I've only ever seen this game once in my life - on a single arcade machine in Manila in the mid-90s surrounded by Street Fighter and MK cabinets. I guess it caught my eye because it looked like a console platformer and not an arcade game at all, but I forgot all about it for the next 30 years until I tried it out again today.
Magical Cat Adventure is the video game version of those pictures that get weirder and weirder the more you look at them; you know, the ones where the clock says 5:00 and the sun is in the middle of the sky, and a blind man is reading the newspaper. It doesn't really do anything egregious, but none of its elements really fit together the way they're supposed to. It's momentum-based in that you get faster and faster the more you move in a direction, but the stage layouts don't facilitate or reward speed in any way. There's so much input lag, particularly with attacking (it feels like almost half a second!), that it feels like a deliberate decision, but the controls feel slippery rather than rigid. There is an attempt at nonlinearity, but it's uninspired and phoned-in (think branches you can climb to get to collectibles). And rather than throw plenty of enemies at you the way most arcade games do, this is content to have enemies drop in one-by-one but in the most obnoxious 'gotcha' ways that the optimal way to play this is by slowly and painfully ambling forward through the levels. (There is a time limit, but even playing very conservatively I never once came close to running out the clock) This not only makes the gameplay tedious but also slows the game down so much that this already-easy game is a quarter-nibbler rather than a quarter muncher, which explains its lack of success in the arcades.
If I had to say something nice about this, I think the graphics are fine and the bosses are decent - they have multiple attack patterns and give enough of a 'tell' that they're manageable even with the considerable input lag. But when a game has only five short levels and starts feeling boring in the middle of the first one, it's not hard to see why it wasn't a roaring success!
Magical Cat Adventure is the video game version of those pictures that get weirder and weirder the more you look at them; you know, the ones where the clock says 5:00 and the sun is in the middle of the sky, and a blind man is reading the newspaper. It doesn't really do anything egregious, but none of its elements really fit together the way they're supposed to. It's momentum-based in that you get faster and faster the more you move in a direction, but the stage layouts don't facilitate or reward speed in any way. There's so much input lag, particularly with attacking (it feels like almost half a second!), that it feels like a deliberate decision, but the controls feel slippery rather than rigid. There is an attempt at nonlinearity, but it's uninspired and phoned-in (think branches you can climb to get to collectibles). And rather than throw plenty of enemies at you the way most arcade games do, this is content to have enemies drop in one-by-one but in the most obnoxious 'gotcha' ways that the optimal way to play this is by slowly and painfully ambling forward through the levels. (There is a time limit, but even playing very conservatively I never once came close to running out the clock) This not only makes the gameplay tedious but also slows the game down so much that this already-easy game is a quarter-nibbler rather than a quarter muncher, which explains its lack of success in the arcades.
If I had to say something nice about this, I think the graphics are fine and the bosses are decent - they have multiple attack patterns and give enough of a 'tell' that they're manageable even with the considerable input lag. But when a game has only five short levels and starts feeling boring in the middle of the first one, it's not hard to see why it wasn't a roaring success!