Review of The Adventures of Bayou Billy (NES)

The Adventures of Bayou Billy is a video game released in 1989 for the Nintendo Entertainment System developed by the great guys at Konami. Unfortunately, even though it's made by a great company, this game has a very bad reputation. Is it really as bad as they say? Let's find out.

Story : Your girlfriend is captured and you have to go rescue her. Simple, but the story hardly matters anyway. Only cool thing to mention here is the game takes place in New Orleans. Hey, that's kinda neat. Too bad there's no Zydeco music in here.

Graphics : The graphics are mediocre at best. While not outright ugly or off putting, they still don't look all that great either. Billy looks decent but only has a few frames of animation at best. The enemies are mostly palette swaps of Billy himself, which makes the game a bit of a bore to look at after awhile. The backgrounds are very dull and recycled, often being palette swaps of stages before it. Yawn.

Sound : Probably the one area of the game that's passable, the music in this game isn't bad. There isn't anything mind blowing here, but the compositions are arranged nice and show some effort. The sound effects are appropriate but there's nothing very satisfying about them overall. Like I mentioned before, some New Orleans style music would have been nice but I digress.

Game Play : Whoa boy, here we go. This is where the game gets it's reputation. Well, let's talk about some of the positives first I guess. First of all, there's three types of stages which gives some very good variety. Hm, well, there isn't much else that's positive so let's talk about the first kind of stage.

Stage one is a beat em' up, and a very difficult one at that. The enemies in this game are absolutely brutal. You know how in video games you can destroy henchmen in one hit whereas you can take twenty hits? That's not the case here, you are the henchmen to your enemy's henchmen. That is, don't get hit at all if you expect to survive in this game. Not unlike Double Dragon 3, always use jumping attacks or you have no chance of beating anybody.

Stage type two is a shooting game, and you can use the zapper or the controller depending on which game type you picked. If you use the controller like me, you'll be using the D-pad to guide the cross hairs. First, you have a limited amount of ammo so you have to converse which can be hard since you can't get hit either. Then there's the bosses, and this is far as I got into the game without cheats. The bosses in the shooting levels are insanely difficult and I don't suggest even trying unless you have a ton of patience.

Stage three is the most famous of the three, the jeep racing levels. I had to use cheats to get through these levels too, and even then it was a frustrating affair. There isn't much to say except that these are some of the most difficult levels I've ever encountered, and if you hope to make it through this level just never press the acceleration button.

Re playability : Has none whatsoever. Sorry, Konami.

Overall : 1/10. Konami is one of the greatest game developers in the world. So let's ignore this trash and just move on. Can't win em all, so to speak.