Based off the recreational sport of Tubing
, the player controls Bif and/or Jet as they float down all manners of streams and rivers, each of which all have their own hazards to avoid. Pass through gates and collect certain items to get a high score, and make use of soda cans as your weapons.
Toobin contains the following Tropes:
- Abnormal Ammo: Soda cans. Apparently Bif and Jet have good throwing arms, as these are able to knock out a variety of foes and other hazards.
- Auto-Scrolling Level: The entire game.
- Beach Episode: Several partygoers, including a guy flipping burgers, denote the end of a class. In the NES port, it's a
Breather Level, as no enemies are present. - Bears Are Bad News: Some shorelines have grizzly bears standing at the edge of them, said bears will attempt to reach out and claw at your tube.
- Bottomless Magazines: Six-packs of cans will give the player unlimited cans to toss.
- Cap: While there is no known cap on patches available, the score multiplier tops out at five, and cans at nine.
- Eldritch Location: Some of the rivers are rather creepy, like Styx and the aptly-named Nightmare. The music and enemy selection do not help.
- Everything Trying to Kill You: It generally varies from stage to stage, but everything in those stages will do their best to sink the player.
- Exposed to the Elements: Bif and Jet are wearing nothing more than swim trunks and shades. This comes into play in the Yukon stage, which is set around several ice floes and has Eskimos, Polar Bears and Penguins as hazards.
- Gotta Catch Them All: Hidden within the stages are inflated letters that spell out the game's name, also worth a fair amount of points if they're kept to the end of a class. For a limited time in the original Arcade version, if someone managed to clear the game with all six letters and the apostrophe, they could win a free T-shirt. The console ports changed this: if you have at least three letters, you can exchange them for a continue. If you get all seven, you can trade them in for a million points.
- Hard Mode Filler: The Arcade version has 3 classes with 5 stages apiece; clearing all of them causes you to reset to the Class 1 Stages, but with faster enemies and hazards. Clear the stages again for the actual ending.
- Justified Extra Lives: As you are using an inner tube, patches for your tube are used in lieu of lives. Run out of patches and it's Game Over.
- Left the Background Music On: A strange variation; in the aforementioned Beach Party stage in the NES port, there is usually no music. You have to run into any nearby boombox to make the music start playing.
- Never Smile at a Crocodile: Occasionally they'll appear in certain stages to bite the player. A MUCH bigger one can also show up, as Stalked by the Bell covers.
- Non-Player Companion: In a single-player game in the Arcade version, the AI will control a character named "Flotsam" that will also come back periodically if he is somehow sunk during gameplay.
- One Bullet at a Time: Only one can is allowed on screen per player. Hit the button again and your first can will disappear.
- One-Hit-Point Wonder: It doesn't take much to deflate the player's tube.
- Power-Up: A beach ball. It makes your cans fly faster.
- Roaring Rapids: Essentially the whole game. These also denote a change of stage.
- Score Multiplier: There are gates in the water that are worth a fair amount of score. Passing through them makes the multiplier increase; miss a gate and you'll lose one point off the multiplier (which caps at 5). If you get sunk, you lose it entirely.
- Some Dexterity Required: The controls for the game make use of left hand and right hand buttons. You have to switch between using one to rotate yourself to using both to accelerate, and cans would only fire in the direction the player was facing. Later ports would try to simplify this with varying degrees of success, whilst the NES port instead has omnidirectional movement, but locks the player as facing forward. To compensate, the crocodile from Stalked by the Bell no longer appears, and the A and B buttons fire cans to the left and right respectively.
- Stalked by the Bell: Try to stall for too long in the Arcade version and a very large crocodile will appear from the top screen to bite you, heralded by a tune that sounds much like something out of Jaws. You can make it go away by passing through a gate or shooting it with a can. Of course, dying also makes it retreat for a while, and if you can somehow dodge it, it'll go away.
- Totally Radical: Present in the game's marketing and some of their end of class messages in the NES port.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: The players' cans are able to push around each other, and in the case of a single-player run, the AI-controlled Flotsam. You can manipulate things to sink the other, especially since Flotsam can get in the way of the player and even steal cans / score items.
- Warp Zone: A fair few of them, denoted by whirlpools. In the Arcade Game and the ports that faithfully replicate it, you get sent to a higher class immediately. In the NES port, you can end up in different stages within different classes, depending on what route you take. Three such zones exist in the NES port.
- Zeerust: Cuprum, Argentum and the Canal of Mars all look like something from a strange science-fiction series, not to mention the other hazards that tend to crop up.
