Buck Bumble
Buck Bumble is an action video game for the Nintendo 64 developed by British video game company Argonaut Software and released by Ubi Soft in 1998. A special Buck Bumble rumble pack was packaged with the U.K. version. Plot The year is 2010, and as the result of a previous spill at a chemical factory in London, England, the insects in the surrounding area have mutated. Several different types of these mutated insects gather together becoming the evil "Herd", who are bent on taking over the garden, and eventually the whole world. The game casts the player as a Buck Bumble, a volunteer bumblebee that gets implanted with cyborg technology. He is part of an organization known as "The Resistance", which is trying to stop the evil Herd Army. Buck's missions send him on multiple tasks, such as defending the resistance base, attacking Herd supply lines while traveling through sewers, and eventually fighting the Herd's mantis-like Queen. Gameplay The game features full-on 3D graphics. Buck can be armed with up to eleven different weapons, including such realistic weapons as a stun gun, a laser, a rocket launcher, and a guided missile launcher. While the levels are height-restricted, Buck can fly around in nineteen missions, some requiring the placement of a bomb without bumping it into anything. The player or players in two player mode can also perform various aerial acrobatics, similar to a fighter plane, in fact it was originally programmed as a flight game before it "evolved into a flying bee". The player controls the bee with moves such as loops and banking to the sides. At the top of the screen the player is given a radar screen which can be used to locate enemies within the level, a damage metre, and the player's current weapon. One level can have multiple locations which the player can reach by passing through teleporters, or gates. There are several items the player can collect while in each level, such as weapons, nectar from flowers to regain energy, and even point bonuses. Several of the game's enemies such as beetles and wasps have special generators that release another enemy when the first enemy is destroyed, requiring the player to destroy the generator itself to defeat the enemies and clear the stage. Besides the enemies, the player can also be drowned if in water for more than a couple of seconds. Multiplayer Buck Bumble has two multiplayer modes. The first, Buck Battle, allows up to two players to engage in an airborne dog-fight on a preset map. The second is a football-style game called Buzz Ball. The goal is to hit a giant soccer ball into the opposing player's net. As in Buck Battle, the player has the ability to kill the opponent in the process. Players are able to use two weapons from the game: a simple zapper, which gently moves the ball along, and a rocket launcher, which sends the ball flying in a different direction. Development The game was built