Developer: eye on, Seven Computerized Creations
Publisher: Mastiff
Release Date: August 7th, 2003
According to my list I have 1282 PlayStation games to eventually play through and rank. That’s quite the undertaking, and it does cause me to ask some interesting questions. I was thinking about how in the end there will be 282 games that are ranked below number 1000. That’s a very strange thought. I might be playing through some awful PS game at some point with the knowledge that I have over 1000 better options. That’s the feeling I got when I played Easter Bunny’s Big Day. It’s a weird, inexplicable game that came out in the PlayStation’s twilight era. The fact that its release missed Easter by almost four months is one of the least odd things about it. It’s the type of game I would expect to exist if I was trapped in a coma and living in a dream world. There’s just nothing that seems real about it. And yet it’s real, and it’s even still affordable. Sorry, you can no longer afford Symphony of the Night, but hey at least you can play Easter Bunny’s Big Day.
Honestly, it’s hard to even make it through the intro without feeling like this game is a cheap Asian knockoff. The story explains that the Easter Bunny is on his way to deliver eggs to all the good boys and girls at their school, but they all get lost along the way. How many things are wrong about this? In most American traditions the bunny delivers big candy filled baskets and not the eggs themselves. Who doesn’t remember dyeing eggs with their family on the days before Easter? Maybe that’s more of a foreign tradition. Next, since when does the delivery of eggs depend on the behavior of the kids? These aren’t chocolate eggs, they’re just plain old, hard-boiled ones. I don’t think any child would change their behavior over the prospect of a hard-boiled egg. With my son I’d be more likely to feed him one as a punishment than as a reward. Finally, the plan is to deliver the eggs to a school, on Easter, which I’m pretty sure always happens on a Sunday when there is no school. As if this isn’t enough than the game pulls a Cheetahmen and sidelines the Easter Bunny in favor of Robo-Bunny. I can’t believe the Easter Bunny gets the Action Game Master treatment in his own game. That’s just cruel.
As for the gameplay this is a game made for children which almost always for this era means mini games. You go to different locations, play mini-games, and collect eggs. What’s strange is that about 90% of the games are jigsaw puzzles. About the last thing I expected this game to be was a jigsaw puzzle collection. I will admit that I enjoy doing video game jigsaw puzzles to a certain extent, and none of the puzzles in this game are particularly bad. They’re just very easy and quickly completed. I like how many of them are Easter themed, and some of them move around and have non-standard pieces. The other mini games are standard kids game fare such as memory matches. I have been playing so many memory match games lately. I should play something with blood and gore sometime. I am an adult after all. I played the game on the middle level, and it was all over in about thirty minutes. That’s just too short for a PlayStation game, even one aimed at little kids. This was 2003 and kids were playing Pokémon Ruby and Sapphire, not thirty-minute jigsaw puzzle games.
Not surprisingly this game has a very low effort ending. One of my least favorite types of game endings from the old days is the “character slowly walking” ending. I just got done walking around as these characters for the entire game, I don’t need to see it again but more slowly. Endings are for showing the player something they haven’t seen before. Easter Bunny’s Big Day kicks it up to eleven. You get to watch Robo-Bunny slowly carry the eggs up a long, winding road to the schoolhouse. Does it show him actually go into the schoolhouse? Of course not. Not that it would matter much since as I already established the school is closed and all the kids are at home eating candy. I would’ve preferred a static image of a happy child getting an egg to a robot bunny walking slowly down a road. This game has a weird beginning, a bad ending, and way too easy middle. That doesn’t look good for the overall score.
Now I will be honest and say that I did enjoy playing this game a little bit mostly because I enjoy jigsaw puzzle games. It’s pretty obvious, however, that this is a bad game and I’m just a weirdo. It’s ultra-short and the story is just plain bizarre. It’s going into the red, but not as far into the red as you might expect. I'm putting it at #91 right below Cabbage Patch Kids and above Gordo 106. Hey at least the controls made sense and I didn’t fall into any hellish pits of death. So not only is Easter Bunny’s Big Day currently in my top 100, but it’s going to be there for at least the next nine entries. Good for you Easter Bunny. Now hurry up and deliver those eggs before they spoil. It gets pretty hot in August.
PlayStation Quality Percentage: 0/1
