As far as holidays go, Easter really gets the short end of the stick when it comes to video games.
Christmas gets tons of stuff, Halloween has a bunch too.
So why not Easter with it's bunnies n' candies n' Zombie Jesuses?
Well, minus the latter, it seems Mastiff and Seven Computerized Creations thought the same thing
and released Easter Bunny's Big Day in 2003 for the Sony PlayStation.
And this is a prime example of a game that's pretty rare but has almost zero value.
But it stood out from the rest due to its purple spine.
It sticks out in the worst of ways when up against all those luscious black label PS1 games. I kind of hate it.
Grab a basketful of egg-citing holiday fun!
Raaaaaagh, that egg pun is so bad, it gave me shell shock.
Omelet-in' this one slide though. Let's get cracking with the review!
Easter Bunny's Big Day begins with a hideous intro screen accompanied by cheesy music
that sounds like a $30 Casio keyboard's demonstration song.
[horrendous music plays]
After this, I promptly decided to adjust the music volume and
[car honking noises intensify] I DON'T KNOW WHAT'S GOING ON AAAAAA
After this, you're given the option to play the Easter Bunny's Big Adventure.
Wait, what happened to the Big Day? I guess adventure was too long to print on that fourth easter egg.
And then there's an album, which just lets you look at some crap artwork once you unlock it, who cares...
Choose your difficulty, but choose wisely, because expert mode is purely for masochism.
After this, it's another MIDI tune accompanied by a bizarre story and a cheap Shockwave animation.
The story goes that the Easter Bunny sucks at his one and only purpose in life and somehow ran out of eggs.
Just then, Robo-Rabbit appears and says it'll help out, because plot.
After this, it's on to Easter Village where you can roam around anywhere, even into the sky.
And on top of the scorecard for some reason.
Each building has a selection of minigames to complete
like the candy store with a school bus inside or the toy shop with a school bus inside
or the every other building with a school bus inside because creating unique art
for the interior of each building would just been a step too far!
Ah well, at least the puzzles all have unique art.
Just don't confuse "unique" for "good", because trust me,
good is the last thing I would call Easter Bunny's Big Day
or Big Adventure or Puzzle Place or whatever they actually wanted to call it.
You see, despite the Easter theme, this game has absolutely nothing to do
with the Easter holiday whatsoever: not in the biblical sense,
not in the Pagan sense, not even in the commercialized, candy-infused, pastel sense.
This is simply a conglomeration of nonsensically connected jigsaw puzzles,
memory-matching games, and annoying presentation.
First up are the jigsaw puzzles and yeah whatever, jigsaw puzzles, they are what they are.
And while I am prone to enjoy one every decade or so in real life,
I cannot for the life of me imagine why anyone would want to play this one.
Or really, any virtual jigsaw puzzle.
They're just puzzles, they're cheap as day-old balls, and unless you're living in a shoebox,
chances are that you can spare the space to put one together.
Not only that, but assembling one with a controller is god-awful,
especially when the controls are as stupid as this.
It's slow and painful to pick things up and slide them around.
Beyond that... dude! Who in the seven bloody hells thought it would be a good idea
to include hour-long puzzles in this game?
Now, there are also motion puzzles which are the same exact thing, but have moving faces on each piece
and this is kind of neat at first, except that each piece is identical other than the face
and putting together a bunch of squares is as boring as putting together a bunch of squares.
Plus the moving faces slow down your cursor even more, so screw this.
Next is the memory-matching game which takes the form of eggs that have to be bashed open
to reveal a creature. If you match two, they disappear and if you don't, no one gives a sh*t.
Finally, there's the egg catch mode, which is exactly what it sounds like.
You catch eggs, it's a mode, you play as Robo-Rabbit and dead or alive, those eggs are coming with you.
Eggs fly your way thrown by specters unmoved and unseen
and before they hit the ground and break, try to catch them in your basket
or your head or any part of your robo-body, because cyborgs are awesome like that.
Finally, once you got enough stupid eggs in your stupid basket, it's on to the stupid ending.
Shockingly, it's also stupid. The Easter Bunny isn't even the one doing the final delivering.
It's Robo-Rabbit once again, getting down and dirty with the grunt work.
But oh noes! He's broken down. Gotta press some buttons.
And... it looks like he'll be fine.
[ending music plays] Yep. He's fine. Totally fine.
There's no problems here. It's all good, end credits.
If that was Easter Bunny's Big Day, I feel really, truly bad for his other days.
The dude had one job and he completely fails at it.
And a wind-up toy ends up doing it better than him!
Yeah, someone needs to fire that guy and look up the recipe for hossenfeffer.
As for the game itself, it's a strange collector's piece simply due to its scarcity,
its purple spine and its Easter-y theme.
But really, the Easter theme is so nominal, I find it hard to call it an Easter game at all.
Photoshopping eggs into the background of random stock photos
and throwing pastel colors everywhere does not make it an Easter game.
It just makes it obvious at how much they were trying to cash in on a holiday
without giving any thought to what the holiday means or what could be creatively done with it.
You can slap any other theme on the packaging, keep the gameplay the same...
...it would make no difference whatsoever.
Nyah-yah and yeah I know, it's made for little kids probably,
but that's no excuse for making bottom-of-the-barrel products.
If anything, kids deserve more care, not less!
This is about as cynical as games get and I'm just glad it's over, man.
[Easter Bunny's Big Day music plays]
Oh you're still here, well that's cool. Click on these if you didn't know how YouTube works
then y-you can do that. There's videos there, you can watch them.
Twitter, Facebook, Patreon, all the things you can do on the internet to... to YouTube, uh...
Yeah, I don't know where I'm going with that. Merry Christmas!