Pink Goes to Hollywood

Genre: Platformer Developer: Headgames Publisher: TecMagik Ent. Players: 1 Released: 1993

Back when I was a kid, I would go to (at the time) Funcoland and browse their lists and see what caught my eye. I never did any research on my games. Sure, they were only a couple of bucks a piece, but they never seemed to give me any long term game play for my hard-earned cash from my paper route. I based my selections off of popular licenses of the day and usually got mediocre games. One of the games I owned then was Pink Goes To Hollywood. I knew nothing about the game at all, but my love of the cartoon show convinced me to buy it. I honestly tricked myself into enjoying it at least for a little while and even completed it once, not that it’s a hard game. I wanted to write a review for it, so I went back and gave it one more try to see if it would give me any more enjoyment then it did when I was a kid. Needless to say, it didn’t.

The game is a generic “me too” platformer all too common for that day and age released by the (sarcasm on) wildly popular company TecMagik. It’s reminiscent of Aladdin or Pitfall!: the Mayan Adventure with large and sprawling stages that require you to find each exit. Pink can pretty much jump with C and attack with his punch gun (I don’t know what you call it though) with B and traverse about six repetitive and tedious stages. The stages themselves don’t have enough going on in them to make them exciting to play through. Each one just feels like they made them big for the sake of making them big, and it often takes too long to find the exit.

Since Pink is basically auditioning for a Hollywood act, he’s traversing through several movie sets while Inspector Clousseau is in constant pursuit. The jungle and kitchen stages are two of the better stages, and some stages have you actually battling Clousseau at the end and others don’t. When each stage is completed, you are presented with an ending basically saying that Pink made it to Hollywood.

The graphics aren’t groundbreaking in any way, but they portray the zany and abstract look and visual styles that the old cartoons did, and I kind of like that about the game. The Pink Panther and Inspector Clousseau look exactly what they looked like the cartoons, and that’s another plus. Their animation is also very well done too. What we are faced with though, throughout the rest of the game are graphics that don’t look bad per se, but the stages being too long and drawn out cause the graphical changes to be too spread out as well. For that reason, they got old for me to keep staring at for the duration of the game.

The music also sounds like the abstract score found in the cartoons, and it’s fitting here too and helps the lighthearted feel of the game. Surprisingly, the sound effects are rather good even for the Genesis. Everything is pretty crisp, from Pink’s jumping to the punch of his attack; it all fits really well.

After all the praise you probably think that I actually like Pink Goes to Hollywood. In all actuality, I don’t. It’s just too generic to stand a chance at all. That’s not to say it’s a bad game, because it’s not. It’s just that most other platformers at the time were done better.

Even though it’s a mediocre game, it’s still a Pink Panther game, and that’s cool since there’s so few games that feature one of my favorite childhood cartoon characters. It’s a cool game to have in a collection but not much fun to play anymore, still it may be worth a try if you really like the Pink Panther.