Circus Charlie (Famicom) Review

This week's game is Circus Charlie for the Famicom. It is a action/adventure game originally released in the arcades then ported to the Famicom.

Personally, me and my brothers played this endlessly, trying to finish this game, getting farther and farther in to game, trying to finish it every time we play it.

Circus Charlie is a circus-themed arcade game. The player controls Charlie, who is a circus clown, who entertains the crowd via different circus acts.

The player must control Charlie to get from the starting point to the finishing podium to clear the stage, while performing the acts. Each stage is a different circus act and with varying difficulty. You control Charlie going to left and right with the directional pad, and depending on the stage, pressing the A button makes Charlie do a specific action for that stage.

The first stage is Charlie riding on top of the lion racing to the podium while jumping through the burning hoops and burning pot of oil.

Stage 2 is about Charlie walking a tightrope and jumping over passing monkeys. Sometimes a blue monkey will quickly go by, and you earn 500 points by jumping over it.

 Stage 3 is making Charlie walk on balls. It is a similar to stage 1 but this time, you have to jump over to the next ball, if Charlie touches the other ball, Charlie will fall.

Stage 4 is Charlie standing on a running horse and jumping on the bouncing board. This stage is an autoscrolling stage, and can prove to be a quite difficult stage to clear as for the unpredictable location and spawn of the bouncing boards.

Stage 5 is Charlie doing the trapeze. This is the shortest stage of the 5. However it is also the most difficult of them all. 

Since this game is just a Famicom port of the original game, this game has no ending, with your purpose is simply to get the highest score you can.

What is surprising, is that for an arcade game, the game is not fast, frantic or difficult at all. The game is slow paced, and has a more relaxed tone to it compared to games like Berzerk or Pacman. And the difficulty mostly comes from timing your jumps and trapeze.

Good Points:
+ Easy to get into
+ Relax pace
+ Solid arcade gameplay

Bad Points:
- Bad landing detection
- no feeling of momentum which usually leads to miscalculated jumps
- Players can get easily bored with the concept of the game