Chubby Cherub. Released in 1986. Developed by TOSE. Published by Bandai.

My first memory of Chubby Cherub is from the Nintendo Player's Guide, the magazine that was included with NES consoles that were not bundled with Super Mario Bros. The little redheaded girl who lived next door to me got it with her NES, and as we read through the game listings the two of us were utterly confused by this game. Chubby Cherub?? What the hell was this? An angel that eats cake and kills dogs with hearts? Really? WTF? Seeing the box art in stores didn't help either. It looked cheap and creepy all at once. It had a naked cartoon cherub with a vacant stare and his mouth agape on a gray box. It doesn't offer a real compelling reason to want to play the game, even by early NES standards. Ever since then I've had a morbid curiosity about Chubby Cherub, primarily focused around the question, "WHY DOES THIS EXIST?"

It turns out it was actually a licensed game in Japan called "Q-taro the Ghost: Bow-Wow Panic," and was based off of the manga and later children's cartoon “Q-taro the Ghost”. Q-taro likes to cause mischief, eat junk food, and is scared of dogs. He also looks like a condom with a mouth. Apparently for about 20 years or so, he was a pretty big deal in Japan. In fact, the creator of Pac-Man, Toru Iwatani, has said that Q-taro the Ghost was part of the inspiration for Pac-Man (apparently more than a pizza was involved).

That helps explains the fairly bizarre concept of the game, though it still doesn't entirely explain why they changed him from a ghost to an angel. I suspect it came down to Bandai wanting to release the game in the US without having to pay the licensing rights of a character that was virtually unknown to Western audiences. So they had to figure out what could replace a white roundish condom looking ghost that flew around the screen. After they decided that condoms probably can't fly, and children probably wouldn't want to play as on anyway an angel was probably next on the list of passable ideas. And since eating was going to be a key element to the game.... Chubby Cherub was born.

Now that we have an idea of how the game came to be, the next question is the big one. Is it any good? Absolutely not. It is a terrible game. Not just by today's standards either. This game was terrible when I first played it on an emulator in 1996, and it was terrible the day it launched ten years before that. It was one of the first NES games made, and because of that I'll look past the music and graphics which are pretty rough. Those aren't the worst things in the game anyway. That would be the controls. Chubby is insanely hard to control. Really the controls are more like suggestions. You just go in the. And really this game is just not fun. You fly around, eat, try to not get killed a dog, and that's about it. There's no real challenge to the game aside from fighting back the urge to sling the controller across the room.

The most damning commentary on the game actually comes from Nintendo of America, at least in an indirect way. Chubby Cherub was released in 1986, so its launch predated Nintendo Power and even the Nintendo Fun Club so the game never had any kind of full review. However in 1990, the 11th issue of Nintendo Power included a special mini-magazine - the Nintendo Power Pak Source. This 36 page directory had a listing of every licensed NES game that had been released up until that point. Each listing included two screen shots, a brief description, a gameplay hint, and ratings broken down into four categories. If you can get a hold of a copy the Pak Source is a really interesting look at that moment in time, and is kind of amusing when you look at how different "classics" got reviewed. For example, Double Dragon and Simon's Quest both got rated higher than The Legend of Zelda. Let that thought simmer for a while.

At the end of the day, the Pak Source, as every other part of Nintendo Power, was more of a marketing tool rather than an unbiased look at NES games. The 0 to 5.0 rating system saw a lot of very generous ratings. Most games were getting scores between 3 to 4.5, with only a handful of games getting scores that dipped into the 2's. Chubby Cherub was the only game that got lower than a 2 in any category. And it's cumulative score averaged out to 2, making it the lowest rated game in the directory.

Basically this was Nintendo of America saying, "of the nearly 300 games on our console this is the worst." Quite a legacy.