Wally Bear and the No Gang

"Do you like buying games that insult your intelligence? Here is your answer!"

Released by AVE in the early 1990's, Wally Bear and the NO! Gang is an unlicensed game about a skateboarding bear who travels through subway stations and sewers to teach people not to steal or do drugs. I guess it's not a horrible concept, it's unique anyway, but the way it is pulled of in this game is just retarded. For instance, in level 4 you find out that the evil Ricky Rat has stolen Priscilla's new radio, and has gone on the other end of the subway with it. Oh no! Luckily getting the radio back doesn't require and more intelligence than it takes to break a potato chip. Because getting that radio back doesn't mean catching up to Ricky and beating the crap out of him. That would be immoral. Instead you just have to skateboard over about five mice and get to the door on the other side of the the subway train. Congrats. You got the radio back. Somehow skateboarding to the other side magically transfers the radio from wherever Ricky is to Wally Bear's hands. Either that or we're just supposed to assume that Wally kicked the crap out of Ricky and just didn't decide to show us. Either way, this is pretty much the problem for every solution in the game. Just skateboard to wherever your animal friend in trouble might be, say one magic sentence, like ''Doing drugs is stupid, Toby.'' and his or her problems are magically answered. ''Thanks Wally, I didn't know what to do!''. They don't seem to care about the fact that you didn't say anything helpful, you simply stole a one-liner from a commercial NBC plays at 1:00 in the morning.

Oddly enough AVE seems to have believed that someone would buy Wally Bear and the NO! Gang as their first NES game, because on the label they wrote Press Here so you'd know how to put it in your NES. To bad they didn't give instructions on how to fit this down your toilet pipe.

Graphics : 7 out of 10. Well, here's the high point. Everything is pretty good quality wise. The coloring is good, but the animated sprites seem bland. As everyone who plays this game points out, Wally's dad is not wearing pants, Wally's family doesn't own furniture, and the wallpaper in his living room could cause a seizure if you were to spin in circles inside the house. No wonder Wally doesn't even argue about having to trek through streets filled with golden dogs who chew through your stomach if you try to go by the grocery store and crazed birds living in sewers with no purpose other than killing you and your drug free ways.

Sound : 2 out of 10. Two words. Catchiest. Music. Evar. Just kidding, it's so awful. I have no idea how someone could have composed this stuff and still have the ability to walk in an upright position, but then again you have to be a special person to make a game like this. It sounds like someone tuned the pitch of a Yamaha keyboard as high as it would go and then accidentally sat on it. Except for the music when you lose a life, that sounds more like a cat ran across the keyboard.

Play Control : 1 out of 10. Wally must be wearing so Air Jordan's, 'cause that bear can get some hangtime! If you decide to jump, don't expect to be coming down anytime soon. And when you get to level six (if you feel that you don't know enough overplayed ''don't do drugs'' sayings already) don't expect to ever beat the level. I've done it once, and I've been there close to a hundred times but your floaty jumping makes it impossible to dodge the stone masks. Also this is one of those one hit and you die games, unless you have some pies or skateboards, then Wally is given another hit.

So....should you....ha ha...buy this? If you collect NES games like me, then you might want it for a conversation piece. If you buy games just to play them (how odd) then I'd steer clear. You won't find this at Funcoland anyways, and the $20.51 I paid on eBay probably doesn't sound to enticing, does it?

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/25/03, Updated 02/25/03