Super Bee (Odyssey²)

Super Bee is a fairly simple game that never received a U.S. release, the game releasing instead only in Brazil and on Europe’s Odyssey² equivalent the Philips Videopac. The Odyssey² was on the wane as the gap between it and its competitors grew in the early days of console games, and it’s no surprise that later game releases for the system were limited to regions where the console was doing better financially. Besides this small tale of its release though, Super Bee doesn’t have much going for it, at best blending in with the many 8 bit bug-based titles.

Super Bee has you control a fly that is probably meant to be a bee who buzzes around a square enclosure grabbing fruit to earn points. Touching the outer walls means death, but there’s a complication that makes the task a bit more difficult than it first appears. After grabbing a fruit, the fly will leave behind a small wall in its place, either vertically or horizontally depending on how you approach the fruit. These walls are just as deadly as the perimeter and the play area quickly becomes cramped as you inevitably place more and more of them, making it inevitable that you will die before you manage to grab that many fruits. If you do grab enough before perishing, you may earn yourself a second go without losing your points, the most obvious way to know if you get to continue being the appearance of a spider holding a special bonus fruit. This did seem a touch inconsistent, but the gameplay set up to kill you after you’ve barely done anything doesn’t really inspire the player to put in the time needed to learn the tricks to survival. Death will at least usually clear the field entirely of walls though, so continuation will not spell instant death.

High scores are fairly small in Super Bee because of how easy it is to die in the cramped quarters, but if you’re looking for a bit of variation, the difficulty settings will set up the play area to have some preexisting walls to make things end more quickly. It is an interesting idea for variation at least although one that highlights how little room there is to even play, so it best serves as just something to check out once while keeping the clear field from the simplest difficulty as your play area for setting scores.

In many ways, Super Bee fits the bill of the kind of old game you play for a bit and don’t really expect much out of. You collect a few fruits, try not to die, and your time with the game is already up as you seek out something more interesting to do. If you do decide to sit down for a bit and try to get a better score though, you’ll notice some odd quirks that hurt the simple premise. As mentioned, picking up a fruit builds a wall, but sometimes the way these walls appear can be instantly lethal. This immediately undermines the premise of the game majorly, eliminating the potential thrill of keeping yourself alive as long as your skill can carry you. These tricky wall placements aren’t guaranteed though, I only saw two of that kind in my time with the game, but it is a constant worry once you know of their existence. If survival is your only concern, it is possible to fly back and forth a bit, avoiding walls and fruits just for the sake of staying in the game, but it seems Super Bee anticipated this play style and will suddenly give the bee a huge burst of speed to try and trip you up. This seems to even happen when you are playing by the rules, further supporting my suspicion that Super Bee is incredibly eager to kill you, either by boxing you in quickly or forcing you into failure.

Another small issue with the fruit collecting is the way they spawn into existence. After grabbing one, another will appear in a short amount of time, giving you enough time to fly off into some other part of the box and potentially be right where it spawns. This can mean despite any planning you’ve put into the affair, you can suddenly have a wall throw off your plans because the fruit spawned beneath the bee. Despite having a High Score always present at the bottom of the screen, it seems like this game doesn’t want you getting anything very high at all, Super Bee ending up more like a virtual toy than a proper video game.

Even if we shift our focus to considering Super Bee more as a one-and-done quick experience rather than a product to own and play repeatedly, it’s still unexceptional. The sound in the game is mostly limited to the buzz of your bug, the bee itself can only pick up fruits if it hits them perfectly and with the right part of its body, and you’ll very quickly realize it’s sort of like a less inspired version of the game Snake. As a game of Snake progresses, you collect objects that increase your chances of failure by making your snake have to avoid more of its growing body, with loss being inevitable once you’ve consumed too much. Super Bee involves eating fruits that make wall obstacles appear, but this variation on that formula isn’t quite as engaging. The fruit can be placed anywhere, even nearly on top of a preexisting wall, so survival depends more on that random element than your ability to cope with an ever more dangerous play field. Super Bee isn’t really about pushing the limits of your skill to stay alive as long as possible. It’s about hoping the randomly placed fruits won’t screw you over before you can get a decent point total.

THE VERDICT: With games like Super Bee, it can be tempting to be a bit lenient. This is a game where you can see all of the content in half an hour, but the short experience isn’t a very good one. Immediately the hit detection on fruit is an issue and there’s not much you can do to plan out how the walls will be placed. Super Bee wants to kill you fast, making the short sessions deceptive in that you don’t have enough time to really consider how poorly constructed the game is. Pushing for a high score is fighting a battle of hoping random chance won’t kill you, and the difficulty variations only make your inevitable death come quicker, further cutting down the amount of things you can do in this simple title.

And so, I give Super Bee for the Magnavox Oddyssey²…

A TERRIBLE rating. A few replays is all it takes for a player to see that Super Bee isn’t worth the time investment. If the walls had been smaller or the play area larger, perhaps the gameplay concept of Super Bee could have some legs. The randomness of incredibly impactful elements is what pushes Super Bee so low, with any glimmer of fun you might be having inevitably doomed to be snuffed out by those factors. Perhaps its for the best the U.S. didn’t see this dull addition to the Odyssey²’s library as it meant they could devote their time to a better game about bugs like Spider Fighter or the Oddysey²’s own Killer Bees!

An all-around unimpressive bug game, the best moment in Super Bee is when the hilariously bad spider sprite comes down to let you know you’ve died and can stop playing.