I'd lament the fact that Piko interactive is selling a legal ROM of an insanely obscure and forgotten Game Boy platformer by Ocean (and a sequel to Ocean conversion of an old arcade game called Hunchback), but... yeah, why is this here and why is Piko Interactive asking almost 9 bucks MSRP for it?
This is just a Bleem emulated version of the game with the usual features found in other rereleased by Piko (like their Steam “ports” of GBA shmup Iridion 3D), so no music options, and no colorization, for istance.
THAT aside, one would almost want to believe they stumbled upon a “hidden gem”, or a somewhat decent game of its time that is way better than its absurd premise (or the “hunchback with Green Goblin inspired rapeface” cover-promo art) would led on... sadly, this isn't the case.
Super Hunchback is a simple affair, really, a fairly basic 2D platformer that has you as Quasimodo jump on logs, avoid obstacles, collect fruit and items for points, with the idea of reaching the bell at each of the 3-5 sequences a level is comprised of, with 9 levels in total, with the goal of saving fair Esmeralda from a villain called Halfenpounder or something that helds her captive in a castle.
Riveting stuff, but whatever, though it's kinda funny how the story description "implies" you are going to save her because no one else showed up.
Gameplay is so simple, you don't even have an attack because there are no enemies to face or defeat in order to carry on, and the controls are fairly ok, again, not much to learn, since you'll have to master the basic jump and how to fully get the most out of it with, swing on some vines/ropes and occasionally mash the jump button to swim back to the surface if you fall into water.
It looks okay, though the Quasimodo sprite is kinda half-assed, as in the bonus room you get to see him chilling on a folding chair and realized that yet, he's supposed to have a bowl cut, but the in-game sprite makes him looks like a hunched, bald Popeye-Wimpy gestalt entity.
Music is a bit annoying, to be honest, not the worst but you do wish you could at least turn it off or lower the volume a bit.
the big problem is that they decided to make a precision platformer with few levels nearly impossible, insanely stupid hard, and i while i do occasionally enjoy this type of masochistic experience (i finished Velvet Assassin, for ♥♥♥♥'s sake)... this is just the game developers vomiting their spite at the player, making sure you will never get to the end, or make any progress after a bit, unless you devote god knows how many time to learn or have a The Wizard/Rain Man style relative that will do it for you.
Or more correctly, subject them to, since this is just punishment for its own sake,
This is the kind of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ that justifies savescumming (which i did profusely because if the game throws ♥♥♥♥ at you, it's actually fair you have some way to fight back against the cheap ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥), as especially after the mid-point the level design becomes insanely cheap, hyper frustrating, throwing curveballs that will mean instant death (there's no health bar and it's inconsistent which obstacles will just make you jump back and leave stunned for a few seconds, and those that will just kill you), stuff that you simply won't expect or be able to react or perform as needed the first time around, not that the game would let you
Plus it highlights how the controls are okay but not as good as the game needs them to be (the fact you always have to gain some momentum Super Mario style even for mid air control and yet you can't press B to run-/gain momentum... doesn't help, at all), since it almost wants to be Super Meat Boy but doesn't give you those precise controls, and that game is hard but actually fair.
This is just unfair, and to “seal the deal” on how unfair it is, to further spite the player, despite the game encouraging racking up points, you don't get extra lives that way, and if you run out of lives, its game over, no continues, no password, you're booted back to the options-less title screen, which has one of the game's few highlights, a 8 bit rendition of Putting On The Ritz that i believe is a Young Frankenstein reference.
Which is nice, even if kinda random.
That aside, the game telling you to “rack points up” in the bonus warp zones feels especially empty because it's not like it even saves high scores at the end.
To say nothing of how in one of the final levels getting killed by a bolt of electricity glitched & crashed the game 99% of the times (Piko sure did put time to remove Ocean's copyright and put theirs into the code, but clearly no one tested the ROM), and how the final level is an insanely confusing, overly long and annoying “adjust the mirrors” puzzle, where nothing of the sort happened before, and this one is made even harder to figure out (even with a guide and a map of the puzzle) due to the Game Boy screen size.
Even putting aside the ♥♥♥♥♥♥ non-optimization, the game itself it's quite ♥♥♥♥ regardless, so even on sale it ain't worth it, unless you're me or the protagonist of Shangri La Frontier.
Or need some material for an AVGN-inspired web series.
