A Bug's Life || ThinkThank #3
A Work of Fliktion
This is may be a good entry to reiterate that not every title I will reflect upon was a good game. Leaving aside that relative "goodness" of a game is too subjective to be worth discussing for any reasonable length of time, I will say that A Bug's Life was not received well at the time of its release, nor have many among the gaming public been clamouring for a remaster or a remake to right the wrongs of the past; to show the world the true vision which the studio, Traveller's Tales had in mind, but could not execute at the time due to technical limitations. No, I believe that the developer achieved precisely its mission in the development of A Bug's Life. That is, to quickly put together a functional tie-in game whose graphical ambitions were staid enough such that they could be ported from Windows computers to N64 and Playstation with ease, and to provide young players who recently had their imaginations set alight with cartoon insects the necessary kindling to keep that fire going for another fiscal quarter.
Quick Story
Before we get started, I just wanted to mention a small note about the funny way that kids remember and internalise information. On the PC version, the one which I played growing up, before the program boots up in earnest, you are presented with a screen which offers two options: Software or Hardware Acceleration. I did not know for the life of me what this meant as a child, and for some reason it never crossed my mind to ask anyone about it. In fact, I didn't think it was related to technical abilities or limitations on a given computer, but rather, I thought it represented two distinct, atmospheric preferences. I knew the words "Software" and "Hardware", but as they have no intuitive connection to technology, I simply assumed they were some kind of poetic descriptors.
At first however, I assumed it was a distinction of difficulty, and tried both to see if there was a difference in that sense. Detecting none, I shifted my focus, having noted that when I tried the "Hardware" option, the game appeared noticeably different. Shapes were harder, sharper, and most textures seemed darker than their "Software" counterparts. After a few more back and forth tests, I determined that "Hardware" was a personal preference for images to look harsh and moody. Despite learning the real meanings of "Software" and "Hardware" further down the line, I still attached a sort of emotional attribution to the words, with programs which rendered all components via Software as somehow gentle, inviting, and of noble bearing. Meanwhile, things rendered via Hardware were sharp, functional, and unconcerned with palatability. With some mental gymnastics, I could probably be convinced to still express them this way to this day.
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| Software, for the sophisticated palate |
A Simple Game
A Bug's Life is not impressive in almost any measurement of one of the pillars of a game's design. It is bright and colourful, recognizably portraying models from the 1998 movie, while also being blocky, mismatched, and at times garish. The story is... well its just a quick retread of the movie, isn't it? Which again, that isn't a bad thing-- its just not going to blow any minds. The movement is a touch cumbersome, even if I am personally the kind of person who actually likes fiddly controls and mastering them, as apparently that skill is one of my solitary inarguable "things". The camera is also of a distinct vintage, before more variables could help third-person cameras find optimal locations in real-time.
I will however take a minute to offer real praise, in that the sound is great for the time. A handful of the enemies' sound effects may be on the grating side, but the music, commentary from Flik, and the voice lines from what I presume to be the movie's voice actors are all wonderful. Of particular note is the voice of the ant who instructs the player in the tutorial level. That voice is just so soothing and reassuring!
I suspect that the relative quality of the soundscape's atmosphere is what smoothed over some wrinkles in the overall game for many players. Walking around to get a lay of the land in a new level had a certain delightful quality, keeping spirits high with a pleasant soundtrack. In some ways, this suspiciously decent sound begins to poke holds in detractor's sentiments. Despite what some of its contemporary criticism claimed, I don't think it is fair or right to suggest that the game was cobbled together cynically, only to collect a buck with no creative ambition. But I have gotten ahead of myself.
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| Its no Pikmin, but its fun to be a little guy in a big world |
The Gameplay
I wouldn't call A Bug's Life a "hidden gem", as having Disney and Pixar on your cover kind of makes you the furthest thing from hidden you can get, but perhaps 'overlooked' or 'missed' would be appropriate. Consider that the target audience for this game was almost solely, 'children who saw the movie', you're dealing with both a comparatively small demographic and a moving target. Once they get old enough, they likely don't want to play the game targeted at a bracket below them anymore, and upon release, anyone who already erroneously believed themselves "too old" for this kind of game would have no reason to give it a chance, as they likely did not with the movie either. Importantly, this is an older game now, with little assurance that those reading about it would have played it. A quick overview of the mechanics is in order.
A Bug's Life is an action-platformer, with open level design akin to Banjo-Kazooie or Spyro. The player control's Flik, the protagonist of the film, out to solve puzzles, defeat scarier bugs, and platform his way to success. This is not an immersive sim or something-- A Bug's Life is very video game-y. Moment to moment, the player moves from collectable to collectable, taking the form of Grain, which assumes the role of Coins in a Mario game or Gems in Spyro. At times, portions of a level's map are inaccessible, blocked by a door a number marked on them, indicating the amount of Grain needed in order for the door to automatically open when Flik approaches. This ensures that the player has been forced to do a requisite amount of exploring before continuing the level.
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| This cardboard door has some impressive locking tech. |
Flik can also find Berries, which are used to fight enemies, with different colors offering increasing levels of damage. The starting Berries, the red ones, offer the most minimal damage, while the apex of the weaponized Berry family is the Golden berry, which has the ability to permanently defeat enemies, rather than letting them respawn.
Scattered around the map, there are also four Letters, which when fully collected during a level will spell out "FLIK". This was an extremely common collect-a-thon trope, and is hardly worth mentioning further.
But lastly, and most interesting to me, are Plant upgrade tokens, which allow Flik to deploy a variety of instantly-growing plants to help him solve puzzles. See, a core mechanic of A Bug's Life's gameplay is tracking down and utilising big plant seeds which appear on the map. In pleasant defiance of the laws of nature, Flik may change the color of a given seed, so long as he has the associated Plant Token, and collecting multiples of the same color will grant Flik subsequent improvements to that plant. A single leaf platform for instance, can be upgraded to be a multi-leaved staircase, allowing the player easy access to high places.
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| Thanks DOSgamert for being one of the only places to find clips |
There are a handful of gameplay wrinkles here and there-- boss battles and running sections-- but the core experience lets the player loose on an open level, to pick it apart until the player's collecting has been satisfied and the exit has been found.
The Feature that Saves
There's a major element which kept this game in my mind all of these years later. I'll start with it's mechanical side. I mentioned a moment ago that I found the Plant Upgrade Tokens to be the most interesting to me, and that is because I find them to be the place where the designer, Jon Burton, was the most comfortable sharing some expression. I find a bit of narrative reinforcement in Flik's primary gameplay loop to be the development and independent deployment of plant-based tools. Remember, in both the film and the game, Flik is an inventor. What marks him as 'different' and not always understood or trusted among his colony-mates is that he has a restless imagination that longs to solve puzzles, not simply toil away until death. Although none of the puzzles are particularly challenging-- the game's box touts "..guaranteed fun for all ages...", so the puzzles definitely need to skew easier-- I find their spirit entirely in line with our protagonist's nature. The player will observe a token in a place that cannot be reached simply, and is left to sort out for themselves which combination of plant tools they need to use in order to achieve their goal. In other words, in order to solve the game's puzzles, the player must think like Flik. Especially when you consider the target age being around 10 years old on the high end, this is a wonderful design goal to have successfully delivered.
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| Its hard to express the horror of this level; at least as a seven year old felt it. |
Were it not for successfully using game mechanics to evoke the sensory experience of the film, I don't think anyone would remember A Bug's Life, much in the way almost nobody remembers the troves of shovelware "Activity Discs" which superficially plastered licensed images over technically playable, mini/micro-game templates. What the game did, for those who still had supple imaginations, was provide a successful continuation of how the film made them feel. The City level, while containing more threats than usual, a higher density of hard-to-reach collectables, and an almost frenetic soundtrack, also captured the mood of the equivalent scene in the movie, in which Flik is both excited and overwhelmed by the "Big City". Its immediate follow-up, the level in which Flik collects the rest of the Circus Bugs, has almost no functional resemblance to the introductions in the movie, but nevertheless carries the feeling of gathering a council of lovable friends, which was the more essential emotional experience anyway.
For what its worth
I find that ability to capture essence, in the absence of greater gameplay ambition, to be remarkable and admirable. I find a bit of work-a-day inspiration in this. Jon Burton, again the sole designer of the game (Two other programmers helped in the porting to other systems, but the gameplay design was all Jon), was given the task of creating a tie-in product in a not-well-respected medium, for a motion picture property targeting children, on a limited schedule and budget, and managed to not over-promise or under-deliver for either reason. Despite the target market being children, whose approval was ultimately second to the mere purchase of the game itself and thus could have been delivered in the most minimal package, Jon Burton chose to create a mechanical gameplay loop that encouraged creative thinking and embodied the spirit of the children's beloved movie. Despite the high standard set by film it was tied to, Jon didn't set out to produce a massive, overly ambitious and sprawling game that would blow the competition out of the water. Instead, he delivered a functional and pleasing craft of a game, instead of an art. A game which was content to be pleasing to its intended audience, and completely disregarded by those outside.
Although anecdotal, everyone in my life who I have spoken with about this game who is within a two to three year margin of my age has blurted something praising, emotional, or ecstatic about it. "Oh my god, that game scared me so much as a kid!" or "Man, I spent hours just running around, exploring. It was such a vibe." and "I remember thinking that I must have done something so big, because for the first time, I actually beat a game! LOVE A Bug's Life." Meanwhile, its contemporary reviews called it outright bad, cheap, a cynical cash-grab, fundamentally flawed-- the list goes on. Perhaps, had any of us cared at such an age to even consider what irritable 30 somethings in 1998 thought, it would have been our first time experiencing the Audience/Critic divide that is so often discussed these days. Thankfully, we were spared such distractingly dull and misanthropic conversations, as we were too busy collecting Plant Tokens to find ourselves a Golden Berry.
Special thanks to DOSgamert on youtube for the gameplay pictures!
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