0 to Z of Playstation 1 Games - Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity

      

Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity, also known as MTV's Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity, is a point and click adventure game based on the American animated series that was created by Mike Judge. The game was developed by ICOM Simulations the company are however credited as Viacom New Media.

The game released first way back in 1995 for the PC, with the game coming out on the 31^st of August in North America, with a European release the same year. The game had a planned port to the CD-I however that was cancelled when that system began to suffer falling sales. The game was eventually ported to the Playstation on the 29^th of January 1998, however this port would only see a Japanese release.

Brad Delaney who was one of the games Designers, a role he would also hold for MechAssault in 2002 and its follow up in 2002 MechAssault 2 Lone Wolf. He was also a designer on the 2006 release F.E.A.R First Encounter Assault Recon. And was one of the Lead Multiplayer Designers on F.3.A.R in 2011.

Christian Gustafsson who worked as a Programmer on Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity went on to work in the same role for the 1996 release Gex, as well as the 1997 release Battle Arena Toshinden 2. He was also the Lead Programmer for Tiny Toon Adventures The Great Beanstalk in 1998.

Chris Kowalski who was an Animator for Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity worked as an Audio Scripter for Front Mission Evolved in 2010. He was the Audio Designer for Green Lantern: Rise of the Manhunters the following year. In 2014 he worked as a Sound Designer for the World of Warcraft expansion Warlords of Draenor.

Beavis and Butt-Head in Virtual Stupidity is an inventory based point and click adventure game, controls are pretty basic, the D-Pad is used to move the cursor around the screen, with the circle button used to interact with objects or other characters, pressing the square button will bring up your menu actions, pressing circle selects your chosen action.

During your progress through the game you will see several different types of cursor appear on screen depending on what action you are using. The first is Look which is shown by an eyeball, when this icon appears that means there is an item you can inspect, this also applies to important characters when you move the cursor over them.

The second cursor icon that appears is the Use or Grab icon, this appears as a hand on the screen, this allows Beavis and Butthead to interact with items and people, when the icon turns into a fist it mean you can interact with that object or person.

Walk appears as a foot icon for the cursor, this will appear in any area that Beavis and Butthead can walk to. Talking to other characters appears on screen as a speech bubble cursor icon. Items that picked up can be interacted with by moving the cursor to the top of the screen

In addition to the main story there are four mini games to play there are Hock a Loogie, Bug Hunt, Court Chaos and Air Guitar. The first has either Beavis or Butthead hocking loogie’s off of the school roof. 

Bug Hunt which can be done in three locations has the player burning ants with a magnifying glass. Court Choas has the player shooting tennis dudes with tennis balls, while the final one Air Guitar has Beavis and Butthead singing via the medium of burps and farts.

 

The game opens with both Beavis and Butthead working at Burger World, where they meat Todd who is the leader of a gang, Todd proceeds to threaten Beavis and Butthead, the pair don’t mind however as they both like because of his power and think he is cool, the pair then decide to join Todd’s gang.

Following the events of Burger World, both Beavis and Butthead are forced to stay in science class in order to dissect a frog, they managed to wangle their way out of class by saying to the teach they need the bathroom, the pair escape from school with the pair exploring various areas around the town of Highland, as they try to get closer to Todd and his Gang.

  

With Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity releasing on Playstation long after it’s initial release on PC, critic reviews for this game are none existent, especially with it releasing only in Japan on the Playstation. As a result we head over to GameFAQs for their user ratings for the game.

The game is currently sitting at an average user rating on GameFAQs of 3.31/5, this is from a total of 21 user ratings with a wide spread of ratings for the game ranging from a user rating the game at just a 0.5/5, up to a couple of users rating the game at the full 5/5.

The largest number of user ratings fall at the 4/5 mark with four of the users rating the game at this, either side of this at 3.5/5 and 4.5/5 we find three users each rating the game at this, another few users rating the game at a 3/5, while two more rated the game at a very average 2.5/5, the final three users rated the game at either a 2/5 or a 1.5/5.

Next up we have the games difficulty level, again we have a good number of users rating this category with 16 in total. We also have a good spread of difficulty ratings for the game as well, with one user rating the game as being simple, another few users rated the game as easy.

The largest percentage of users coming in at 37.5% rated the game as having just the right difficulty level, while around 31% of users found the game to be tough. The final user rating for the game comes in at unforgiving, averaging out though we find that the game according to GameFAQs users has a just right difficulty level.

Lastly we have the games lifespan, here we see a slight drop in users ratings with just 12, but again we have a good spread to work with. There is however a clear majority when it comes to the games lifespan with 6 of the 12 users spending around 40 hours with the game.

A couple more users spent around 20 hours with the game, below this we find one user each spending either 2, 8 or 12 hours with the game. One user really did enjoy this game clocking in around 80 hours with the game, averaging out this comes to a 32.7 hour lifespan for Beavis and Butthead in Virtual Stupidity. 

This is the part of 0 to Z where is visit four online retailers and see what the availability of the title is, and what price you would be looking at if you wanted to pick this title up, the sites that I will be using for this are Amazon.com, eStarland.com, retrogames.co.uk and Gamedude.com I know the last one is very location specific, but from a podcast I listen to, I’ve heard they have a huge stock of older games, Ebay has now been dropped unless the game is unavailable at other retailers.

So lets get down to business with Gamedude, who unsurprisingly don’t stock this Japanese only release, the same goes for eStarland.com. Heading over to Retrogames.co.uk next, who also don’t stock the Playstation release of this game, like eStarland they only stock the original Bevis and Butthead that was released on the Genesis, in the case of eStarland they also stock that release on the Super Nintendo and Sega Game Gear.

Moving on to Amazon.com in the hopes of finding at least one copy of the game, sadly we don’t strike lucky, we do find the PC version of the game, with a handful of used copies available. These used copies range in price from a very good condition copy for $26.94, up to a very good condition copy for $39.62.

 

Even heading over to the co.uk version of Amazon we don’t find any copies available. So as a last hope we head over to Ebay.com where we finally strike lucky, however the copies on offer are the PC version of the game only, even checking Amazon.co.jp failed to produce any results. So the game is hear by classed as extinct in the wild, there are probably copies out there somewhere, but not on any sites that are counted in this section.

Written by

P J Gibbon