Boogie Woogie Bowling (Mega Drive)

 I think, if I cast my mind back to the ancient past, this game might have received a review in an issue of SEGA Power, probably an issue numbered in the 40s. But I had no interest in sports games at all as a kid, and that review wasn't of Boogie Woogie Bowling, as the game underwent a rigorous blandification process while being brought westwards. The name was changed to "Championship Bowling", and while Boogie Woogie has a cast made up of two boys, a girl, and a xenomorph, Championship has a cast made up of two men and two women, drawn in a totally different style to the ones in Boogie Woogie. 

 

The reason I even bothered to look into this game as an adult is thanks to a bit of weird happenstance. A couple of years ago, I got a chinese clone console that has a slot for Famicom cartridges, and a slot for Mega Drive cartridges. It's a nie little machine, it's USB powered and has HDMI output, so it's very convenient to get running in the 2020s, plus it even has region and language switches for the Mega Drive games.  One little quirk it has is the power switch: in the middle, the console is switched off, push it upwards to turn the Famicom part on, and downwards to activate the Mega Drive part. Anyway, a friend's son was playing on it, and with no cartridge in the Famicom slot, tried to turn it on by pushing the switch upwards. This revealed a menu of over a hundred built-in Famicom ROMs that had been there the whole time without my knowledge! A short experiment later revealed that there was an equivalent menu of Mega Drive games, too! And Boogie Woogie Bowling was among them.

 

I have no idea, though, how I managed to recognise that it had been reskinned for a different version that I'd only ever seen in a magazine more than thirty years ago, though. The human brain really is mysterious, I guess. Anyway, it's a bowling game. It plays pretty much like any other bowling game: it's mainly based around stopping a marker that quickly moves back and forth on various power/spin/etc. meters. Isn't it strange how bowling games and golf games are so similar in how they're played? There's also a little gimmick that lets you press the face buttons while your opponent's trying to determine their ball's spin, which I think affects the speed of their marker, though I'm not totally sure on that.

 

The main mode is structured as you might expect: you bowl against various CPU opponents, gradually increasing in difficulty. A lot of these opponents will throw gutter ball after gutter ball, while some will oddly alternate between gutter balls and strikes. either way, it's a lot more merciful than the other bowling game with which I'm familiar, the Game Boy pirate cart classic World Bowling, which is absolutely merciless and demands perfect play from the outset. There's a couple of other modes, too, though these can only be played as a solo practice, or against other human players. There's split mode, which gives you sets of random pins, never a full set, and you have to clear them. In this mode, you only score points if you clear every pin. There's also bonus mode, which is more interesting: each individual pin is assigned a different points value, seemingly at random. I guess there's no CPU opponents for these modes because it would have been too complicated to program them to actually try and score properly? That's just a theory, though.

 

Boogie Woogie Bowling is an incredibly okay game. I definitely wouldn't have paid money for it on release, and I probably wouldn't today, unless it was apart of some kind of compilation or something. But if you emulate it, or find the ROM hidden away in a piece of hardware you own, it might amuse you for an hour or so. One extra thing I found interesting is that it was published in Japan by Visco, a company I definitely associate more with arcade games and the Neo Geo than with regular consoles.