#100: Q*Bert 3

Q*Bert: A Real American

We're up to the 100th game released on the SNES in the US and what do we find? Is it a hidden gem? An all time classic? Something that really shouts Super Nintendo? No. We get a bad port of a 1982 arcade game.

@!#?@! indeed, Q*Bert. @!#?@!.

Now, Q*Bert is a game I played a fair bit of as a kid, on I believe the Atari 600XL port. It was a pretty good game for that sort of low tech system. A directional joystick and no buttons needed. No real computational power needed since there wasn't much going on on the screen at any given time. It was fun.

Hallelujah!

This game? Really not so much. The controls just don't work with a SNES controller at all. Q*Bert is set up so diagonals are the things that matter, and I seem to recall back in the day you could just rotate your square joystick into a sensible orientation. Try as I could here I couldn't repeat the feat with my xBox 360 controller. The odd shape kept moving back into my hands the way it should, so up was up and right was right. Only this control scheme had up being up-left and right being up-right and if you pick the wrong one in a split second decision you were dead...

I was dead a lot.

The enemies were so slow that I didn't really need to go fast and make split second decisions. So I was actually able to beat a few levels by concentrating really hard on keeping my diagonals straight. But concentrating really hard on the controls for a game isn't fun. It's the mark of a terrible game. Besides, I want the enemies to move fast enough that I need to make split second decisions! That's the essence of Q*Bert! Make snap decisions properly over and over or die. I want the decisions I'm making to be figuring out enemy movements to chart a safe path, not how do I move down-left.

Even in the game where I beat some levels, disaster struck. I jumped out of bounds somehow and ended up in a glitched out, frozen game state. I don't know if that's an emulator issue or part of the actual game but I don't like it.

The game's music and imagery were all really silly, as though the people who put it together remembered playing the game from when they were kids and decided they had to make it feel very kid-like. It didn't really fit.

Now, on the one hand, this was actually Q*Bert. So I don't know that it deserves an F... It was a legit port that just couldn't work with the SNES controller. Or couldn't it? I'm pretty sure diagonals actually work fine if you code the input handler properly. Which means they didn't. Q*Bert is a fine game. Q*Bert 3 is terrible.

Rating: F