"Tecmagic you let this Pink Panther fan down."

Back when I was a kid, I would go to (at the time) Funcoland and browse their lists and see what caught my eye. I never did any research on my games, sure they were only a couple of bucks a piece but they never seemed to give me any long term game play for my hard earned cash from my paper route. I based my selections off of popular licenses of the day and usually got mediocre games. One of the games I owned then was Pink Goes To Hollywood. I knew nothing about the game at all buy my love of the cartoon show convinced me to buy this game, I honestly tricked myself into enjoying this game at least for a little while and even completed it once, not that it's a hard game. I wanted to write a review for it so I went back and gave it one more try to see if it would give me any more enjoyment then it did when I was a kid, needless to say, it didn't.

The game is generic “me too” platformer all too common for that day and age released by the (sarcasm on) wildly popular company Tecmagic. It's reminiscent of Aladdin or Pitfall the Mayan Adventure with large and sprawling stages that require you to find each exit. The stages don't have enough going on in them to make them exciting to play through; each one just feels like they made them big for the sake of making them big and often take too long to find the exit. Since Pink is basically auditioning for a Hollywood act, he's traversing through several movie sets while Inspector Clousseau is in constant pursuit. The jungle and kitchen stages are two of the better stages and the wild west and the haunted house stages are two of the weaker stages. Some stages have you actually battling Clousseau at the end and others don't. When each stage is completed, you are presented with an ending basically saying that Pink made it to Hollywood.

The graphics aren't groundbreaking in any way but they portray the zany and abstract look and visual styles that the old cartoons did and I kind of like that about the game. The Pink Panther and Inspector Clousseau look exactly what they looked like the cartoons and that's another plus; their animation is also very well done too. What we are faced with though throughout the rest of the game are graphics that don't look bad per se but with the stages being too long and drawn out it causes the graphical changes to be too spread out too and they got old for me to keep staring at for the duration of the game.

The music also sounds like the abstract music found in the cartoons and it's fitting here too and helps the lighthearted feel of the game. Surprisingly, the sound effects are rather good even for the Genesis, everything is pretty crisp, from Pinks jumping to the punch of his attack, it all fits really well.

After all the praise you probably think that I actually like the game. In all actuality, I don't. It just too generic to stand a chance at all, that's not to say it's a bad game because it's not it's just that most other platformers at the time were done better, Pink can pretty much jump with C and attack with his punch gun (I don't know what you call it though) with B and traverse about six repetitive and tedious stages.

Even though it's a mediocre game, it's still a Pink Panther game and that's cool since there's so few games that feature one of my favorite childhood cartoon characters. It's a cool game to have in a collection but not much fun to play anymore, still it may be worth a try if you really like the Pink Panther.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 12/22/09

Game Release: Pink Goes to Hollywood (US, 1993)