Adventures of Yogi Bear

"Should have stayed on hibernation mode. Forever."

It is not particularly hard to image what a Yogi Bear Snes video game would look and play like, and if for some reason you are reading this nonsense and the word ``platfomer'' is the one you are thinking right now, well, not reward for you because that is a given.

Plot:
There is no intro but apparently someone is intending to build a chemical plant near the Jellystone park or something like that and Yogi must stop them.

Graphics:
The game sports big, detailed, well animated and rather colorful characters in the vein of Bugs Bunny Rabbit Rampage, not as good or big or detailed or colorful and specially nowhere near as good animated but still very good looking.

Music:
It`s pretty fun to listen to and overall the quality is surprisingly high for the most part, plus you get to hear Yogi do his world famous laughter or whatever it is before the title screen pops up, which hardly sounds anything like the original but well, not that I am complaining. In any case, the soundtrack is surprisingly good.

Gameplay:
Our mission, as expected, is to reach the end of each level avoiding or jumping over enemies such as moles, hedgehogs, ferrets, bats, birds, skunks, living snow men and the like. In the process you have to collect clocks, jump over picnic baskets and activate some sort of beacons or whatever they are (each stage has its own different ones) for no other reason than to get more points at the end of each level, which I assume that probably translates into extra lives although I am not 100% certain, so if you just skip through most of them nothing actually happens.

There are five stages, each one with another five fairly long and almost insultingly uninventive levels without any check points so even if the game isn`t particularly hard you`d better be careful or it can be quite frustrating, specially if you take your time and decide to look for every single item in the area.

The controls are decent if a bit slippery, you know, when it seems like the floor is filled with oil. Thankfully this problem is not as annoying as in other games (Robocop 2 for the Nes comes to mind). Yogi is kind of heavy to handle as well, which kind of makes sense but can a bit tricky while playing because this makes harder to calculate the jumps. The difficulty as I said before is rather low and there is not a whole lot of variety when it comes to pitfalls and such, the stages are fairly standard platform fare (snowy landscapes, caves, forest areas and the like), they are not interesting in the slightest and the few obstacles you may find are nothing that you haven`t seen before a trillion times in much better games. This is why I`ve decided to rate it lower than the average Snes platformer, I mean if you look at other derivative platform games like Mr. Nutz, Aero, Zero, Plok or even Hurricanes at least those games include one or two mildly original twists however in the of case of Yogi there is nothing at all, nada, nil. It`s an extremely dull experience.

Overall:
Yet another platformer nobody has ever heard of and that definitely should never have seen the light of day, not because there is anything particularly wrong with it, in fact it`s rather competently made, but because it has absolutely nothing new to offer at all, even among the barrage of derivative Snes platformers who have absolutely nothing new to offer at all.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/18/09

Game Release: Adventures of Yogi Bear (US, 10/01/94)