Tiny Toon Adventures: Buster's Bad Dream

Also known as Scary Dreams¹, Buster’s Bad Dream has slipped under the radar thanks to its incredibly delayed release stateside, its outdated cartoon license, and its overall limited presentation. If anything, the game has had more discussion as a prototype of sorts for Astro Boy: Omega Factor, both of which were programmed by Yaiman (Mitsuru Yaida, best known for leading Gunstar Heroes and the Bangai-O games). However, where Omega Factor and many of Treasure’s other titles focus heavily on setpieces, Buster’s Bad Dream’s restraint helps it stand out for those more interested in pure combat. The single-plane beat ’em up engine compares less to Treasure’s 16-bit days and more to Fill-in-Cafe games like Mad Stalker and Panzer Bandit, with deep toolkits that draw from contemporary fighting games more than belt scroller classics.

The main difference, however, is that Buster’s Bad Dream directly adapts mechanics from Capcom’s more frenetic fighters, such as Marvel vs. Capcom or JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. Main character Buster has the usual fare – a four-hit jab combo and a launcher – but with a super gauge that can stack nine bars at a time. His quarter-circle forward super, where Buster pulls a Frank West and careens forward with a shopping cart, notably gives him his sole invincibility frames in a toolkit that has absolutely no other hard defensive mechanics. When the player isn’t in a position to spend their meter, they have rich mobility options to tap into that may not be apparent on first glance. Buster’s launcher (down + attack) has a sliding variation (down-right + attack) that’s more easily interruptible, he can cancel launchers into jumps for follow-ups, and he can fast-fall before his apex to modulate his jump height. These contribute to a strong air game that helps Buster navigate scenarios that grow increasingly projectile-dense, with ample hang time when in a mid-air combo and a jab count reset upon hitting the ground that lets him bully enemies more or less infinitely.

One of Babs’s supers has her throwing out many tennis balls at once. Her other one, not shown, lets her hit and aim a gigantic tennis ball with a strong multi-hit effect.

The rest of his kit comes from his assists, which spawn in Marvel-style to drop an attack of the player’s choice, taunt, and then poof out of existence. While the lead character is always Buster, these assists have their own health bar and can be interrupted before attacking. The first two assists shown, Babs and Plucky, each have the most in-depth design and best enemy interactions. Babs’s tennis balls can be aimed forward, down, or up and have ricochet and mild penetration characteristics. This gives Buster a much needed turnaround attack² and additional aerial coverage. Plucky, on the other hand, drops anvils at various distances with a short cooldown, although each anvil will persist until the next is called. While more limited in range than Babs, the platform can force enemy jumps (or block enemies that can’t jump), helping Buster control space by dividing up a given screen into mob segments. I found each of these to augment Buster’s poor range in ways that didn’t trivialize the encounters, thanks both to their ability to die and a compensatory cooldown for each based on the strength of their respective moves. They also integrate excellently with his inherent combo mechanics, helping him refresh combos cleanly or trapping ricocheting enemies in the air when a straightforward follow-up doesn’t suffice.

Each of the assists also have their own supers, with some of the assists thriving on their supers alone. Hamton’s regular “attack” just spawns him, with the only upside being that the player can launch him to hit other enemies as a projectile in exchange for a bit of his health; when his super is used, he’ll toss out some food after a time to heal Buster, which otherwise only refills at the start of each level. Shirley, on the other hand, can give Buster a Genei Jin-esque afterimage, letting him completely melt many encounters when used correctly, although she has no regular attacks. The other assists felt more undercooked by comparison, with all three primarily freezing the enemy in place and generally feeling redundant against one another without the depth of space control that Babs and Plucky enjoyed.

In level 3, when the red panther is introduced, you’re instantly forced to respect its space due to its height, its long swipe when you’re in front of it, and its inability to be launched or stunned.

The first impression enemy-wise may seem a little dim, however, with the generous hitstun and presence of both parabolic and horizontal launches making herding the enemies to infinite them seem trivial. However, the opening level introduces palette-swapped enemies with all-encompassing superarmor, and these increasingly define the game as it evolves. The superarmor implementation here is shockingly well-reasoned: the enemies who have it are clearly marked (often jarringly so), it is never contextual, the player’s attacks still ladle generous hitstop over them, and no wave ever spawns solely superarmor-equipped enemies. These hard-and-fast rules are necessary, as the game doesn’t hesitate to arm its enemies with unreactables when the player gets too close. These upset the powerful air game mentioned previously and begin punishing the player for falling in front of enemies to start jab chains. Within just a few levels, each wave transforms from sets of training dummies to dangerous enemy grouping tests, where popcorn enemies are effectively ammo to launch into enemies with superarmor and/or unreactables. By end game, the popcorn enemies may have their own unreactables (such as the dogs in the final world having a turnaround one), and many of the enemies begin loading the screen with projectiles to keep the player out of the air or make it hard for them to come back down.

To describe how well the enemies synergize with one another to create situations that strain Buster’s otherwise extensive capabilities, I’ll use the final main level³ as an example, which has five waves on different “floors” of a classic elevator setup.

• This first wave is a killer: the red panthers are one of the first major roadblocks in the game, and here they’re combined with the aforementioned dog enemies. The panthers will instantly swipe from the front if you’re too close, while the dogs will instantly tap you from behind, so bunching them up by jumping behind a panther requires a confirmation that it doesn’t have a dog trailing it. Since the superarmor makes the panthers unlaunchable, balling up and launching the dogs here will separate them from the panthers, which may not be what you want depending on how close you are to the wall.

• The second wave brings in superarmor dogs, while letting you toss swooping bats around as your main launchable. The dogs attack frequently and are only truly vulnerable when they skid after a dash attack. Thankfully, a single hit on a bat will knock it to the ground, so getting all of the bats in a group and then horizontally launching them back and forth can work as long as the dogs don’t get too separated or new bats don’t come in and swoop from off-screen.

Without taking out the robots quickly in the third wave, four of them will spawn and begin blanketing the airspace in projectiles. However, not paying enough attention to the football players will let them harass you from off-screen.

• The third wave completely switches up the enemy composition. Robots from the level prior arrive and have three moves apiece: they can extend their arm to smack you when you get too close (though it has a long wind-up), they can shoot a ring of energy slightly above you, or they can fire a rocket that will fly off-screen and then land at some distance away. Unfortunately, these guys aren’t launchable, so to stack damage you need to use the other football player enemies as fodder. Their charge move turns their whole body into a hitbox perpetually until they reach a corner or get hit, and having one spawn on each side of the screen makes it hard to get them together to launch from side-to-side since they’ll cross each other up repeatedly. Each wave has subwaves of each enemy group that spawn when the members of the last subwave for that particular group have died, so making sure you have some answer to newly spawned football players from off-screen to avoid them interrupting your other attacks is imperative. Jumping over them seems like the answer until all four robots are on screen, each littering the air with projectiles and choking out your aerial approach.

• The fourth wave leans into the insane damage output that’s possible in the game, with giant versions of the football players and more dogs. All of these are launchable, however, so as long as you can ball them up (I usually bounce one set off the wall on the left side to hit the other football player as he charges), you’re good to unleash some sort of infinite. The large enemies deal a significant amount of damage, but their size also makes them a wrecking ball through groups of other enemies.

• The final wave combines it all: giant robots, bats, and football players. The size of the robots diminishes the effect of their energy projectiles, since they shoot at a height you’ll rarely be at, but it still creates a safe ceiling for the bats to enter from. Once you can lure the bats down while keeping the football players juggled, you can set up serious damage on the robots on the outside, but in most cases I tried to save as many supers as possible to pop here.

After enough damage has been dealt to a boss, it begins spawning adds, and in this fight, it drops stone busts from the ceiling. According to TVTropes, this boss is from an episode of the show, which I vaguely recall, but evidently watching the majority of this show on repeat as a child didn’t leave much of an impression on me.⁴

If they had gone the extra mile on higher difficulties remixing the enemy compositions, I’d probably have delayed this review even longer to keep investing time. The only difference between the three difficulties is the amount of health Buster starts each level with, although each also has a second loop that ups enemy health pools. This also can make the boss fights drag given that most of them are loopable with some sort of wall infinite, although thankfully the setups are easy to find, making the fights seems less like knowledge checks and more like breathers. I still found it perfectly challenging for a first run on Normal, and on the second loop I found myself cruising through the first half of the game; a good sign that some mild time investment unearths the tools for mastery that I want to see from a game like this. I’m hoping that this gets a reevaluation from those who understand beat ’em ups better than I do, as this seems like an surefire bet for those who enjoy games with weak defense, punishing but consistent enemy design, and frequent checkmate situations.