely follows the events of the movie. And when I say loosely, I mean loosely. Remember the part in the movie where Beetlejuice stomped on a bunch of bugs and then used the dead bug carcasses as currency to buy weapons? Neither do I.
This is one of those kind of movie based games. The kind that takes a lot of liberties with the source material.
I hope I’m not venturing into spoiler territory on a 30 year old game, but before we move on to the next segment I have to mention how abruptly Beeteljuice ends. Remember the part in the movie where Beeltejuice is in a waiting room, waiting for his number to be called? That’s the last stage in the game. You run around the final stage collecting what looks like numbered tickets. When you collect five of them, the game just ends.
No fanfair. No buildup. It just ends. If the game was following the events of the movie, as it had loosely done up to this point, there still would have been a few levels after this. But no. That’s it. It’s like they suddenly ran out of time when making this game and had to cut things off short. No séance, no model town, no showdown with Otho.
Very strange.
Gameplay:
This is a 2D side scroller with a pretty steep (at least at first) learning curve. What you are supposed to do isn’t evident right away if you don’t have the instruction manual. Touching or jumping on enemies kills you. You don’t have any weapons to speak of. You can enter shops which sell things, but you don’t have any money. What are you supposed to do?
Simple: kill bugs. No really – kill bugs. As you play you’ll notice holes in the ground with tiny bugs jumping out of them. You have to stomp on these bugs to earn currency, which you use at the game’s shops to buy “scares”, which are basically projectile weapons you use to kill bosses and stage enemies. The bugs are color-coded. The yellow bugs, which are more difficult to catch, give you more currency. The red ones, which are slower moving and easy to stomp on, give you a tiny amount of currency. The blue ones are in between.
You can jump down the pits that the bugs are coming out of to compete in mini battles against random enemies. These enemies you CAN kill by jumping on their heads. Clearing out the room gives you a large amount of currency you can use at the shops.
Okay, you’ve got enough currency to buy some stuff. What next? Well, entering the shop seems like the most obvious place to begin, so we’ll start there. Each shop gives you a choice of three different “scares” to purchase. The higher priced items tend to give you multiple projectile attacks while the cheaper ones just give you one shot. I can understand why a game where you have to buy your attacks with currency might seem like a bad idea to some people, but I didn’t mind it here. Shops are plentiful and you come across a ton of them as you play. There are many opportunities to earn currency, and I rarely found myself having to grind for more. But I can see why people wouldn’t like this idea at all.
Once you’re armed up with all the projectiles you need, you can start advancing through the game’s stages. Where you are supposed to go is pretty ambiguous for the most part. The game doesn’t do a great job letting you know where to head to next. You have to really look everywhere and try to find areas where the screen scrolls with you. I remember a part early in the game where it seems like you have to keep going right, but there is a dead end. What you have to do is turn around and climb onto the roof of a nearby building. Once you start doing so, the screen moves with your character as you head the opposite direction.
One annoying thing about this game is that if you touch the bottom of the screen, you die. So if you are on top of the building I mentioned and you decide you want to return to the ground level to catch some more bugs, you can’t just jump off the building. You’ll hit the bottom of the screen and you’ll kick the bucket. What you have to do is jump onto a nearby tree, wait for the screen to come down with you so you can see the ground, and then jump onto the ground. The screen only pans with you if you have your feet on the ground, so if you just try jumping off the building directly you die. Instead of the screen just following you as you fall, you have to climb down little by little until you can actually see the ground. This resulted in a lot of annoying deaths as I played, because it literally goes against every single thing I’ve ever learned in a video game before.
Most stages end with a boss fight. Again, how to defeat them isn’t made evident by the game. What you have to do is pepper them with projectiles until they slam into the wall behind them. Do that, and the boss is dead. The problem with this is that a lot of the projectiles are short range, so you really have to get up in the boss’s face in order to kill him, which results in you taking a lot of damage that is very difficult to avoid.
I’d have to say my biggest complaint with the entire game is how you have to pause the game to select your attacks. So if I’m using the skull and I run out moves, I can’t just hit select or some other button to pick the next weapon in line. No no. I have to pause the game and pick it from a menu. I found myself having to pause and interrupt the action constantly. It really disrupted the flow of the game for me.
One thing I had forgotten about Beetlejuice is its inclusion of top-down stages. In these stages, you have to explore the Deetz’s house to find items for each member of the family. These family members are blocking your way and won’t move aside until you find what they are looking for. These stages have a nice maze/puzzle like quality to them and I really found myself enjoying them as I played. Easily the highlight of the game for me, which is funny because as a kid I couldn’t stand these stages.
Graphics:
I’d be kidding myself if I said this was a great looking game. It’s not. It is very primitive looking, and not in a positive or charming way. This isn’t something like the original Super Mario Bros. that you could make an argument still stands the test of time. It doesn’t.
Garish colors, plain backgrounds. Meh. That said, the top-down stages look a lot better than the side scrolling ones – so at least the game has that going for it.
Sound:
Really not much to appreciate here either. The music and sound effects are filled with your generic NES bleeps and bloops. There are absolutely no catchy tunes you’ll find yourself humming after walking away from this game. And the noise the game makes when you die... ugh. The sound is about as mediocre as you can possibly get.
Overall:
Even after finishing this game I still didn’t quite understand why people hate Beetlejuice so much. I had a fun time with it! It wasn’t until after writing my own review and looking over it that the game’s flaws really started to jump out at me.
Little effort was put into this game’s presentation. As far as graphics and sound go, this is probably one of the weakest NES games that I have reviewed to date. I personally don’t care as long as the game is still fun to play, but I know that a lot of people out there probably can’t get past how ugly this game looks and sounds. Then there’s the learning curve. If you don’t have an instruction manual, you’re really going to struggle finding out what you are supposed to do in this game. Another strike for new players. Then there’s all the weird stuff the game does, like killing you if you touch the bottom of the screen. You might be saying – why didn’t I complain about this when I reviewed Contra? Simple – in Contra you keep moving in one direction with no need to double back at all. In this game, you HAVE to backtrack and go up and down to make it through levels. That’s why this flaw is so annoying.
With all this said, I STILL like this game. I don’t know why. Yeah, it looks primitive and it’s racked with flaws that would probably turn off most gamers – but I don’t care. I had a good time with this game. I won’t say I was jumping out of my seat over it or anything, In fact, I will probably never return to it again in my life. But it accomplished what it set out to do: it kept me entertained for a little while.
Beetlejuice, this is probably the best online review you’ll ever get. Take it and enjoy it!
Final Score:
C+
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