I’ve only ever seen Beetlejuice once.
It was a freezing Canadian night in the fall of ’98. I had been home from school thanks to a nasty cold, and it was on TV well past my bedtime. My memories of the film are extremely hazy, no thanks to the high fever and the lack of sleep. My mom, who was very over-protective of me when it came to media, wouldn’t usually let me anywhere near anything horror coded, so seeing Michael Keaton haunt the Deetzes was quite exotic to me at the time. Not to say that Beetlejuice is scary, but even kid-friendly spooks like Goosebumps novels were deemed too hardcore for lil’ ol’ me in my mom’s eyes.
Anyway, thanks to the terrible fever, the Day-o sequence, the afterlife waiting room, and goth queen Winona Ryder are the only things I can recall with absolute certainty. The rest of the movie is a muddled, near psychedelic haze of Tim Burton aesthetics and Danny Elfman scores swimming through my mind. This viewing has become a core memory that always jumps back to whenever I’m reminded of Beetlejuice.
Despite my vague memories, I’m confident in saying that there was more to the film than Michael Keaton squishing bugs under his heel for pocket change. Then why, I ask you as I froth at the mouth and gesture wildly with my hands, was this made such an integral mechanic in the Nintendo game?
Some levels are charmless platforming romps through painful stages that have nothing to do with the movie. Other levels are top-down monstrosities, Legend of Zelda style, that task players with navigating a maze. Said mazes grants you extremely limited ammo to defend yourself with, and once you’re out, the only way to not die is to run around like a moron trying to dodge the enemies that always move quicker than you do. But at the core of the gameplay is ol’ Juicy stomping teeny tiny bugs to get monies. It came out three years after the movie did, so they had plenty of time to think of something better.
No great game is complete without a designated “bug squish” button, and Beetlejuice is no exception; the B button performs this hideous task with a stomp of Beetlejuice’s weathered shoe. He can’t kill actually dangerous enemies with the wimpy stomp, but he can squish these harmless little bugs in exchange for help tickets. These tickets act as currency in the shops. Each bug kill nets you anywhere between 10 and 75 tickets. You need upwards of 500 to acquire one “scare” from the store. Scares are these sad excuses for power-ups that fade after you throw 3-4 projectiles, or every time you get hit, whichever happens first. These power-ups are needed to kill the end of level bosses, and you’ll be needing a lot of them to do away with the baddies in one try. Put another way, currency grinding is a key mechanic in this already frustrating platformer. Does the fun never begin?
And oh, how could I possibly forget this tidbit? If you die in a boss room, you’ll respawn in there, too. But your scares don’t refresh. So if you blew all your scares on your last attempt, beating the boss is impossible. So your only option is to let the boss kill you over and over again until you Game Over. Considering you only get three continues to beat eight hellish levels, this can be a crushing blow that will bring an otherwise fruitful run to a screeching halt. It’s rock bottom game design; a cruel choice made to intentionally spite players who have busted their ass to make progress on this turd.
Adding to the nonstop fun is slippy platforming, a fixed perspective that insta-kills you if you move down quicker than the camera can, and those GODDAMN TOP-DOWN LEVELS GOOD LORD WHY. The only good thing about those joyless stages is that the music sounds suspiciously like 80’s Britpop bop Touch Me by Samantha Fox. Listen to the in-game track here, and then this bit from the pop song, and you’ll never unhear it.
What better way to round off a terrible game than with an insufferable final level? The Afterlife is rife with irritating enemies and no places to buy power-ups. It’s also the only “mandatory scavenger hunt” level in the whole game. Y’know, the type of level where you have to navigate an annoyingly complex stage and hunt down a certain amount of tokens before you’re allowed to move on? I’ve mentioned it on the blog before, but Easter egg hunts are my least favourite design choice in all of video game-dom. Having one of these sprung on me right before laying this garbage to rest was a slap in the face. A very specific slap in the face to me, personally. How very dare they.
Beetlejuice is a miserable experience that I couldn’t recommend to anyone. It’s no exaggeration to say that the only worthwhile thing about it is the David Wise soundtrack.You don’t even have to suffer through the game to enjoy the tunes. Thank goodness for the Youtube revolution, eh? That this was a Rareware game is genuinely shocking to me. These guys made Donkey Kong Country! What the hell happened?!
Let’s end this review on a positive. If you want to play a good Beetlejuice game, I recommend Haunting Starring Polterguy on the Sega Genesis. In that game, you play as a recently deceased punk who has to scare the yuppie family responsible for his death out of their home using intricate traps, strategy, and ‘tude. As it was the 90’s, the ‘tude is very important, and is reflected in the many many many scares used to frighten the bejeezus out of the snotty family. Polterguy can do gnarly things like possess a housefly, blow it up to human size, and give it the head of the bratty daughter to send the mother inching ever closer to a full-on mental breakdown. No animation is ever used twice throughout the entire game, so there are hundreds of these to see over the course of a playthrough! Even if the aesthetics aren’t in line with the Tim Burton flick, this unrelated title is an infinitely better Beetlejuice game than the Beetlejuice game we actually got. In this instance, Genesis truly did what Nintendon’t.
Avoid this cruddy Beetlejuice cart like the plague, but do consider checking out Polterguy this Halloween season. You’ll be glad you did.
Final Rating:
NESJunk 