I don’t know how this got past me, but I’m on it now: a few weeks ago, the unreleased game saviors at Lost Levels gave up on their seven year wait for Tiny Toons: Defenders of the Universe and finally pushed the beta they had been sitting on into public channels. The reason you should care about such inexplicable, unfinished, licensed pap? Two reasons. It’s from Treasure, the Japanese game developer everyone so loves (probably too much). And it’s been billed in the past as the spiritual successor to Rakugaki Showtime, the cult crayon arena fighter nobody’s ever played.
Thinking it was at worst a curious historical footnote to the legacy of a storied developer, I went through the trouble of giving it a shakedown. And this was certainly troublesome code—it allegedly runs very badly on PS2 emulators, and although my dusty old PS2 could read the game just fine it couldn’t display it on my screen without the assistance of the exceptionally obscure Blaze HDTV Player. For these reasons it seems like very few people have actually played the game in a workable state.
But I have, though I probably shouldn’t have bothered. It isn’t that this beta code is technically unplayable. It’s not a finished game, by any means—the game has both audio quality and audio cue problems, and critical instruction text runs off the screen where it can’t be read. These are just small, quashable problems, though. The game still feels largely content complete and doesn’t look awful for a 2001 PS2 game, though it doesn’t look good by any metric. But the technical side is competent, so that’s not the issue.
Instead, the game’s major problem seems to be that it has too many masters. If it is indeed trying to be a spiritual successor to Rakugaki Showtime, it’s also trying to meet the arbitrary kiddie game requirements of either publisher Conspiracy (who judging by its track record may or may not have cared at all) or license holder Warner Brothers. So from its game design DNA it pulls the elements of a chaotic arena fighter, like Power Stone 2 but occasionally even more frenetic and hard to control. This is fine for a multiplayer game.
But demographics demand that DotU be a linear single-player game as well, and here this beta is a disaster. See, it’s still an arena fighter, so its single-player implementation is fighting AI opponents in a small, boxy arena before running down a…long hallway that still plays like an arena. Here, game design that emphasizes fighting is in direct conflict with level design that emphasizes platforming, so the whole game collapses into a mangled mess.
I’d like to believe that Treasure realized it was trying to push a square peg into a round hole with this game, and shut it down internally. More likely the reason for it never seeing release was “Conspiracy sold the license to stay afloat” or “somebody realized that nobody would buy a Tiny Toons game in 2001.” In any case its problems ran too deep to be salvaged, and we’re lucky it was doomed to be played only by bored bloggers on lazy afternoons.
Related Links:
Underrated: Mischief Makers
Jumper and How Not to Make a Game
Up All Night: Ex-Mutants