Bubsy: I’M on Fire??

Once I finished Bubsy: Paws on Fire! (review forthcoming) I happened to check out the Steam global leaderboards. There isn’t an overall combined leaderboard, but there is one for each character. I was shocked to see that for Bubsy I was number five, and for Virgil, Woolie, and Arnold I was number three. (My position may have changed since writing this.)

For a moment, I got excited - I’m so used to being completely buried in any leaderboard that it didn’t even occur to me that I might be on the first page, let alone in the top five. This was after a completionist playthrough (every achievement and every collectible with every character) but I hadn’t otherwise been attempting to max out my combo chains and get the best possible scores. If I wanted to, I could probably top all four leaderboards.

But then I realized that of course the reason for this was that there’s only a couple hundred people even on these leaderboards. (At time of writing, 200 for Bubsy, 165 for Virgil, 164 for Woolie, and 130 for Arnold.) And for a game that I like this much - for any game that I like enough to get high scores on, really - I’d much rather it be popular enough for the leaderboards to totally drown me. I don’t want to be high on the leaderboards if it means the game is low in the sales charts.

I’d rather have a sequel than a top score.