It’s 1993 and I’m 16 years old. I’ve got a fancy 9600 baud modem attached via a serial port to my dad’s IBM Think Pad. The World Wide Web doesn’t exist yet, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing to do. I’ve discovered the nerdy underground of local BBSes, where enterprising young geeks with second phone lines swap pornography and shareware games.
These little digital dictatorships with unusual names - Sluggo’s Domain, The Pyramid, Rusted Shut, The Graphics Connection, Beavis Beavis, The Wicked Garden - pump new video games onto my dad’s computer a few times a week. Most of the file sizes are tiny, even by the standards of the time - a Space Invaders clone here, a simple Tetris clone there. What else can you expect when the fastest modems anyone has pull down a whopping 9600 bits per second?
PornHub, 1993-styley.On this particular day I’m on a BBS I don’t usually go to. One that doesn’t have a daily usage time limit, which is a real plus. I’m looking through their file offerings when
It catches my eye. A game so enormous, it breaks a barrier I’ve never seen a video game break - it is a colossal megabyte in size.
An entire megabyte.
Sure, if I think about it, which I don’t, there are probably games I have on disk or cartridge that are already that big. But I’ve never, ever seen a game for download at a BBS that was so immense, so unapologetically decadent with its data size. What on earth could be contained in a game that breaks the megabyte barrier?
---
It’s 2013 and I’m 36 years old. I’ve got a fancy Apple Airport Extreme that’s attached via WiFi to a 27-inch iMac. The World Wide Web is a phrase you rarely hear anymore, and most of the time there’s nothing to do on it. But my wife’s out of town and I’ve decided to use a service I don’t typically use: I pull up my Steam account for the first time in over a year and look around for a free video game to download.
Since I have a Mac, the choice of games is a bit limited on Steam. So I settle on Lord of the Rings Online. It’s a good fit for my mood right now. I’m definitely a Tolkien fan, I haven’t tried an MMO in a while, and, perhaps most importantly, the price is right. It’s totally free. A few clicks and the progress bar starts moving. 1 and a half hours until completion. Perfectly reasonable for a game that’s about 17 Gigabytes in size.
—
Ninja Rabbit.
That’s the name of the game that breaks the impossible megabyte barrier.
What could such a game be? I am aware of a ninja rabbit character already - Usagi Yojimbo, the rabbit pal of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Could it be a game about him? Maybe a Beat-Em-Up in the vein of the Turtles’ own classic game?
Wasn’t he a samurai, though? Or a ronin? I'm not totally sure what the difference is, actually. I should look that up. On a BBS.
One thing’s for certain, it must be a beauty of a game. It must have all the colors a VGA monitor can output if it’s that large.
A few clicks and the progress bar starts moving. Estimated time to download… 14 hours.
14 HOURS?!
Yes, it takes 14 hours to deliver Ninja Rabbit over a telephone line that was probably originally connected to my Victorian-era home in the 1940s. But that’s the cost of modern technology. What choice do I have? I set the connection up, piddle around for a while and then go to bed.
—
It’s an hour and a half later and I’ve just stuffed a burrito into my stomach. Steam tells me I’m ready to play Lord of the Rings Online. Sounds like a reasonable way to spend a lonely evening.
I hit play and the Lord of the Rings Online login screen pops up. Looks promising, until I notice a progress bar here, too. Oh, so there’s more loading to do. Patches and stuff. Fair enough.
I go about my business for a while. Check a few forums. Waste a little time. When I get back, 45 minutes have gone by. The loading is still zooming along.
Then something catches my eye. "Downloading file 2489 of 21566.” There are over 20 grand of patches and I’m barely a tenth of the way through? You’ve got to be kidding me.
Clearly, I will not be slicing up orcs tonight.
I wants it. MY PRECIOUS!—
I wake up. It’s probably been about 14 hours since I set up the download of Ninja Rabbit. I have to be attentive because my parents or sisters might pick up the receiver on the phone, spoiling the download. Thankfully it’s a Saturday morning and everyone’s sleeping in. I sneak into the kitchen. Ha ha! Just a few minutes left. Everything’s going according to plan!
My mind races with possibilities. A game so large has to be epically good, right? You can’t just dump that much data into a game and not know what you’re doing, right? Ninja Rabbit has to be something I’ll remember forever. Right?
Well, here it is. The fruit of my waiting.
Behold: Ninja Rabbit.
Ugh.
What a load of ugh.
In fact, as you might notice right away, it should rightly be called “Ninja Rabbits”. Plural. But to this day it’s still singular in my mind as this detail was not included in the original description on the BBS. It’s also made by a company called MicroValue. Any time a developer unabashedly uses the word “Value” in their company name, it isn’t a good sign.
You might also notice that Ninja Rabbit is horrible. Maybe there’s a layer of irony here, but for a game that combines two stereotypically fast things - ninjas and rabbits - it’s unbelievably slow paced. The controls are stiff and delayed. And it frankly just looks like crap. There may technically have a lot of colors, but it’s really just a huge brown mess. The spewing blood might be a little novel during this Mortal Kombat era, but even that just feels more inappropriate than tantalizing. It doesn’t feel dangerous, despite the gore. It just looks and feels stupid.
At the risk of sounding spoiled or entitled, I gotta say: Even for free, this is a ripoff. It’s a waste of time and anticipation. I play it for a few minutes and then dejectedly delete it off of my dad’s computer.
What a boring game.
—
What a boring night.
I plop down in front of my TV. Should I play a few levels of Super Mario 3D World on my Wii U just to kill a few hours before going to bed? Nah. I’ve been playing that with the wife and it’d be a shame for her to miss anything.
Maybe I’ll just look around the eShop for a while.
I’m looking through Nintendo’s online offerings when
It catches my eye.
Kung Fu Rabbit.
There is another game that mixes rabbits and the martial arts. And I’ve discovered it on tonight, of all nights.
Somehow this game found me at just the right time. I’m already thinking about how LOTR is turning into a Ninja Rabbit experience, and this game seems delivered to me, in sympathy, from the benevolent ghost of my beloved 9600 baud modem. I can almost hear it whispering in my ear.
“I’m the Ghost of Computing's Past. You have no choice but to download Kung Fu Rabbit, tonight.”
It’s quite a bit larger than a megabyte in size, but times being what they are, and even with LOTR steadily patching in the background, Kung Fu Rabbit is delivered to my Wii U in just a few seconds.
Finally, I have something new I can play tonight.
—
Ok. This isn’t a full review of Kung Fu Rabbit. It’s an impression. A quick look. A few paragraphs from a tired writer too lazy to finish a new game.
What’s Kung Fu Rabbit? It’s a highly stylized action platformer where you use your abilities to jump and stick to walls to wind your way through carefully attenuated levels in a search for… look, I can put it even more simply: It’s a Super Meat Boy clone, okay.
Is it any good? Uhm… it’s all right. I don’t regret picking it up. It entertained me for a few hours before going to bed. But I suspect if you’ve put a lot of time into Super Meat Boy (which I haven’t) you’re just going to wish you were playing that game, instead. It doesn’t strike me as a Meat Boy Killer.
Granted, Super Meat Boy isn’t available on the eShop, so if you’re looking for a game that scratches that sort of itch but you want to stick to Nintendo’s platform, Kung Fu Rabbit will probably suffice. But would I recommend it from my first impressions? Probably not. Right now I'm feeling the gravity of my favorite phrase for when I want to damn something with faint praise: It’s diverting enough. And it is. It has a nice art style, decent music and it’s certainly playable. It’s no classic, but it’s no Ninja Rabbit, either. I got what I came for.
There are flaws, of course. Control is so loose I’ve taken to calling the main character “Floaty the Rabbit”. The sound design is ok, but the mixing is terrible. There’s a gurgling sound you hear whenever you’re near a tar trap that’s highly irritating and just way too loud. And it’s relentless. You’re going to hear this “someone’s at the end of their milkshake” sound every few seconds while playing this game. In fact, I had to go to the settings and turn sound effects down because I got so tired of hearing it. Been a long time since I had to do something like that.
But I'd still say it has more virtues than vices. There are better choices on the eShop, even for the price, but if you're looking for a game like this, well then this is the game you should buy. (I should squeeze that sentence into every review).
That's my impression at the end of an underwhelming night. I turn off the Wii U and roll over in the bed.
As I blink off to sleep, it occurs to me that I might have had a better time if I'd simply gotten drunk on the money I spent on Kung Fu Rabbit.
—
It’s the next morning. I’ve got the whole day to do whatever I want. And LOTR Online is finally ready to go.
I launch it.
It’s… incredibly past its heyday. The controls aren’t fun, the graphics are outdated and the whole place is a ghost town. I play for an hour and only ever see one other player. And it occurs to me pretty quickly that I don’t want to play with him.
So I kill bats in a cave for a few minutes and then delete it off of my computer.
Then it occurs to me. Times may change. Standards may change. Games will balloon in size. But one thing is true:
There will always be Ninja Rabbits.
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