Our spiky-haired, smart-alecky Nintendo Power mascot must have been on cloud nine when he found out he was getting a game of his own. Too bad he has to share it with his equally conceited object of sibling rivalry; his twin sister. …Wait, what? Since when did he… ah, never mind. That’s not important right now.
On a personal note, I myself love bowling, but I don’t do it very often. I did recognize, though, that this is pretty darn close to the real thing. The gameplay even takes the actual physics of the game into consideration, including how hard the ball is rolled, how much spin is put into it, and even gives you a choice of the ball’s weight and whether your bowler is to be left- or right-handed. These all seem sort of superfluous and unnecessary at first, but they do make certain differences. The biggest factors that I noticed, however, is the character’s placement behind the alley, and the amount of power put into the ball’s throw. Everything else makes pretty minute adjustments, which sounds VERY confusing, I know, but it all becomes much clearer after a while of trial-and-error. This makes it all very challenging having to perfect how to knock at least most of the pins down as opposed to getting gutterball after gutterball, but once you figure out how to get a strike, it’s easy to get even two or three strikes in a row (a “double” or “turkey” as it’s called in the sport).
The music is, for lack of any better term, pretty weird. I guess you could go along with the game’s claim to being “funky” and call it exactly that, but it’s actually quite annoying. It even has the tendency to “interrupt” the game’s SFX or make them sound differently at times, so I just turn the music option off. It’s interesting in itself how they even gave players the option to turn off the music, however. That’s good, because the SFX are better anyway. The sound of the pins being knocked down are especially realistic. One thing that disappoints me, though, is that they gave a voice to the announcer, but not to the main characters! This is especially strange during the animation where Nester screams, and the camera “flies” right down his throat. Instead of hearing a kid screaming in frustration, you hear this weird little sound effect that sounds like it’s from an arcade game. (Kind of like that sound when Pac-Man dies, you know?)
NFB’s graphics are nicely done, but I still feel that they don’t quite use all of the VB’s capabilities. The option screens are pretty few, flat, and uninspiring, and the title screen even only has one thing that really pops out at you, and that would be, once again, that “Funky”. Even though the animations are flat as well, they’re still hilarious. There’s a menagerie of different funny faces that Nester and Hester will make depending on just how well they do, ranging from looking like they just won the lottery if they nail a tough spare or split, to pulling their hair and throwing outright temper-tantrums if the ball misses a lone pin or goes in the gutter. Boy, anger management trouble much?
In a nutshell, I’d say that Nester’s Funky Bowling is pretty entertaining even for non-bowlers, but it probably will take those said people a bit longer to get the hang of the game. It took me a week to finally bowl a 213 in NFB, but that just shows how much it really makes you determined to top the high score chart. It might not be TOTALLY “Funky”, but it is FUN, I’ll give it that.
P.S. Who’s this “evil brother Lester” I keep hearing about? I’ve seen him mentioned in some other reviews, and in my approximate week of owning the game as of this review, I haven’t seen a wink of the guy yet. Ah well. At least it’s appropriate for Nester to star in a game with graphics as red as his hair.
I give Nester’s Funky Bowling **** out of *****. A great bowling game with a nice silly twist.