Thanks to Konami for the review code

Title: Felix the Cat
System: Nintendo Switch (eShop)
Price: $24.99
Release Date: 03/28/2024

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Story

In this action platforming adventure, you take control of the classic cartoon character as he sets out to save his girlfriend Kitty from an evil professor! You can do that in NES form, Japanese NES form, or Game Boy form, either way, you still have a rescue mission to do.

Presentation

This is yet another game emulated via the Limited Run Games Carbon Engine, and as the first Konami collaboration done with Carbon, it maintains a lot of the typical quirks and options as the last few Carbon games I covered from other companies.

Unfortunately, that means a super simplistic UI and no bonuses in the slightest. Still, there are a few good parts of the presentation! After a very boring menu from which you pick between the three versions of the game, you end up in your version of choice, and for the NES game, it does a pretty cool tweak to the in-game color palette. See, on original hardware, Felix the Cat was darkened, probably more than it was intended to be. Here in this collection, LRG went in, fixed whatever made the original ROM image darkened, and now the game is bright and colorful, really looking great here! Played on an HDTV or OLED screen with the borders disabled (and since there’s only one border option, it’s either black bars or yellow stars), and you have a damn fine looking emulation, making NES Felix look the best it possibly could. The music and sound emulation is good here too, which is a big relief after how Boy and his Blob messed up the sample audio.

The Game Boy game is a bit irksome though, but it has something I like the idea of. Just like prior LRG Game Boy reissues, the color palette is neither the pure green GB or the gray GB Pocket, but something ugly inbetween. Yet again, we also have a case where the little preview video on the game select menu shows a completely different color palette than what you actually get. However, if you flick the filter on, you get a very neat green palette with a Dot Matrix effect!

I personally find the dot effects to be a bit too overdone, but the fact you can make it a more authentic Game Boy green is much better on my eyes than whatever the weird default colors are meant to represent. Unfortunately due to only having one border option, that means the cool faux Game Boy border from some prior Carbon collections is completely absent, so you still have to deal with the two options, but I found the game to look just fine in handheld mode sans-borders.

Much to my frustration though, this set continues the long-running bug with Carbon Engine emulations, in which they do not save your border/screen options after you close and reopen the application. Every single time you boot into the game, you gotta setup everything once more, and I am bewildered at how Limited Run has not fixed this quirk of their emulator yet.

Gameplay

So you have some presentation options that ended up being a bit better than previous Carbon sets, and then you have… Nothing but a worthy celebration because that horrid save and quit system from prior Carbon compilations is ditched in favor of a proper save state system! Thank goodness. You also have a handy rewind that can be done by pressing ZL at anytime in-game, but otherwise you just have the games here, not even a sound test is available to keep you occupied. No flyer scans, no cart/boxart, no footage of the old NES commercial, no context behind the Japanese version like old preview magazines, nothing at all. You just get the three options for a game, and that’s all. Back to the usual compilation structure we go, then.

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Felix the Cat (NES)– This is the original version of the game, and being that it’s a Hudson Soft game, Felix is full of charm. You take control of the cat throughout several worlds, as he jumps and uses his magical powers to defeat enemies in his way. Along the way, you’ll find secret bags of magic to dive into and collect bonus items in, and will occasionally find a magical heart which increase Felix’s magical abilities, along with giving him extra hit points. All typical platformer stuff. You go through several stages in a world, and the final stage of a world ends in a boss fight, and they’re all pretty darn easy.

In fact, Felix in general is very, very easy. So much so you may not even need any of the save/rewind features to beat it at all. With good input response timing, this emulation is rather solid and gets the job done at letting you play and enjoy the game, and I had a good time with this Hudson gem. At the end of the day though it isn’t anything too special, and outside of the improved colors there’s not much to mention about the game itself or any specific carbon-enhancements, so let’s talk about the weird content edits done to this release!

Yes, a NES game from 1992 got some content edits, and they’re all really weird. The first I didn’t notice until a bit later was how the first boss of the game, Felix’s friend Poindexter, was completely sprite edited to have his head replaced by the Professor. The same professor you’re meant to fight at the end of the game. The reason for this edit is pretty understandable once you learn the context, as that character is owned by Don Oriolo, who didn’t give it up to Dreamworks when they bought Felix the Cat. Thus, while the sprite edit they pulled off is a bit amateurish and silly, I can see why they did that.

What I can’t fully get, is why some other minor things were changed. A few poses during the powerups tweaked here, a cigarette erased there, a gun redrawn on the second boss, these edits are just strange and I have no clue why any of them were done. None of them seem to endanger the ESRB rating, so maybe it’s a Dreamworks mandate? Whatever the case if you notice something off about this reissue, you aren’t alone, but thankfully all the levels are intact and outside of sprite edits nothing major has been done to this game as far as I’m aware of.

Lastly, there’s the stealth, unannounced addition of the “Famicom version” to the collection. See, it was advertised in Japanese magazines back in the day, but never released, so the idea of an unreleased version of the game is rather exciting. All the more reason why this collection adding any sort of historical context or bonus materials would have made things so much more fun, so you can understand the context without me having to tell you or you having to search it up!

Unfortunately, upon playing the Japanese version, I can barely tell any major differences at all besides the Japanese text, and there’s a catch to that aspect. See, in the US version from back in the day, all the Japanese text was in the game’s coding. All of it. The Famicom version presented here has the same sprite edits, the same quirks, and even the same english copyright text as the US version presented here. So, is this really a lost prototype, or just a hacked together US version with the JP script enabled?

Honestly, I’m not too sure, but I have a feeling it’s the latter. Discussing with someone from The Cutting Room Floor wiki who looked into the game, and it appears the Japanese version included here only has a few byte differences from the US version. So either they were so, so similar to the point there’s almost no changes whatsoever besides the text, or this is just a simple US-JP switch flip in the game’s code. Whatever the case, if you wanna play this in Japanese, go right on ahead. Just don’t expect anything of note in this version or for this collection to tell you anything about it.

Felix the Cat (Game Boy)- It’s Felix, on the Game Boy! It has less levels than the console game! It plays a bit sloppier and is even easier than on NES! The game kinda just ends when you beat it! There really isn’t much else to say about it, this is as classic of a Game Boy port as you can get, and the one thing that’s admirable about it is that it does manage to shrink down the NES game without compromising visibility all that much. The game is still very easy, it’s a pretty relaxing platformer, and there weren’t any cheap deaths I encountered due to the smaller screen. Pretty solid port, but since the game is a cut-back version of the NES counterpart, there’s almost no reason to play this version outside of comparing the differences and curiousity.

The sprite edits are also still present in this version, which means the professor looks even sillier slapped onto that first boss. A bit more of a visual mess as a result, but still a solid platformer from Hudson.

Conclusion

Honestly, I really can’t give this collection a good recommendation in the slightest, despite me having a decently fun time with the game itself. While Felix was a fun hudson gem I’m glad I got to play after being held back by its rarity all these years, this collection is honestly such a pitiful value for money that I’m bewildered Konami even bothered to release it at this pricepoint with the lack of bonuses this set has. It is $25, moreso than any Konami compilation besides the TMNT set, which included so many bonuses I couldn’t even begin to list them all!

You literally just get the three versions, some screen options that don’t properly save, and nothing else, not even a sound test. If it wasn’t for the fact the input response time was solid and everything game wise is emulated pretty well, (disregarding the strange sprite swaps) I’d even go as far as to argue this as the weakest Konami retro reissue to date, since outside of the literal game itself, there’s nothing special here, and considering even their Arcade collection had some interview and archival material for $5 less, plus had more than one game with two and a half versions, this really, really feels like a game that only got priced the way it did due to licensing fees.

So with those fees in mind? I still don’t consider Felix the Cat to be worth that amount of money. Yes, this is way cheaper than real carts of both versions, and the Japanese version being available for the first time ever is sorta kinda neat. (even though I’m pondering if it was just a text swap and not from an actual prototype version) But with zero historical context, bonus features of any kind or even button mapping, this is a singular, fun NES platformer thrown in the most barebones wrapper imaginable, and pales in comparison to all of Konami’s other retro compilations.

When the TMNT collection can be crammed full of cool bonus content and Felix can’t even get a scan of his own game cartridge thrown into this set, this is one I’ll have to recommend you only go for if you have nostalgia for the game in particular, or see it on a discount. The game is still fun, and the emulation is a lot better than prior Carbon Engine titles, but I don’t even think a Hagane port as barebones as this would be worth the $25. They really could have taken some lessons from that TMNT set and loaded this with bonus content to make the asking price worth it.

I give Felix the Cat a 5 out of 10.