Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular (NES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Kemco's 1990 license-based sports game for the NES, Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular.

Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular, like so many other games made by Kemco, doesn't have the tidy, clear-cut history that you might expect from such a simple NES game. The company certainly liked playing musical chairs with its licenses.

Similar to how The Bugs Bunny Crazy Castle (https://youtu.be/vmqWmLZQRMo ) was a localization of the Japanese game Roger Rabbit, Snoopy's Silly Sports is a localized version of a Famicom game known as Donald Duck, which was itself a heavily localized port of Alternative World Games, a Commodore 64 game by Gremlin that was released in 1987.

The game is an Italy-themed sports mini-game collection cast in the same mold as classics like California Games and Track & Field. There are six different events to compete in over a couple of rounds, and once the results are tallied, if you did well, you might just find yourself walking away with a gold medal of your very own.

The six events are as follows:

1. Sack Race has Snoopy hopping down a street at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius, avoiding manholes as you attempt to stay ahead of your opponent, Spike.

2. Boot Throwing is a hammer throw-style event that has you chucking Wellies for distance in front of the Roman Colosseum.

3. Pogo is a hurdles-style event that has you leaping over walls on a pogo stick near the Parthenon, even though the Parthenon is not in Italy.

4. Overboard tasks Snoopy with shoving his opponent over the side of a Venician gondola.

5. Pile of Pizza is similar to the 100-yard dash, but Snoopy also has to carefully balance the giant stack of pizzas he's carrying. If they start tilting like the Leaning Tower of Pisa in the background, you'll probably end up dropping some.

6. River Jump is a simple pole vault event in which you have to clear a river in Naples instead of the traditional high bar.

The events are extremely simple, and as you can see from the length of the video, they don't take very long to clear. However, I'm sure that any of you that have played it before can attest to how misleading the length of this video might be to the uninitiated.

It's a game aimed squarely at kids, but it can be excruciatingly difficult. Some of the events, like the Sack Race and the Boot Throw, are fairly easy to get the hang of, whereas others, like Overboard and Pile of Pizza, require a lot of focus and practice to consistently do well in.

And then there's River Jump. Learning how to clear this one is likely one of the hardest single challenges you'll find in any NES game. It requires super precise timing, and since it provides no feedback about where you went wrong when you fail, you don't have much choice but to play it over-and-over in practice mode, praying that you stumble upon the magic winning combination.

It took me years to figure it out as a kid, just like the surfing stages in T&C Surf Designs did.

But somehow, that never made the game un-fun. My sister and I played this one quite a bit, and we always had a good time with it no matter how much we sucked, just like we did with Track & Field, T&C Surf Designs, and California Games. The game's design is firmly planted in the 1980s, and it belongs to a sub-genre that was all but dead by the end of the 90s, but if you are able to appreciate the hyper-focused, rapid-fire nature of the gameplay, there's definitely some fun to be found here.

The graphics are neatly appealing, too. The Italy-theme gives the stages a consistent, cheerful look throughout, there are a few nifty parallax tricks in the backgrounds, and the Peanuts characters look fairly sharp on the NES. They give the game a sense of personality that it would be sorely lacking without.

I think that Snoopy's Silly Sports Spectacular is game that might be hard to appreciate if you approach it expecting something comparable to Mario Party or the Mario & Sonic Olympics games. It's distinctly a product of its own time, and it hasn't aged particularly well, but if you want something that you can jump right into with a friend and play in short bursts, Snoopy still makes for a pretty cool time capsule piece.

And if you like Snoopy, you might also get a kick out of Snoopy Concert, a Japanese SNES exclusive. You can find my translated playthrough of that one here: https://youtu.be/klyc5zpdviY
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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