What's this? A double review?
Two of our staff members decided to do a review on Boogerman.
What do they think about this grossly rude game? Let's find out!
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Mr. Gable's Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure (1994)
You go ahead and you have your Super Mario Bros. and your Zelda. You keep your Final Fantasy and your Street Fighter. You even can have your Sonic and “Super” Metroid. I’ll take Boogerman, thank you.
Boogerman is the only game to memory that I have ever acquired, played, and beaten in the span of roughly 10 hours. An experienced and highly skilled player could probably do it a lot faster but as for me…it took me a couple of times. Once to learn the controls (stupid rental place never came with an instruction booklet) and twice to actually play it decently.
If you can call playing Boogerman decent.
The story as written on Wikipedia:
One dark and stormy evening, The civic-minded Professor Stinkbaum was working in his lab where he was secretly building a machine that would save the world from pollution by transporting it to a place he called Dimension X Crement. That same evening, eccentric millionaire, Snotty Ragsdale paid a visit to the lab to investigate this project and find out how such a thing was possible. He wasn't too sure about the machine's purpose. When the machine was activated, a cloud of pepper was inhaled through the nose by Ragsdale, causing him to let out a mighty sneeze. The power of said sneeze broke the machine. As a result of it breaking, a portal opens from it. Just then, a mysterious giant arm pops out of the portal and steals the machine’s main power source. In response to this danger, Ragsdale rushes into the Men’s room to change into his alter ego, the mighty Boogerman! After doing so, he jumped into the portal to pursue the arm to learn the reason for the theft it had committed.
That’s more or less how I remember it except Boogerman goes undercover as Professor Stinkbaum’s janitor and then he unwittingly is thrown into Dimension X Crement. (That name is absolute genius.) But it really doesn’t matter. This whole “story” is actually just the set up for the game. The entire game takes place in Dimension X Crement (HAHAHA! It never gets old!) where you play through many nasty levels of garbage, sewers, snot, and other unnamables.
Boogerman is your average side-scroller. You go left to right collecting items, grabbing power ups, scoring points, and defeating bad guys. All of these things match up pretty easily to most any other platformer at the time except for one important difference: The grossout factor. You flick boogers, burp, hack loogies, and fart. (AWESOME!) And you can actually do a Mega-Burp & Fart by holding the button for a longer period of time. (MEGA-AWESOME!) This is the kind of game you’d buy because you enjoy the gameplay of Donkey Kong Country or Super Mario Bros. but you also have an annoying little sister. So you pop in Boogerman to get all of the great action of a side scroller but at the same time grossing out your siblings so they’d leave you the heck alone so you can play it by yourself.
This is the intro screen and first level. It's totally RAD.
Watch around the 1:00 mark for amazing burp/fart action
Boogerman is brought to you by Interplay, the same people behind Earthworm Jim and Clay Fighter. Boogerman has the same whacked out craziness of those other games while still performing pretty strongly on its own. Even though I would say Boogerman is the inferior of these 3 games, it’s still pretty awesome. If he had a gun, he’d be number one. Anyway, if you can’t derive from the title that you’re in for a bizarre game then at least if your nerditity (it’s a word!) is up to snuff than you know that if Interplay is involved...it should be pretty amazing.
I give this game a 4 out of 5 bits for ludeness, awesomeness, and playability.
-Mr. Gable
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The Everyman Superhero: Boogerman:
A Pick and Flick Adventure (1994)
Normally, when disgusting things come out of our body, we just hide it or wipe it on the side of whatever we're sitting on. Never did you think that maybe, just maybe, you were bitten by a radioactive, overweight, balding middle-aged man and became a superhero.
That's not entirely the plot of Boogerman: A Pick and Flick Adventure, but you play as protagonist Snotty Ragsdale's caped crusader, Boogerman. Unlike most superheroes that use incredible strength, the ability to fly, or some other boring retread superpower, Boogerman is armed with a prodigal amount of gas and mucus. Physically, his arsenal (and I stress the arse) is pretty well limited to slamming his butt into the ground. However, his long-range attacks include flinging boogers and hawking loogies at scab creatures, pus monsters and goblins. Up close, you can unleash devastating burps, or borrow a page from South Park's Terrance and Phillips and deliver your gas attack from a different oriface.
The game is set in Dimension X Crement, and most of the characters, monsters and levels are similarly-conceived puns. If you've played a platform game in your life, you know that you side-scroll from left to right (and up and down) trying to take down the bad guy. In this game, mix in that and everything in the world that was funny to you in elementary school, and you have yourself Boogerman.
While not a game you'd fire up on the Sega at Grandma's house, Boogerman's humor is harmless enough to share with actual grade-schoolers, yet hilarious enough that even if you're paying off student loans, you can still get a chuckle out of flushing yourself down a toilet or snot-rocketing foes. It's also worth mentioning that if this game had existed prior to 1980, it would've been banned in more countries than Grand Theft Auto (because using the word "fart" would probably have knocked it into NC-17 territory with the old people in charge).
You'll love this game if: You're learning cursive
You'll hate this game if: Your sense of humor includes references to movies made in the silent film era
3.5 out of 5 bits
-JAK
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