One Hour Reviews: Game #012: Clu Clu Land, Released: October 18th, 1985

Developed by: Nintendo R&D 1, Published by: Nintendo

Introduction & Bias:

I'm happy to be in the home stretch of the NES launch games. Part of the intention of this blog is to see the evolution of the games on the Nintendo over its nine year lifespan. Covering the original 17 for so long makes the games all look a little bit the same in some ways. I am still in the era when Nintendo released the same games for the NES and the arcade and I am at a time when the NES library was largely made up of older titles that were recycled for Nintendo's new home library. I am not complaining about this as a business model. What I am excited for the most are fresh ideas that will come to the NES and really see the quality and originality of the games pick up.

With that bellyaching in mind this article is a review of Clu Clu Land. Now, I have never played this game before. By its name I assumed it was going to be a platformer since the word "Land" is in its title. Other than that I am going in completely blind about this game. You could say that I don't have a Clu. Har har har.

First Impressions & Presentation:

Upon starting the game I get a kind of bubble-themed text title card and a bright sounding tune playing in the background. It looks like high scores are in play with this game so maybe I'll be able to make a self-imposed challenge to make sure that I have something to work towards during my hour and, oh...

Pictured: No programmed high score

Oh, well. The game is nice enough to give me some gameplay demonstrations and I am glad it did because this game is nothing like I expected. I looked through about three demonstrations before I felt comfortable enough to proceed. It took me that long because I have never quite seen a game like this before. On the surface it reminds me a lot of Pac-Man since the playing field is represented in a top-down view on a black surface with a roughly maze-like setting. I watch with confusion as what appears to be two propeller fish fly or swim in straight lines until they hit a wall which at that point they bounce off and return in the opposite direction. The playing field is set up into a grid with what must be poles at the grid corners because the only way the fish people players can turn is by holding out a hand and spinning around the pole to change direction which is really inefficient if you ask me.

Opposing the player propeller fish are blue, spiked sea urchin type things. Their only method of attack seems to be getting in the way but they are so good at that. They get in the way so well that if one of the player propeller player fish people touches them they explode. That's good family fun right there. The other two death causing items in the game are the enemy spawning portals which kill the player if they run (and not swing) over those spaces, and time. Time runs down very quickly and the player will always be under the gun to solve the game stages rapidly. The game gives the player 800 "seconds" to complete each level. I put "seconds" in quotation marks because in reality the player has less than two minutes to complete each stage.

The presentation is serviceable. While the demonstrations are silent the game has music that plays during all of regular gameplay. The music picks up when the player has 200 "seconds" left which adds to the tension. The graphics are pretty simple. It evokes Pac-Man with the black background with colorful objects running over them. It even goes so far to have food items and other powerups appear on the playing field over time. There is nothing wrong with taking Pac-Man as inspiration but it also means that I want to compare the game to Pac-Man in other ways.

Not Pictured: My confusion about who thought this stuff up

So it turns out that I learned a lot by watching the demos but it took playing the game a round or two to really get the hang of this unusual concept.

Experience & Conveyance:

Once I started playing I hard to learn two things: first, I had to learn how to control my player fish propeller player and I needed to learn the object of the game since I didn't quite figure it out during the demonstrations. Turning the player character in the game is not as simple as pressing left to go left like in Pac-Man. What needs to happen is that the player must press the direction of the pole the player is passing. If there is a pole below the player then pressing down will extend the player fish's arm. Once the player catches the pole the fish will start spinning around the pole until the D-Pad button is let go. This turns out to be a large source of difficulty for the game. More on that later.

Pictured: A successful alternative carer as a stripper

The object turns out to be creating pictures on the screen. As the player fish propeller player player passes between certain pairs of poles some familiar looking gems will appear. The top of the screen has the unintuitive phrase "LAST: #". It probably would have been better if it said "LEFT: #" as this is a countdown of how many gems the player needs to reveal before beating the stage. The stages, when completed, create one picture or another. Sometimes the completed pictures look kind of creepy when the enemy portals are taken into account.

Pictured: The true inspiration for Five Nights at Freddy's

The goal is to complete as many stages as possible before running out of lives. In my entire hour I did not even beat stage 5. This difficulty comes from a couple of different sources. First, the movement is kind of clumsy. The spinning mechanic does leave a fair amount of room for error and this is where my comparisons to Pac-Man come in. With Pac-Man the player can develop some twitch reflexes to go in the four different directions with a lot of precision. While the goal of this game is not to go over every part of the maze, just very specific portions, getting the propeller player propeller fish player to go where it is needed quickly takes some getting used to. On top of this the players can quickly find themselves running into enemies a couple of times in a row if they are not careful because there are no invincibility frames to take advantage of between lives. To add insult to injury, the timer continues speeding down to zero even while the player is respawning so it is possible that the player could die, respawn and run out of time a couple of seconds later and die again. If the player runs out of time the timer comes back to 300 "seconds" instead of 800 so the player is under even more pressure to complete the stage quickly. It is quite possible to come into a stage with a full compliment of lives and then lose all of them in just a couple of seconds. Add this in with rubber band traps that appear when passed over which will bounce the player back without warning and a faster game speed beginning on Stage 2 and you have a pretty classic Nintendo hard game.

Pictured: Exploding. That's good, clean family entertainment right there

Verdict & Score:

I can't say that I have ever played a game quite like Clu Clu Land before. I certainly have not come across anything like it on the NES yet. I think it is fair to compare this game to Pac-Man since both games involve exploring what is essentially a maze while avoiding obstacles. The reason why Pac-Man has stayed relevant all of these years comes from the simplicity of the controls. It is much easier to move in a direction based on a single input than to have the extra step of swinging around a pole to change directions. This is especially true since the player can under or overestimate the length of their swing to end up going in a wrong direction and end up dying or wasting a lot of valuable time. Clu Clu Land is buoyed by some good presentation but it's hurt by the odd rules and controls that make the game a little artificially difficult. With all that mixed up into one product I'll give Clu Clu Land a 5/10. It's not bad but I have a feeling that I would not recommend this above an average NES game.

Factoids & Trivia:

One of the advantages/disadvantages to playing these games blind is that I get to create my own narrative for the game. I do not tell the reader what the names of enemies or player avatars are unless the game tells me first so I get to be as silly as I want to. After doing some research it appears that I am only about as silly as the game creators. Let me break this down:

The player is a bubble fish named Bubbles who is trying to gain the treasure stolen from Clu Clu Land by the evil urchins, the Unira.

That's pretty much it! I mean, now that I know that this is a bubble fish and not a propeller fish player propeller fish player fish I guess it makes more sense that the player explodes when they die. I was right about the sea urchins being sea urchins but that is some plot. It turns out the title is just an attempt at romanizing the Japanese title "Kurokuro Rando". "Kuro Kuro" is the Japanese onomatopoeia for going around and around which makes sense considering that this fish cannot steer on its own. No wonder why all of its treasure got stolen.

There is also a VS arcade port. If you want to hear a guy attempting to make a couple of jokes while mumbling into his microphone and playing the arcade port I will ask you to watch the linked video below. Also, if you want to buy this game most people are trying to sell it for about $25-30 dollars.