As featured in Retrogaming Times Monthly issue #17, October 2005.

With summer winding away as a distant memory I thought it fitting to hit the water and take a look at one of the less popular Tengen NES ports, Toobin'.  Released in 1988 Toobin' lets one or two players race down a raging river in inner-tubes as either Bif or Jet avoiding obstacles, throwing cans, and navigating through gates for bonus points.  In a one player game the unused player becomes computer controlled and undergoes a name change to Flotsam, so in the arcade there's always someone to race against.  There are three classes, each with five rivers that change as you progress downstream displaying some very detailed and comedic graphics.  Toobin' never seemed to be all that popular in any arcades I visited, then again I was about seven years old at the time.  Just the same Toobin' became a game that I love to play, especially head to head in the arcade.  So one would think a home version on the uber popular NES would be great fun as well right?  Well, not exactly.

The NES version of Toobin' is one of the least polished games to come out of Tengen which, if they were one of the handful of other unlicensed NES developers, wouldn't be a big deal.  However compared to all their other games something just seems to be missing in Toobin'.  Graphically the game comes across as pretty good, although the graphics are nowhere near as detailed as in the arcade, that isn't to be expected.  The one thing that pulls the graphics down is the lack of detail in the character and enemy sprites.  Compared to Super Sprint and Road Runner the object sprites are especially dull.  Over all things look fine but when you start paying close attention to the details you see where the flaws are.  Control is another big issue on the NES.  The arcade version of Toobin' used no joystick, there were instead five buttons: two to paddle forward, two to paddle backward, and one to throw cans.  This made for some heated gameplay moments on par with other button tapping games such as Track And Field.  However on the NES the control pad controls all movement, B throws to the left and A throws to the right.  While the controls function fine the reworked can throwing mechanic takes some time to get used to since instead of rotating your 'tube and firing forward, you have to position yourself at a diagonal above whatever you're trying to hit.  Yet the biggest abomination to the original is the lack of a simultaneous two player mode.  Instead of racing head to head downstream you are asked to take turns one at a time in a two player game.  To add insult to injury the instruction booklet lists both controllers working in a single player mode as a "Special One-Player Mode" citing that one player could move Bif with one controller while the other throws the cans with the other.  Seriously, it says that.  Give me a break, if there's not going to be a simultaneous two player mode then don't try to cover it up with a gimmick like that.

In the end I can't recommend the NES version of Toobin' since much of what made the game fun to play in the arcade is missing in the home port.  The game isn't so broken you can't play it and there is some fun to be had but when a game is designed to be a two player race, removing one of the players is like slicing the game in half.  With a little more work I'm sure the home version could have been just as entertaining as the arcade original, the NES should have more than enough power to allow a true two player mode.  It's a shame that this game came so close to being every bit as fun as the original just to come up short, but even Tengen had their misses.
 

"InsaneDavid" also runs a slowly growing gaming site at http://www.classicplastic.net/dvgi

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