Review:
Circus Caper (Nintendo)

Class: Staff
Author: Anthony Romero
Published: October 23rd, 2005

It was a decade and a half ago that I played Circus Caper for the first time, with my interest in the game coming from the flyer Toho packaged with Godzilla: Monster of Monsters. I eagerly rented the title at the first opportunity, and warmed up my NES with high hopes for what Toho's game might have in store. Four minutes, and countless deaths, later I popped the game out of the system and placed it back in the box, although, much to my dismay, the residual experience would be forever burned into my psyche.

For the years that followed, whenever the topic of the worst video game was brought up I answered, without hesitation, that it was Circus Caper. Since those years, my feelings toward the game have hardly changed, although I never really forgot the game unlike numerous other titles which I played for the NES. There is a saying that there are two types of movies that stay readily in memory: remarkable ones and awful ones. I believe the same could be said for video games, and, because Circus Caper was so awful, I have never been able to forgot the title, and likely never will at this point.

Of course a common question is what relation does this game pose to Toho's movie franchises? The answer is, for the most part, none. It was one of Toho's few attempts at an original licensed game, and unlike later attempts was actually developed in house by Toho's, now nonexistent, video game-wing. However, the game does feature a, highly degrading, cameo from the firm's most popular character: Godzilla. Fans of the King of the Monsters shouldn't fear though, as he is located in the game's fifth level, which very few people will ever actually reach, in one of the mini-games, which even fewer people will even bother with past the first level.

If more proof was needed that this was a new intellectual property, then the story would seem to be evidence enough to confirm this. What little "plot" there is, is as follows: Tim, and his sister Judy, enter a town-wide carnival and become interested in the event's main attraction, the circus. However, Tim has no money for admission, but the clown at the entrance is willing to roll some dice to see if they can enter for free. With a flick of his wrist, the dice hit the table and the clown exclaims that they have won (regardless of what the dice roll ends up being); unfortunately, it seems that the clown only has one ticket to give. So Tim, ever the gentlemen, allows his sister to attend while he waits outside. Eventually, the day gives away to night as the young boy is still waiting outside. Just then the vile Mr. Magic arrives on the scene to inform the boy that he has captured his sister. His reasoning for the nefarious act is that the young girl had stumbled upon his organization's smuggling ring and must be silenced, or he learned of a vast fortunate that Judy's parents are in control of and plans to extort the money out of them through ransom... or the game simply gives no justification, nor does it explain why Mr. Magic felt the need to give this information to Tim. Regardless, the young boy leaps into the hero roll effortlessly with a commanding "Shucks! You can't have her!", while venturing inside the tent where he is destined to die numerous times in the next few minutes...

Most players will experience mostly the same thing while playing through Circus Caper: they will begin at the start of the tent and make their way slowly to a large body of water, all the while an endless number of clowns with knives will leap around our young hero as they try to run him through. Out of the depths of the blue surf, two alligators will appear, jaws at the ready, as they slowly close their mouths and then open. The solution is obvious: leap on the closed mouths across. Of course it never works out that way, as more then likely one of the clowns will hit the player, causing the controls to basically freeze up as Tim lazily slips into the water, and his death below. Second attempt: The player rushes to the pool and manages to reach the second alligator before it quickly opens its mouth and relieves poor Tim of his legs. Third attempt: the player, with some luck, manages to clear both alligators and reaches the safe ground beyond. At this point the knifed clowns will be joined by flying, decapitated, clown heads that hover above (this is the stuff that nightmares are made of, kids). Little Timmy will eventually make his way to the second body of water, which is twice as long, with twice as many gators and has both clowns with knives and the flying heads all over the place, as this would simply be hard without them but their inclusion makes it impossible. To make matters worse, the game often glitches so the other alligators don't appear in time, forcing the boy to either leap into the water to his death or lose his legs instantly from the gator he is on.

What happens next varies, although it can range from a grown man cupping his eyes as tears readily flow, to finding some blunt object to end the game's reign of terror and spare future generations. If by pure chance the player manages to clear this second body of water, then congratulations, although it's highly suggested that they end on this high note. For if they advance and happen to die in the next stage or during the boss then it's all the way back to the start of the game for them, along with a possible call to the suicide prevention hotline.

Apparently, though, at some point in the game's development it became obvious to the production crew that there was no hope for salvaging the main game, so they devised four, pretty much unrelated, mini-games. The mini-games can be played by entering a door, and can be played as many times as the player likes. The first mini-game has a "Fairy," which is never seen, suggest that young Tim take a rest and play a little game of leaping over a moving spire of flames with a bear (which I suppose could only be considered "restful" in contrast to the knife wielding clowns and pools of gators that await Tim outside). The second mini-game has Timmy driving down a road, while avoiding boulders, tell the time runs out (are these rooms or separate dimensions?). The third mini-game has Tim chucking baseballs at moving Rodan statues, which is set up so only golden ones will earn a point, while the numerous blue ones moving directly in front of the boy will take away point every time they are hit. The ending result is that you will probably get 2-3 points for a minute of play, which can be earned simply by killing 2-3 guys in the regular game. The final mini-game features Godzilla in, arguably, his most embarrassing appearance to date, as the nuclear menace exercises, trying to touch his toes is my best guess, while the player simply presses A as quickly as possible (talk about fun!). The main problem with these, beyond the fact that they are mostly a chore to play through, is that points don't matter in Circus Caper at all. There is no bonus for having a huge collection of them, and the player loses all of their points every time they have to continue, which happens too often to count.

If by some stroke of luck, and against the designer's intention, the player manages to actually reach the end of a level, then they will be presented with a key to the next. This process is complete with a solid blue screen, which then rapidly starts to shift between white and blue, as the development teams attempts one last ditch effort to stop the player through seizures, seeing as how the eye-gouging difficult didn't deter them. For if there is one thing to take away from Circus Caper it's that even when you win, you're still the loser.

The graphics here are simple, even by the NES standards. For a lot of the game's enemies it's hard to tell exactly what they are (is that really a decapitated clown head with wings, and a miniature ballerina that just leapt into the bottomless pit?). The characters clip whenever they are on top of either Tim or another enemy too, which is a standard problem in most of the older Nintendo games. The backgrounds tend to be very generic too, although the system was never known for diverse backgrounds anyway.

On the plus side, at least most of the "out of game" images, such as the introduction story, are constructed rather well. Although I suppose the "seizure" sequences shouldn't go unmentioned here, and it's bad enough that it's worth deducting the score in two places.

The game features a very small, and highly repetitive, collection of music that is utilized through out the game. None of the music here is particularly memorable or good, even when keeping the limitations of the Nintendo hardware in mind. As for the sound effects, there pretty much aren't any except the punches, kicks, and the soccer ball.

The game's primary controls, jump and punch, are easy and can be done without much trouble. There is a third kick move as well, which is done while holding down and is the only way to strike smaller enemies. However, the item system is far less convenient, as the player scrolls through the items by pressing select. It seems easy enough, but the problem is that the endless amount of enemies make it so there isn't a luxury moment to do this, and the item is used through the attack button so the player is a sitting duck while changing items or they will be forced to waste them to try and avoid getting hit. Of course one must consider that a NES controller only has four buttons, but that still doesn't excuse the implementation of the item setup. In fact, I can think of two clear solutions: 1. that "Up" replace jump, and one of the buttons is used just for items 2. that they utilize the system set up in Mega Man, where items are selected from the pause menu. Unfortunately, I'm probably giving this aspect more thought than the game's designers did.

Moving on to more problems addressed by the controls comes the aspect of hit detection, which is very poor. In fact, foes will often leap on top of the player, as Tim's punches will fly through them with no effect. Being struck by enemies also cause the controls in general to crap out, for example if there is a pit nearby and Tim tries to jump he seems to become a magnet for the unholy netherworlds below. The game's second stage is just awful in regards to the controls too, as poor Timmy dons a rocket pack which grants him the "ability" to take nearly 5 tries to simply get over a ledge that would have taken a single regular jump (I can't help but feel the game's designer is laughing somewhere).

Even though one will likely grow tired of Circus Caper long before beating it (or even clearing the second body of water, for that matter), the nightmares will still remain...

By any standards, Circus Caper is simply an awful game. I cut the title some slack in the audio and graphics department, but honestly it's hard to mess these up in regards to what the NES was capable of. I would like to point out, though, that roughly two years ago I revisited this game, and actually beat it from start to finish, which had become some masochistic goal of mine since my troubling introduction to the game all those years before. Unfortunately, triumphants didn't sound nor did world peace reside when this accomplishment was met. In fact, all that happened was that the lackluster story was wrapped up, as Judy tells about how she was used for target practice with knives (I'm not joking). At least Mr. Magic wasn't anti-climatic, as he was as challenging as one could hope for, although I did string together a nice list of profanities every time he killed poor Tim, as it meant having to venture through his painfully long maze like level yet again.

Regardless, it's safe to say that Circus Caper is one of worst things, if not the worst, Toho ever put their name on. It's no wonder that the company never released the game in their home country, instead opting to just victimize those in the US.