The Adventures Of Bayou Billy Review

Every so often a company that makes good games makes a questionable one. Or a string of them in some instances. Konami, for example, made a lot of good games. Well. Kind of.

There’s a whole story about Nintendo and game producers and Nintendo trying to keep a lot of crap games coming from one or two publishers. Basically, Nintendo wanted to restrict how many games a developer and producer could release on the NES per year. The idea was if you allowed fewer releases, you’d get better releases instead of a lot of churned out crap. So any publisher was allowed, to get that Nintendo license, to release five games a year.

It’s a decent enough idea and it has merit. But, and there’s always a but, some companies found work arounds. Tengen and Wisdom Tree, for example, just went around Nintendo’s copy protection by making their own carts and, essentially, creating official pirate NES games. I find the instance with Wisdom Tree particularly entertaining as they were mostly biblical games and instead of playing by the rules, they circumvented them to get what they wanted. Seems familiar to me somehow.

Anyway, other publishers found a more respectable way to go about this and, essentially, split up their production between two brands. Konami did this with Ultra. And here’s the thing. Konami had games like Contra and Castlevania on the NES. But Ultra had the TMNT games and Metal Gear. The first Metal Gear game, a Konami IP was released in America under their shell company Ultra. Ultra didn’t make it into the SNES days after Nintendo relaxed their restrictions but they had about a dozen games on the NES, some on the Game Boy, a couple of DOS ports and even a couple on the Commodore 64.

All that to say that Bayou Billy is a Konami game, not an Ultra game. Now that the preamble is over…

Bayou Billy is your basic “Save The Princess” game. See, Billy’s got himself a lady and she was done kidnapped and so Billy is going to go out and save her. Simple, right? Nothing complicated about this plot and that’s how we like our beat em up/driving/rail shooters. Yeah, that’s right.

So Billy here is a game that takes place in abroad variety of styles. You’ve got a 2.5 D side scrolling beat em up. You’ve got a Pole Position style driving segment, and you’ve got a side scrolling rail shooter (that used the Zapper!) segments. They crammed a lot into this cart and, in general, things are pretty good.

Except for the fighting stages. See, Konami thought the game was going to be too easy for the Americans and, for a change, they upped the difficulty. Kind of. In those same said beat em up sections in the NA version of the game enemies have double the health and you, Billy, do less damage. So, essentially, enemies now have 4x the health. So these fighting stages take a LONG time and any deaths you’re going to take happen here. The fighting isn’t exactly great either as enemies seem to be able to punch and kick Billy from all the angles while Billy has to be directly in front of a bad guy to hit em. The bad guys in question come in a few flavors. Pink guy, Blue guy, I think there’s a Green guy. Birds. Gators. Men With Hats. Men Without Hats. Even, and I am not making this up, cyborg robo men with bionic commando arms. The locations are good, the enemy variety is good, the combat is garbage.

The driving is pretty typical racing for this time. It’s not really a race against other vehicles as much as it is the clock. You’ll have to deal with other cars, rocks, oil spills, planes, and other hazards all trying to mess up your jeep. Thankfully you’ve got some guns and grenades to help. Jackal (another Konami/Ultra title) this ain’t, but it does the job.

The shooter stages actually work a little bit like Gotcha! (yet another Konami/Ultra) Except instead of playing capture the flag with paint guns, you’ve gotta deal with random commando dudes and helicopters. This can be played with the Zapper or the control pad if you don’t have one.

The other two modes are fun enough to play and enjoy but having to get through all the fighting stages just makes it a chore. It’s too bad. It’d be a half decent game if not for that.

The graphics, across the board, are good. The beat em up stages have very little flicker or slow down, the driving stages have good looking sprites and background, and the shooting stages have good looking characters and helicopters. All in all, it’s a decent looking game.

The music is where this game shines. All the music in the game is funky as hell and super enjoyable to listen to when playing or just on the background. Best part of the game for sure. Oh! And there’s a little digitized “Oh my God!” That’s kinda neat, right? Right.

If this kind of thing interests you at all, I absolutely suggest trying to find a copy of the Japanese version of the game. There’s no dialog that you have to contend with, there’s no real story to speak of that we didn’t go over here. The fighting stages will be better and the rest of the game will be the same.