Chubby Cherub reconsidered, kinda
The game Chubby Cherub, when it bobs to the surface of the collective conscious at all, tends to be treated as one of those NES games that makes a nice, easy target for a few softball jokes, and little more. I mean, come on: It stars a fat, naked angel eating candy and avoiding dogs. I suppose any concept can make for a great game, but it's an early third-party release for NES, so the chances of it having turned out well were pretty nil. I don't remember if Seanbaby ever made fun of Chubby Cherub... but if he didn't, that just underscores how unremarkable it is. It would have been perfect fodder for his pioneering "let's insult slipshod NES software" work in the ’90s.
Personally, my only memories of the game involve being annoyed at its omnipresence on that fateful summer of 1988 as I scoured the country in a desperate search for Castlevania, not realizing Castlevania was (1.) temporarily out of print and (2.) about to get a new manufacturing run. When what you really want is gothic horror but all you can find are candy-obsessed flying babies, it's hard to hold a kind thought in your heart about the flying babies.
Anyway, going into this week's video project armed with nothing but an awareness of the fact that Chubby Cherub is widely reviled and hails from the same developer/publisher combo as last week's M.U.S.C.L.E. Tag Team Match, I was pleasantly surprised that it's merely a mediocre game rather than an aggressively terrible one. The action moves at a sluggish pace and the overall design feels lopsided and unfair, but it's not without a bit of merit. Like the video says, I could see kids back in the day having an OK time with this one — and indeed, several commenters have confirmed that they did, indeed, have a not-entirely-painful experience playing this game when they were young. Plus, if nothing else, I had an excuse to talk about vintage anime thanks to the game's origins.
Speaking of which, I considered throwing these snapshots I took in Nakano last week of vintage Obake no Q Taro merchandise into the video:
Those are some hefty prices for a few chunks of painted plastic. They don't begin to compare to the outlandish premium prices attached to Chubby Cherub, though. The cartridge is trending toward $100, and complete copies have been selling in the $500-1500 range of late. That's a lot of money to pay for a game that maybe isn't terrible but definitely isn't great.
And on that note, thanks once again to Steve Lin for lending me his boxed copy of the game for documentation!
