I'm here to talk about what is merely a footnote in a much more important story from my life.
When I was a little kid, videogames didn't mean a lot to me. Well, I did play them a lot, even back then. Flash games were all I knew of the internet. Minecraft and other famous mobile games from the time were a thing. But I wouldn't really say I was a real "fan" of the stuff back then. They were just another part of my life. A big one, but not one that defined me. No, it would take a few years for that to change.
It all started on a Christmas morning. Now I don't recall exactly how old I was at the time, but my internal timeline (it's like an internal clock but for your whole life) indicates it was probably the Christmas of 2010. That day, I woke up to a gift from my parents unlike any I had ever had: a PlayStation 2. I don't think I had ever asked for one, or even for a videogame console at all, but I guess my parents noticed how all the other kids in my class had Wiis and DSes and sometimes XBOX 360s and thought it'd be nice if I had my own gaming console, so they got me that for Christmas without warning. I thought it was a cool gift, but it came with no games other than the pack-in title The Golden Compass, in which I could barely get past the first stage. So as much as I wanted to play with my new console, there wasn't really much to do in it.
But that wouldn't last long, because not much afterwards, my mom came home with a few pirated game discs. Being a Brazilian kid with a PS2, it would have been absurd if I had never owned one of those in my lifetime. They came in plastic envelopes with the games' boxes printed on paper and folded inside each envelope, holding within it those labeless CDs. I could write whole paragraphs about how I'd win every race against my younger brother in Sonic Riders, how I'd spend hours exploring the hub world from Cars, or how I was the only kid in my class who could beat Ben 10: Ultimate Alien - Cosmic Destruction, or how my copy of The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy would just get stuck on loading screens for hours. But there was one game that stood out from the rest. One filled with mystery and intrigue. One I could not make sense of no matter how I tried to.
It was a very strange "game," if you can even call it that. It opened to a menu with music and in that menu, a few options. Select one of those and it will send you to a giant list of game titles. Press one of those, a game would start. For a five(?) year old kid, a massive list like that one can only be described as overwhelming, and overwhelmed is exactly what I'd feel whenever I tried that game. The cover was weird, on the front, there was nothing but Mario standing on a white void, the game's title on the bottom. I knew Mario was a Nintendo character, so its presence there only confused me even more. On the back of the cover, there were some game boxarts and some text I never bothered to decipher due to the terribly low quality. I tried looking for the games in the back inside the list, and while I did find at least one of them, I didn't go too far because it was seemingly broken.
Okay, no more playing around. It was SNES Station. You know? The SNES emulator? For the PS2? The one with this song?
Man, this song. If I ever go amnesiac and can't remember anything, play this song and I'll be back to my bullshit in an instant.
Anyways, I couldn't make heads or tails of the thing, so due to a lack of attempting I would just never touch it, much prefering to play something that actually made sense to me. I didn't even know what a Super Nintendo was!
Now we fast forward a few years, to what is perhaps the most fateful day of my life. Or at least that's what I like to think of it as. 'Twas early in December of 2013. If I had to bet, I'd say it was the 7th day of the month, but I might be a little off. My family and I had just moved out of the big city to the countryside, and since we were still in the process of moving, we didn't have every piece of furniture in the new apartment yet. I'm only mentioning this to explain that, that day, bored from playing Minecraft and having no access to the internet, me and my brother decided to sit on the floor (the same level as the TV was) to play some PlayStation 2. And I guess we were feeling pretty daring that day, because we thought we should give SNES Station another try.
Of course, not knowing any of the games packed in that emulator, me and my brother decided to just pick at random. So, we scrolled down that alphabetically-sorted list of games a little until I stopped at the first title that caught my attention. The game in question?
SURPRISE, IT'S BEBE'S KIDS
It shouldn't come as a surprise that me and my brother didn't spend more than 5 minutes playing this. The first screen of the game was enough to indicate to us that what we were playing was shit. So we closed the game and went back to exploring that list. And what happened afterwards was much more interesting than Bebe's Kids. Alas, you've read the title of this post.
Brief as it was, that experience sticked with me. And today, I decided it was time to finally go back to Bebe's Kids and find out if the game was truly shit or if 8 year old me was missing out on a truly hidden gem of the SNES library.
Hint: I fucking did not.
Okay, so before I actually start, of course I had to look the title up to see if it was based on anything. And much as I had assumed when I was 8, this game was, in fact, based on something else. A 1992 animated movie of the same name, to be specific. Reviews seem mixed but mostly negative. Read up.
So you boot up the game and press start, and the game gives you a character select. We can select between two of the eponymous Children of Bebe. I picked Kahlil because I like his stance here. Those spread legs just exude confidence. One thing I noted while writing this with the game running on the background is that if you wait long enough on this screen, the song will just stop playing, and after a while, the game will show the company's logo again, as if it were reset, but instead of sending you back to the title screen, it will just go back to the character select. Odd.
After that the game takes a few seconds to load this stage's cutscene (a bad sign if nothing else) and after that we get to the actual game. And no more than 10 seconds of gameplay should be needed to understand why this game sucks.
The game's a beat-em-up, but it's a really slow beat-em-up. Your punches and kicks feel extremely weak and they come off very slowly. You can't combo anything and jumping doesn't seem to make a difference. There are a few items sitting in the background that pop out a little like an ice cream cone and a baseball which you can pick up. It took me a while to understand how to use the baseballs, but I did notice immediately that there was a counter for them. Turns out you need to hold one of the shoulder buttons and press jump to throw them at enemies. Okay, standard SNES stuff. I also noticed that you can do an uppercut by holding one of the shoulder buttons and then pressing one of the attack buttons. That uppercut is much stronger than the normal moves so I just stuck with that for the whole game.
Right from the first screen there's already two enemies hanging around you. Before I found out about the uppercut I was just kicking them and they pretty much seemed indestructible, but since the camera would stop moving after a certain point I figured I'd have to be patient and just spam kicks until I got them down. Repeat that process one more time and you can reach the end of this stage without defeating the third row of enemies. Without the uppercut, this took so much time to do I thought it was going to be impossible, but I managed to do it with only 9 seconds left on the timer.
Going back to the enemies though, they're pretty weird. They don't punch or kick you like you'd expect in a beat-em-up. Knowing Nintendo and their guidelines it shouldn't be a surprise that they wouldn't make the adult enemies beat those children up in their videogame, so instead what they do is just grab you, which drains bars from your health unless you spam the directional buttons to escape. It feels super non-threatening but when you consider the implications, it's not hard to understand why the game is like this. What is hard to understand is why the hell they were adapting every single fucking movie in theaters into videogames back in that time. Who the fuck was playing this??? I can't honestly imagine how someone would think this game needed to exist. Alas, it does. And someone had to come up with a way to pretend those kids aren't getting beat up in an amusement park. Imagine being that guy.
So you reach the end of the stage and get transported to the second stage. Here, baby Peewee is inside the House of Glass (in an amusement park? Is this normal?) just casually throwing shit off shelves like a cat. Mr. Butter Fingers here is trying to catch the falling glass but he just lets a lot of it fall to the ground. There's a glass counter in the place where the ball counter went in the last stage so I assumed I had to do something with it, but it didn't seem like you could throw glass at the guy or the baby.
I had no clue what to do here so I decided to do what was probably intended at the time of this game's released and went on the Internet Archive to look at the game's manual. It was also here that I learned that the pause screen for this game displays the word "Chillin'!" Simply marvelous.
First thing I learned here was that the characters have unique "Special Super Moves" you can throw out by holding L or R and the crouching button. You can only use them at full health and they cost 2 HP bars. Alright. So I found out that the objective in the second stage is not to help the poor guy trying to stop the baby from breaking all of the glass in the House of Glass, instead you're supposed to break the glass objects as they fall so that Robin (that's his name btw) doesn't put them back on the shelves. Damn it! I should've known these TOUGH STREET-SMART KIDS EQUIPPED WITH SPECIAL SUPER MOVES were up to no good! I read the movie's plot summary on Wikipedia!
So after losing a lot more HP than I wish I had trying not to hit my head on the falling glass, I'm on the third stage, which is back out on the amusement park again. And right in front of you there's a guy throwing explosives on the ground. Like they do in amusement parks, y'know? So I take five steps to the side and a fucking PITBULL jumps at my face. Of course, I should have expected that the natural predator of the young child would be an enemy in this game. Okay I don't actually know if those really are pitbulls but they're nasty nonetheless. If they jump over you they can get TWO hits of damage on you. What a thrill!
Can you tell I don't really have that much to say about this game? Sorry, this is my first time writing about bad videogames. Want to see something better? Watch the fucking Doug Walker review. I don't care.
So the next stage is the House of Horrors and right away there's a painting that shoots stuff at you just sitting right by your side when you begin the stage. Cool. The point of this stage is to find the exit in a maze of rooms, but they're super confusing and all look the same. All the enemies are annoying and the haunted paintings keep puffing rings of air at you and the whole stage is just kind of really stupid and boring. I just turned up the emulator's speed and started walking through doors, having no idea if I was making any progress or just going back and forth the same three rooms.
Just kidding. I looked up a map. You know it's an annoying stage when GameFAQs has a map for it. And you know what? I'm glad I did. The moving bookshelves in this stage actually send you to different rooms depending on which side you enter from, which I never would've guessed by myself. And the worst part? Sometimes, if you take a bookshelf entrance then try to come back from the same entrance you came from, you get sent to a different room. Awesome! Great!
So after getting lost, even while using the map (seriously these rooms look all almost exactly the same), I eventually got out and into the next stage. And this is where I notice that between every stage there's another outdoor section. Apparently every time you lose inside one of the indoor stages you get kicked back to the last outdoor stage, and losing inside one of the outdoor stages... you just start it over again.
This time there was a mallet sitting on the ground as a pick up item. I thought you'd be able to use it like you'd expect to but nah, it's just another reskin of every other throwable item. Yeah there's more than just the baseball. I didn't even mention the other ones because they're all the same fucking thing. I gotta out-lazy the game or I'll be losing by playing it.
After beating the same two enemies again in another very short section (Yeah they didn't even LET THE DOGS OUT this time) I get to the Pirate Ship stage. I didn't mention it before because I thought it wasn't a huge deal, but suddenly now we have enemies that actually hit you. It started with the mummies in the last stage, but I guess I kinda excused those for being mummies, but now the pirates are just straight up punching you in the face. This game makes no sense anymore. Fuck there's another type of pirate that throws SWORDS at you??? Does this happen in the movie??? Is this why I can't play as Peewee???? Man fuck this game.
This stage is longer and there's a bossfight at the end. It's a really shitty bossfight (Wow! GO FIGURE.) The Pirate Captain animatronic here walks around a bunch and has a really weird hitbox. It's really hard to hit him with uppercuts because he just won't stop moving and, when he's not moving, he's likely going to attack you. I tried to just jumpkick it but it wasn't enough damage, so I had to keep trying to uppercut it. It eventually worked, and the boss went down.
Next outdoor area just has two dogs right in front of you at the start. Why are all these stages like this?
So... The last stage. The "Underground World." There's a lot going on here. First enemy is some green grimace fucker, there's an animatronic guy in a suit who shoots fire from his robot arm, and what I assume is some kind of android above throwing stuff at me. So, just more enemy reskins. What a bore. Oh I think the song here has vocal samples. Cool right.
Okay, nevermind, the manual lied. Here's another stage. I call it 'The Undergrounder Worlder.' The enemies are more animatronics, like a bear animatronic. No I'm not kidding. They're kinda like the dogs from the other stages. There's also some stalactites that fall on you and uhhh that's it I guess.
Final boss time! The song here is just a bunch of voice samples over a really basic beat, it's kind of a funny song. Anyways the boss sucks ass. He's another tall boss with a hitbox you need to jump to hit except unlike the pirate boss he can jump around and shoot fire projectiles, which he does more often than the pirate did with his projectiles. Have I mentioned that its hitbox is horrible? The movement towards and away from the screen is horrible in this game and the boss' attacks pretty much choose when they care about whether or not you're behind them or not.
This guy actually has a second phase where his head detaches from his body and floats in the middle of the screen, constantly shooting projectiles in your direction. At this point I was really tired of the game so I was just abusing save states, and those really came in a clutch because this bossfight takes FOREVER, and with no extra lives I just couldn't afford to lose. Apparently the best way to deal damage to this boss is using an aerial spin kick attack that I totally did notice in the manual, but the problem is that move has a very specific timing to it (you have to hit the shoulder button during the jump but after the initial jump animation) but when you do manage to use it, there's a startup to it, which just fucks everything up when the boss has such a shitty hitbox and there's attacks coming at you all the time.
Oh and you better not dare let this motherfucker jump on you. That's basically like a confirmed 2 hits minimum good fucking luck recovering from that one.
By this point I was starting to go insane with the music in the background constantly being reset by me loading save states. But it's not like it's a long loop either. Or a GOOD one, for that matter.
Oh right I forgot to talk about anything other than the gameplay. Uhhh there's graphics. The music kinda sucks. I think some of the tracks are taken from the movie's actual soundtrack but they're always short loops and they're not really that good anyways. Very short loops. Gets especially annoying with the tracks that have vocal samples.
Anyways I gave up. Honestly, I don't care enough to see the end of this game. I have better shit to do with my life. Apparently Nintendo Power once called this the worst game of all time or something. They're not that far!
Eight years old me was right, after all. I should have stopped at the first stage. This was a terrible idea! This post sucks!
I'm sorry for wasting your time. I'll try to write more jokes next time.
Okay back to my story
I guess I'll compensate for the major waste of time by telling you the end of this story. Or at least, what happened afterwards. Y'know, keep it wholesome.
So, me and my brother, sitting on the floor, playing the SNES emulator. We play Bebe's Kids for two picoseconds and decide to play something else instead.
WISEST DECISION OF MY LIFE.
We go back to the list and continue picking random games. I don't remember every game we played but I know it wasn't a lot... I think we played a Bomberman game? I feel like I might've also played a bit of B.O.B, but I'm not 100% sure on either. I remember we did play a bit of some Barbie games because... Well... Girl games, amirite boys?
I was eight and my brother was five. The idea of mocking a Barbie game on the SNES was funny to us, okay??
Anyways, I guess after a few games I decided to scroll down a bit further on the list, until I found a game with a title that caught my eye. I remember very clearly thinking to myself the title made it sound like the game was going to be some kind of super hero game, maybe a Superman copycat or parody. We selected that game without much thought.
Little did I know that, at that moment, my life would change forever. Because the game I was about to play would make me start looking at videogames in a whole different way. Everyone has that one game they point to and say "This one! This is the one that made me take gaming seriously!" And for me, that was the game.
