The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends

The Good
The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends are a wonderful series of television cartoons from the 1960s, which certainly have the potential to be the inspiration for a good, even great, video game.

Sadly, this video game is one of many video games based on a popular franchise that only succeeds at disappointing.

The player controls Rocky or Bullwinkle through a series of bad looking and poorly designed platforming levels. The ability to easily switch between the two characters and the titles given to the levels are nice touches. Sadly, everything else about the game smells of a different sort of 'Bull'.

The Bad
Maybe, it was simply sloppiness, a lack of resources for adequate development or maybe it was simply impractical recreate the television shows motif and style on a 8-bit video game system. Whatever the reason, these are some of the worst graphics you will see on a official NES video game from the early 1990s

The character does not really have much to do in each level, beyond move forward, until the end of the level. Yes, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale do frequently appear in each levels, but their are not really many enemies, bosses, puzzles or obstacles to overcome, which is just as well because our two famous cartoon heroes are total video game wimps.

Both characters can jump and collect bombs to throw at the two, Eastern European spies. Beyond that, Rocket J. Squirrel can fly-glide. sort of, and Bullwinkle can ram the spies with his antlers.

Our cartoon heroes cannot take too many hits before its lights out, but most players will be able to breeze through the levels in the game with little trouble and with little interest.

The game has none of the clever charm, humor and wit featured in the cartoon series.

The familiar "friends" from the cartoon series (i.e. Dudley Do-Right, Peabody & Sherman and Fractured Fairy Tales) are either ignored or reduced to brief, unimaginative roles.

The Bottom Line
Bullwinkle and Rocky's video game outing only offers a few nice, or simply tolerable, elements to it. The cartoon characters and their fans, deserve better then a steamy pile of 'Bull'.