8-Bit Halfwit is a series where Brent Blackwell, a longtime but not particularly skillful gamer, revisits NES games in order of their release. To see more in this series, click here.
Details
Release Date: October 18, 1985
Genre: Puzzle
GameFAQs rating: 3.21/5
GameFAQs difficulty level: Just Right
GameFAQs length: 4.5 hours
Background: From Wikipedia:
In Clu Clu Land, the player is a female balloonfish named Bubbles (グルッピー Guruppī?, Gloopy) who swims around in a maze trying to uncover all the golden Ingots.
Clu Clu Land‘s story starts with a type of sea urchin, the Unira, stealing all of the treasures in the underwater kingdom of Clu Clu Land. Bubbles, the heroine, sets out to retrieve the treasure. The object of the game is to uncover all the gold ingots in each stage while avoiding the Unira and Black Holes. Ingots usually form a shape such as a heart or a mushroom. The only way Bubbles can turn around to change directions is by means of Turning Posts located throughout the stages. Bubbles can stun the Unira by using a Sound Wave. When they are stunned, Bubbles can push them into a wall to get rid of them and receive points. If Bubbles is hurt by the Unira, she will lose a life. A life is also lost when Bubbles falls into a Black Hole, or when time runs out. The game ends if Bubbles has lost all her lives.
Game On
Boy, I’m pretty bad at this game. I think it’s very possible to be good at this game, but whatever motor skills that would require, I don’t have them. I played this game. A lot. Here were my stages of progression.
1 – I started the game with no knowledge of the goal
2 – I figured out the goal of the game
There’s no stage 3. I didn’t get better. I used up dozens of Clu Clu Lives just looking for a small measure of improvement, and I continuously failed. I could beat the first level roughly 60% of the time, and I never beat the second. This game made me begin to regret this series. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Getting to stage 2 took long enough.
You begin with a grid. It’s a grid that reminds you of Pac-Man, and you sense that this is very much going to be a Pac-Man knockoff. In a way, it is. But it’s less forthcoming. There are dots, representing posts which make up the grid. You’re in a sea of posts, spaced where you can pass between them all. There’s more freedom here than Pac-Man. There are also a couple of villains. Instead of a yellow gourmand trying to intake everything and avoid his demons like Stevie Nicks in a Columbian warehouse, you’re instead a balloonfish trying to avoid urchins. It’s all very nautical. Well, maybe not all, because inexplicably the traps – oh yes, there are traps as well – aren’t fishermen’s nets or anything like that. They’re BLACK HOLES. Just to recap, you’re a balloonfish, whose name is Bubbles, by the way, swimming through areas with nothing but posts, trying to avoid urchins and motherfucking black holes. You know, just like the real ocean.
Here’s the thing – that’s just half the goal. The other half is discovery-based! Sounds fun, right? There’s a hidden design somewhere in this grid of posts, and your Clu Clu Mission is to uncover that hidden design. It’s something cute and Nintendo-ey like a star or a flower or a mushroom. You discover this design by passing between posts. As you pass between two posts, one of two things happens. In most cases, nothing happens. You just keep moving along. If the line you crossed is part of the design, however, a gold ingot appears! With no instruction in the game, this was immensely confusing at first. I kept trying to pass back over the same spots, because, and pardon the hell out of me for thinking this, I thought I needed to collect these coins – like you would in EVERY other video game ever made. But no, you just uncover these coins, which, judging by their design, were originally minted in Hyrule.
Before moving on, it’s time to recognize what was happening in the world at the time:
1979 – Pink Floyd releases The Wall, which instills in us a permanent desire to break down walls.
1980 – NAMCO boldly releases the wall-based game Pac-Man. Pink Floyd can have their rebellion, NAMCO says, but the masses like structure.
1982 – Ronald Reagan, visiting Berlin, asks “Why is the wall there?”
1985 – Clu Clu Land is released.
1987 – No doubt inspired by a free roaming 8-bit balloonfish, Ronald Reagan demands, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!”
1990 – The destruction of the Berlin Wall begins.
Coincidence? I don’t Clu Clu Think so. I think there’s an argument to be made that this video game directly contributed to the ultimate unification of Germany.
I think Clu Clu Land was pitched as follows:
Idea man: It’s like Pac-Man, but with no walls!
Money man: That sounds great! But if there aren’t walls, it’ll be too easy.
Idea man: Ok, how about instead of gobbling up dots, you have to uncover a hidden picture?
Money man: Hmm, maybe. I like it, but go farther.
Idea man: Ok, instead of ghosts, we’ll have two beasts that chase you and some stationary kill spots you can’t go into. It’s set in the sea, so we’ll make them urchins and fishing traps.
Money man: We need a space game. Put in some black holes.
Idea man: But that doesn’t make any s-
Money man: And a fast-moving clock!
Idea man: Ok, but-
Money man: AND MAKE IT IRRITATINGLY DIFFICULT TO CHANGE DIRECTIONS!
Turning. It’s the aspect of gameplay I haven’t bitched about yet, and it’s the aspect that proved most insurmountable to me. It’d be too easy if you just turned, like Pac-Man. No, instead you’re a balloonfish that hooks onto the posts and swings around and around, and you continue swinging until you release into a direction. Curious if this was biologically sound, I looked into balloonfish, aka pufferfish. Turns out it’s not. They’re fish. They’re highly toxic to eat, but they don’t have hooks. As a result, I could only assume that this balloonfish had really gone through some shit in his her day. As a result, she’s got hooks for hands, and so we swing, like some bizarre nautical tetherball. Releasing at the right moment, or latching onto the right post, instead of the one before or after it, proved difficult for me. As I said earlier, I never got beyond the 2nd stage. Forgot to mention – as you progress, Bubbles swims faster, making navigation that much tougher. I’ve never ridden on the hood of a car into opposing freeway traffic, but I imagine that feeling of helpless, high speed dread is similar to playing Clu Clu Land.
Also, after about 2 hours, I figured out Bubbles could stun the urchins and piledrive them into the outer rim of the game board.
PS – there turned out to be hidden walls, pink rubber bands that fling you back from whence you came. I didn’t work them in earlier because they totally messed with my Berlin Wall progressive narrative. Like any good modern narrative builder, I omitted what I didn’t like.
This isn’t me:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_3VBEjwMP8
Game Over
I never got past the second level. The combination of urchins, black holes, poor post-launching, and more than you’d think, the clock, proved too much for me. I briefly regretted not making it deeper into the game, but after watching a video of someone else doing exactly that, I no longer did.
Clu Clu Land is an anagram for Unclad Cull, which taken literally means a naked slaughter of weak animals. If the game’s design is to unabashedly turn away all the 8-Bit Halfwits of the world, to cull us from the button-mashing herd, it was decidedly well titled.
1.5/5