The Simpsons Video Games: The Definitive Review Part Two – The Five Simpsons Games of 1992 for DOS, NES, SNES, Game Boy, Sega Master System, Sega Genesis, & Sega Game Gear

The response to part one of The Simpsons: The Definitive Review was great, and I can’t thank everyone enough. That’s why I threw in a bonus review at the bottom of this. The bonus review isn’t a Simpsons game, but it sort of is. If you got to this review by searching for a certain earthy DC superhero, that review is at the bottom. It actually belongs with this one. So, with that, on with the reviews! In this feature:

• The Simpsons: Bart’s House of Weirdness – DOS
• Krusty’s Super Fun House – Super NES & Genesis, and a million other ports.
• The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts – Game Boy
• The Simpsons: Bart’s Nightmare – Super NES & Sega Genesis
• The Simpsons: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man – NES & Game Gear
• Swamp Thing (Yes, it makes sense!) – NES

REVIEWS

For those not familiar with my way of thinking of how retro games should be reviewed, I take NO historical context into account. I don’t care how important a game was to the industry, because that doesn’t make a game worth playing today. The test of time is the cruelest test of all, but every video game must face it. I might not be here if not for Pong’s success, but I wouldn’t want to play it today. Not when there’s better options. Therefore, when I review retro games, every game gets either a YES! or a NO!

YES! means the game is still fun and has actual gameplay value when played today and is worth seeking out.

NO! means the game didn’t age gracefully and is not worth seeking out, and certainly not worth spending money on.

The Simpsons: Bart’s House of Weirdness
Platform: DOS
Released January 1, 1992
Developed by Distinctive Software
Published by Konami
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Thanks to salmonmoose for being my Troy McClure and giving me a crash course in early 90s computer monitors. I remember you from such gaming questions as “is Link mute or just shy?” and “Joycon Drift: user error or cunning plot to swindle billions?”

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If any Simpsons game could be classified as “forgotten” it’s probably Bart’s House of Weirdness. I’d never heard of it before starting this project. That’s mostly due to the platform. Very few home computer games of the early 90s were played universally enough to be topics of modern gaming discussion. The ones that are tend to be upper-echelon stuff like Doom, Myst, or Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis. Anything below that and forget about it. House of Weirdness certainly isn’t at that level. I bet another part of that is the confused nature of the game. It looks like it could be a point and click game. From the screenshots I saw, I was expecting something similar to Pac-Man 2: The New Adventures. But actually, Bart’s House of Weirdness is a rudimentary platforming-shooter where you guide Bart through seven very short levels. My first impressions were, jeez, this looks great! Seriously, it looks just like the TV show. Funny enough, it didn’t utilize a VGA output, even if you find a version online labeled as such. The two options players get are MCGA and EGA. The MCGA looks SIGNIFICANTLY better. That’s the one to do, trust me.

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The “House of Weirdness” in question is, in fact, the Simpsons’ house. Bart is grounded and sent to his room, which acts as the game’s hub. The first six levels come in pairs of two that can be taken in any order. Defeating both levels gives you an extra power item. No matter which area you choose first, right off the bat, the problem with Bart’s House of Weirdness will become evident: total douchebag placement of baddies and Castlevania-like extreme knock-back from taking damage. Weirdness’ exploration is done one screen at a time, and its favorite party trick is having an enemy be immediately on the other side of the screen when you scroll, kicking you back to the previous screen. This happens in Mr. Burns’ courtyard, where you have literally less than a second to react to an angry goose on the other side of the screen. If you don’t, you fly back to the previous screen.

It’s such a boring and unimaginative way of creating difficulty, but the game largely relies on it. In fact, there’s several sections of House of Weirdness where taking damage is so inevitable that I honestly believe the game is designed that way deliberately. The best example is in what should be the stage’s 3rd chronological level, “Space Mutant Madness.” And note that’s NOT the same as the stage where you go to watch the Space Mutants movie. In this level, you need a raygun to kill the enemies, which take 2 to 3 shots each. You pick up the gun in the first screen, but you only get 10 bullets per pick-up. While there’s more refills along the way, the game simply doesn’t provide enough shots in the path to the level’s goal to deal with the aliens. They’re humongous, so you can’t jump over them, and you often have to start shooting as soon as you enter the screen since the first one is right there. Again, the game is designed almost entirely around the knock-back. I tried to cheese it and just accept damage along the way, but it’s not possible. There’s just too many unavoidable enemies. Thankfully, items respawn every time you re-enter a stage, including health refills but excluding extra lives.

So, obviously you have to grind-up ammo in the first screen, right? The catch is there’s a GOTCHA alien that rides in on the train tracks. When you start the level, you can dodge that alien from the direction you’re walking, BUT, you can’t dodge it from the other side. Also, getting hit by the train causes more damage than normal. Even the guide at GameFAQs notes that the only logical way to beat the level is to shore-up ammo by deliberately getting hit by the space mutant on the second screen, which does less damage than the alien on the train does, then use your invincibility to grab the ammo. Now granted, Bart’s House of Weirdness has tons of life refills (and a few extra lives that aren’t hard to get) but this is still just very dull game design that could have easily been fixed by putting more item drops along the way. On the plus side, the entire level is only 10 screens big and you get your life back in full when you complete a stage. Fitting for a game with “Weirdness” is the title, some of the decisions on when and where to add “challenge” are strange. They do lots of GOTCHAs, but they’re also very generous with health.

You can carry two types of items at a time. One is a form of a gun, like the above mentioned raygun or a slingshot. while the other is either water balloons or bug spray. If you’re carrying bug spray, NEVER swap it for the water balloons since they’re mostly useless. The bug spray is needed to complete several areas, but supplies along the way are limited, so you’ll want to avoid using it to kill any enemies that you can just as easily shoot with the gun-like weapons or just avoid altogether. Like the Space Mutants level above? The bug spray is the only thing that kills the robots in that level, and while the space mutants are optional to kill, the robots are not. The logic of using bug spray to kill robots is silly, but then later you fight a giant spider, and guess what you don’t use to kill it? No, that you shoot with a suction cup dart, because to hell with logical game design. Bug spray? Working on a big bug? What, do you think we’re running a preschool here?

For all my whining, Bart’s House of Weirdness has had me on the fence. In fact, as I type this, I still haven’t made my final decision on it. There’s some quality gaming to be had here. As annoying as the gotcha-like design is, the exploration is very satisfying, and hell, I even liked how short the levels are. I certainly can’t say they overstayed their welcome. I liked the variety of the scenarios, even if that variety is a little bit of smoke and mirrors. Of those first six levels, only “I Wanna Go to the Movies” has you searching to collect objects. You have to collect five coins, then jump up where it says theater admission. This is one of the two twenty-screen stages, and probably the most difficult of those original six. But, you’ll want to take it first anyway, since the platforming is limited and the super items won’t be of much help to you.

The other five stages are simply a journey to the goal, which is represented by the facade of an item. In “The Quest for Maggie’s Ball” you go from your treehouse to the roof and then down into the sewers, where you hop across barrels until you reach the ball. It’s the other twenty-screen level. Completing those two stages gives you a red hat. It doesn’t actually appear on your character sprite, but having it shrinks your collision box and puts a shield where your head is, which nerfs the remaining stages by quite a bit. I recommend going into Bart’s closet next, the location of “Space Mutant Madness” which I already talked about. Walk right, shoot aliens, spray robots, watch for manholes, and get the alien cookbook. In “Too Much T.V.” you actually go inside an Itchy & Scratchy cartoon, a concept that will be recycled in Bart’s Nightmare. In this level, you can’t harm the violent cat & mouse duo and have to sprint to the finish. This was easily my least favorite stage, as it’s purely avoiding objects, and it’s not well done. The action is too fast, and the challenge isn’t logical. Like, for example, you take damage from Scratchy’s mallet even when it’s resting behind him and not being actively “swung.” Thankfully, at nine screens, this is one of the shorter levels. Finishing Space Mutants and Too Much T.V. gives you shoes that double your jumping ability.

“Grave Danger in the Basement” sees you fighting evil mothballs, bugs, the Babysitter Bandit, and skeletons, while “Secret in the Attic” has you avoiding bugs and bats before pitting you against a giant spider. Beating them gives you a pair of sunglasses that I never figured out what they do. Attic, along with Maggie’s Ball could be considered the platforming areas of the first six levels, and the level design often isn’t suitable for platforming. This becomes especially apparent in the final stage, “Adventures in Krustyland” where you must fight Sideshow Bob. This level opens with a vertical climb up a waterfall with logs. This section is so rancid that it almost ruined the game. It’s a three-screen-tall climb with logs that come out in different parts, forcing you to zig-zag as you jump. The logs barely move slower than you’re capable of jumping, causing progress to happen in teeny tiny increments. This would be frustrating by itself, but we’re just getting started.

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When you make the transition between screens, there might not be anything for you to land on. The steady pace of the logs falling resets each screen. THEN, when you get to the top, you have to basically jump in place for a minute or two just to squeak out literal fractions of inches at a time to give you enough room to jump to the platform. Except, no, you have to do it twice. See, in order to beat Sideshow Bob, you need thirteen shots with a special weapon. And, what do you know? There are exactly thirteen shots in the stage, and the waterfall requires you to jump on both sides of it to get one and continue on. Any other flaw in the game I can spin in my head as gamesmanship by the designers. Not this. It’s just plain stupidity and should be either significantly nerfed or cut from the game altogether.

And then, in the final battle of the game, you literally cannot miss one shot on Sideshow Bob. Even worse is the fact that you have to shoot diagonally. If the waterfall is the biggest flaw in the game, the second biggest flaw is how tough it is to shoot at an angle. No jumping and shooting allowed. I couldn’t find a single satisfactory configuration for aiming diagonally. Even a keyboard didn’t work every time. That’s why I’ve been struggling so much to decide my verdict. As gorgeous as Bart’s House of Weirdness is, and it’s STUNNING for this era, it’s also one very inelegantly designed game. And yet, I was compelled to vote YES! on Bart’s House of Weirdness for three reasons. (#1) It doesn’t feel cynical at all. I didn’t get “quick cash-in” vibes from it. It has a sincerity to it, like these are exactly the types of “adventures” Bart would go on. (#2) The game flies by so quickly and isn’t really ever boring along the way, except for that waterfall part. Admittedly, that’s beyond the pale and inexcusable, but that’s the only area like that.

(#3) This is one of those instances where a game is VASTLY improved thanks to modern emulation shenanigans like save states and rewind. I wouldn’t ever want to play Bart’s House of Weirdness on its own terms. It’s too sloppily designed, and sloppiness equals frustration. If this was included in a Simpsons collection that didn’t include emulation bells & whistles, my rating would change from a cautious yet enthusiastic “you have GOT to play this game” YES! to a solid, angry “what the HELL were they thinking?!” NO! Without emulation trickery, I don’t think most people would have fun with it, or even if they did, all their goodwill would be burned away during the final level, with its miserable platforming and a boss fight that feels like an unfinished beta. Literally not allowed to miss a single shot? That’s not normally done in video games for a reason. It’s TOO MUCH, especially in a game this haphazardly designed. If you didn’t have emulation, enjoy that climb up the waterfall, because you actually do have to start the entire level again. BUT, if you have the ability to set your own terms, actually, this really is a diamond in the rough. The first six stages each successfully feel unique from one another and they’re so enjoyable to experience. And frankly, the game is a charmer. For all its many, MANY flaws, I finished this three times in the making of this review and I only got bored during those waterfall parts. This might actually be a bad game, but all I’ve ever cared about is having fun, and actually, I had a lot of fun with Bart’s House of Weirdness, warts and all.
Verdict: YES!
And seriously, indie developers: play this game. I think you’ll get inspired by it. Hey Konami?! How about a long-lost sequel themed around Treehouse of Horror?

Krusty’s Fun House
aka Krusty’s Super Fun House
Platform: NES, Game Boy, Game Gear, SMS, SNES, Sega Genesis
16-Bit Release: June, 1992
8-Bit Release September, 1992
Reskin of Rat Trap by Audiogenic
Designed by Fox Williams
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

For purposes of my sanity, I only played the SNES version past the first couple levels.

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Krusty’s Fun House, super or otherwise, is like a platformer mixed with a simplified form of Lemmings. Playing as Krusty, you have to hop around while arranging the terrain to lure a handful of mice to a contraption to be comically but sadistically exterminated. Well, that’s messed up. I’ve never said to myself “do you know what’s missing in puzzle games? Animal cruelty.” Action games maybe. RPGs for sure. But not puzzlers. It’s also one of the toughest games to review, because it doesn’t technically do anything wrong. The puzzles work, and the controls are intuitive, and it’s got a novel premise. And it’s so boring. Like seriously, this is one of those games that is just exhausting in how competently joyless it is.

The problem is obvious: the levels are simply MASSIVE, but most of the actual puzzle parts of those levels rarely are. The object of each stage is to create a pathway that leads the mice to an extermination contraption that brutally, painfully kills them. It’s okay. I think they’re alien mice. The process usually involves finding and retrieving blocks one at a time from somewhere in the labyrinthine layouts and placing them in a way where they form a staircase. The mice can only climb up platforms as high as one of their own body lengths, which is how big the blocks are. There’s also blocks that launch the mice in a straight line until they’re stopped by another wall, and blocks that are parts of pipe structures that the mice can go through. It’s not the worst premise, but levels are so absurdly big that the act of retrieving the blocks feels like busy work. Maybe it’s a personal preference, but I like my puzzle design to be tight. Here, just figuring out what exactly the puzzle is in any specific room can take a while. And you HAVE to explore, because sometimes there’s switches in the room that open up the remaining levels in the hub world.

Krusty’s Fun House is one of those games that has a tone problem, with two gameplay genres that are at odds with each-other. The comically enormous stages seem to only exist to justify the platforming aspect of the game, but that’s the really boring part. The combat isn’t particularly exciting. You get pies to throw at enemies, but there’s no satisfaction in them. There’s superballs like in Mario Land, but you need to save those for solving the puzzles. There’s also seemingly no on-screen indicator of how much damage you’ve taken. Cobras spit at you. Lasers shoot you. You take damage from falling too high. Oh, I never died. Actually, I’m not even sure where the breaking point is when it comes to the damage. If the game tells you, it’s so subtle that I never noticed. I’m just baffled that this exists because it doesn’t do anything wrong, but it also doesn’t do anything right, either. The set pieces certainly aren’t pleasing. For a “fun house” this really isn’t very whimsical. Which, actually, I suppose that fits the Krusty the Clown character. Instead, you spend a lot of time aimlessly searching, or just waiting, either FOREVER for elevators or FOREVER for the mice. Sometimes the mechanics of the puzzle are laid out where you might have to work a single mouse at time into the contraption, then start over and redo it for each one.

There’s also no way to speed up the mice. I often complain when a classic game collection is missing rewind. If a Simpsons game collection happened and included Krusty’s Fun House, I’d be pissed if fast forward wasn’t an option. This is the first retro review I’ve done in a very long time where I used it to speed up the action. This is also the first game in a long time that I didn’t come close to finishing. I had to quit, because I was afraid my Definitive Review would end here. Any other game looked good after this one. By the midway point of the second world, I hadn’t so much as cracked a smile, and if by that point the game hasn’t gotten to “the good stuff” it’s never going to. The weird thing is, nobody would call Krusty’s Fun House the worst Simpsons game, but it’s certainly the worst to review. Not bad enough to be interesting. Not fun enough to make the playthrough worthwhile. “You know, for a clown, you’re not really a lot of fun.” By golly, there really is a Simpsons line for every occasion.
Verdict: NO!

The Simpsons: Bart vs. The Juggernauts
Platform: Game Boy
Released September, 1992
Designed by Dan Kitchen & Barry Marx
Developed by Imagineering
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Bart vs. The Juggernauts would be the first Simpsons game that’s divided into a series of mini-games. This would ultimately end up being the direction the franchise would park in during the 16-bit era with Bart’s Nightmare (it’s up next, god help me) and Virtual Bart (coming in Part Three). The Juggernauts in question are a satire of American Gladiators, and actually, this is the first Simpsons game with writing that feels somewhat true to the show. There’s banter between Kent Brockman and Dr. Marvin Monroe between games that actually got me to giggle a couple times. As for the games, this is one of those “cartoonish sports” type of releases similar to the NES anti-classic Donald Duck/Snoopy’s Silly Sports Spectacular. I’m not a fan of the genre. I think such games usually are filled with half-baked ideas that, at best, would be more suitable for LCD type of games. Case in point, the caption below.

Easily the best game is Dr. Marvin Monroe’s Hop, Skip and Fry, which is sort of like playing basketball and The Floor is Lava at the same time. Which, hey, I love basketball and my mother and I used to annoy my father by declaring games of The Floor is Lava (or “Love-ah” as she STILL pronounces it. Yeesh, speak American, Mom!) whenever one of his television shows bored us. “Law & Order? THE FLOOR IS LOVE-AH!” In the game, the playfield is made up of a grid of randomly changing black and white tiles. Bart has to grab a ball and hop across the white squares to cross the playfield, where a basketball goal is. Every few seconds, the entire layout of the playfield changes all at once, and while you play, two of the Juggernauts hop around the white squares. Touching them sends you flying a few squares to the side where you may or may not land on one of the lethal black squares. When you get to the other side, you can shoot the ball, but you might as well then hold the A button down and get a running start at the basket, at which point Bart will automatically dunk it. You can also hold the A button down to skip over squares. After each goal, you have to cross the playfield to grab another ball, then continue the cycle until time’s up. It’s got problems but I’d call Hop, Skip and Fry fun.

The other games are all problematic for their own reasons. There’s two combat focused games. One is the above mentioned sumo wrestling on a pool table. The other is just the Joust event from American Gladiators, only it’s on top of the cooling towers of Springfield Nuclear Power Plant. Neither are particularly fun to play, but “Nuclear Power Plant Bop `Till You Drop” is the weakest, as it feels like a slower, clunkier Urban Champion. “Herman’s Military Minefield Mayhem” sees you parachuting past knife throwers before having to tip-toe across a minefield and crawl under barbed wire, all while having water balloons thrown at you. I didn’t enjoy the collision detection of the minefield portion at all. A skateboarding game satirizes Gladiator’s Human Cannonball event. In it, Bart has to build up momentum on his skateboard via button mashing and dodging obstacles, then you fly off a ramp and deliver a flying dropkick into the Juggernaut.

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Finally, there’s “Kwik-E-Mart Doggie Dodge” which feels like it might have been intended to be a level in Escape From Camp Deadly that got deleted. It’s a totally normal platform game level where you have to jump over dogs and swing across pits. Even though you start the level facing right, you’re supposed to actually go left. I didn’t know this and spent fifteen minutes trying to figure out how to knock down a wall, which didn’t exactly put me in a good mood. There’s also a bonus game where you throw weights down onto a Juggernaut’s barbell. Really, none of these games are god awful by any means, but only one I’d call unambiguously fun. The rest are bland and forgettable. There’s also a system in place where you have to get a target dollar figure to move on to the next week, but the games don’t really score high enough unless you play perfectly. There’s also no ELIMINATOR type of final challenge, but it wouldn’t have mattered if there had been. Bart vs. The Juggernauts isn’t a terrible game, but like most Game Boy titles from this era, it wasn’t designed to still be fun thirty years later.
Verdict: NO!

The Simpsons: Bart’s Nightmare
Platform: Super NES & Sega Genesis
Released October 12, 1992
Directed by Hal Rushton (SNES) Harald Seeley (Genesis)
Developed by Sculptured Software
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Again, I only did one version.

The first 16-bit home Simpsons game is really five mini-games and a hub-world. For whatever reason, this is the settled-upon format for the rest of this generation, with the only traditional platformer being an Itchy & Scratchy game for the SNES. It’s as if the developers barnstormed all these high concept ideas, and decided to use EVERYTHING, only they didn’t play test anything to make sure it worked or was fun. Don’t rule out the possibility of that being what actually happened. The levels can be taken in any order, but you don’t really get full control over that order, since hub world is really about searching for the homework pages. The homework pages are caught in gusts of wind. Jumping into the pages gives you the option to choose one of two random-colored doors that take you to the nightmares. For whatever reason, the second level of Itchy & Scratchy requires a second page from the hub world. Get eight pages and that’s the end of the game. There’s no final level. Instead, you get a grade based on your score. You have to score 125,000 points to get the best ending. So, let’s look at the hub and five levels of Bart’s Nightmare individually. This ain’t going to be pretty.

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Hub World – The Streets of Springfield

In the hub world, you simply walk up and down a two-lane road, avoiding some enemies while jumping over others. You get a limited amount of watermelon seeds to spit at baddies, assuming that it even works. Sometimes I had to play FOREVER to get a page to appear. For the most part, the hub world spawns Jebediah Springfield heads, which you have to jump over to slay, and fairies shaped like Lisa that turn you into a frog. If this happens, you have to find an old lady to kiss you. When you take damage, you can blow bubble gum at the “Zzzzs” to add to your life, but only if you hit the z’s in a way where they hit your life bar. But, they scroll WITH you. It’s hard to explain but basically when you move, they move, and what do you know? They tend to linger outside the boundaries. If you jump over a basketball, you spawn a skateboard, but there’s subtle cracks in the sidewalk or various other debris that might knock you off one immediately. Oh, and school buses come out of nowhere on the street. This might be the worst hub world in gaming history. We’re off to a great start.

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Yellow Door – Itchy & Scratchy

Itchy & Scratchy enter the Simpsons’ house and try to kill Bart with various cartoon gags. Functionally, this round plays like a brawler/shooter. Both the cat and the mouse take turns running in with weapons, then retreat when you hit them once. After you repeat this a few times, you move to the next room. Along the way, you get various weapons, including a hammer, a toilet plunger gun, and even soda cans that you shake up. The problem with Bart’s Nightmare becomes obvious shortly into the Itchy & Scratchy segment: extreme difficulty. Much like with the Itchy & Scratchy level in Bart’s House of Weirdness, the action is too frantic. But I prefer the DOS game’s stage, because at least it’s not full of GOTCHA instakills. Even though you have a health bar, anything that has fire kills you in one shot. So naturally there’s a ton of background elements that do just this. The rules make no sense. A bomb can explode next to you that does a tiny sliver of damage, but an oven spits fireballs at you that kill you instantly. Oh, and the kitchen floor is slippery, like an ice level. The second page (which you start from the hub) is more of the same, only with mouse traps, more bombs, and knives as big as the screen. The only significant difference is you fight a furnace boss. This was pretty awful, with almost none of the instakill elements providing enough warning. While smashing Itchy & Scratchy with a hammer is satisfying, offering plenty of OOMPH, it’s just a sloppy half-assed brawler with bad movement physics.

Green Door – Bartzilla

Meet the worst game in the collection, and one of the worst video games ever made. Bartzilla is absolutely unplayable. An auto-scrolling game where you go on a rampage, only it’s next to impossible to aim your laser eyes and fire breath at ANYTHING! Helicopters and tanks fly in taking shots at you, but your lasers often go right past them, behind them, or THROUGH them. This seems to be because the obstacles are set at an isometric angle while YOU are walking in a straight horizontal line across the screen. The sheer unresponsiveness, combined with non-stop bullets and damage, led to me being unable to finish this EVEN WITH CHEATING! After twenty minutes, I gave up in despair of trying to make sense of the controls and consulted GameFAQs. Except even the literal guide couldn’t make sense of this either. I had to heel-toe my way through, rewinding frequently and mashing buttons multiple times to get the shots to actually go the direction I was pushing. Eventually, I made it to the next change. Everyone involved in the production of Bart’s Nightmare should be ashamed of themselves for allowing this dumpster fire to reach shelves with this mini-game playing as it does.

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In the second part, you climb a building and dodge things thrown by pedestrians. Occasionally a giant Mom-thra will fly by that’s easy to avoid if you just stay near the bottom of the screen. When you reach the top, electrocute King Kong Homer and that’s the stage. This was as bland and basic as it gets, but at least it was quick and the controls, you know, responded to my commands. Oh and, when you reach the top, you have to come in from the right side because Homer is punching down on the left. I’ve never been a Crazy Climber fan, and this might actually be the worst version of that formula I’ve played.

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Blue Door – Bartman

I actually think Bartman was probably the best stage in the game. It’s good enough to reach the level of mediocre. In it, you fire a slingshot at various enemies and dodge hazards. The first three bosses are okay to fight and are probably the one and only highlight of Bart’s Nightmare. The rest of the game is pretty lazily designed and sort of awful. There’s really no PING to Bart’s bullets, but that’s fine because there’s really not a whole lot to shoot. It’s mostly Nelson, who flies in on a hang-glider. If not him, it’s clusters of rockets. There’s also storm clouds that chase you and radioactive clouds that feature TMNT-Dam-like impossible squeezes. These pretty much eroded any goodwill I had for the first three bosses. Then, the fight with Mr. Burns that caps off the whole thing is one of those uninspired “the boss dives in and you only have a split second to ping a teeny tiny bit of his health” types of battles that, by necessity, go on forever. It’s surreal that this still managed to be the best of the six games in Bart’s Nightmare by a hefty margin.

Purple Door – Bart’s Blood

Think of the Bloodstream level like Dig Dug……in…..SPAAAAAACE!! In it, you swim around, jab a syringe into germs, then pump them a few times to blow them up. The controls are horrible and the enemy bullets are often barely visible, which is made worse by the loud visuals in the background. When you pop the more advanced germs, Smilin’ Joe Fission icons float in from the bottom of the screen. Catch six of them to move on. If the controls were a little more responsive, and if the bullets were more visible, this might have joined Bartman and reached the level of mediocre blandness. The lack of visibility was the deal breaker on this one. It’s probably the easiest page to get, so if you’re going to attempt to beat Bart’s Nightmare, this might make a good confidence booster.

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Orange Door – Indiana Bart and the Temple of Maggie

Actually, I take it back about Bartzilla. THIS is the worst segment. I simply refuse to believe the people who made Bart’s Nightmare were proud of the finished product. This was the final insult. Here, you have to hop around various stones of various heights searching for a pathway to reach the end. When you hop on some stones, others pop-up. Jump on a stone that’s too low and you die. It’s never exactly clear what stones will raise up others, and finding yourself getting stuck with no possible move is common. Again, I decided to utilize the ability to rewind, and sometimes, even hopping around to all possible stones, I had to rewind five or six spaces backwards in order to create any potential to move a single stone forward. Once again, the controls are unresponsive, and like the Godzilla game, it’s hard to judge the angles because the action is set on an isometric plane (in this case, Maggie’s pacifier) while you’re not. It’s rare that I play a game so unplayable that it’s shameful, but everyone involved in Bart’s Nightmare should hang their heads in collective f’n shame. This is as bad as licensed games get. The first Simpsons game that feels like a cynical cash grab.
Verdict: NO!

The Simpsons: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man
Platform: NES, Game Gear
Released December, 1992
Designed by Barry Marx, Dan Kitchen, Roger Booth, and W. Marshall Rogers
Developed by Imagineering (NES) Teeny Weeny Games (Game Gear)
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Part of me wonders if Sunsoft cancelled their NES Superman game (read my review of that debacle) because they knew a quickly made Simpsons NES game absolutely slayed it. Bartman works as both a Simpsons platform game AND an alright superhero game. Even though the appearance carries over from the previous two NES Simpsons games, the controls have been tightened-up. There’s no ridiculous A+B jumping, and while A-Running instead of B-Running makes a return, it just feels better now. There’s no items to fumble through. B shoots your superpower projectiles, while A jumps.. and sometimes flies. Players have to make their way through three fairly large game worlds and fight four bosses, the final one of which is a team-up with Bart’s comic idol, Radioactive Man. It really feels like they leaned on a 60’s Batman theme, and you even do Batman-style BAP! BANG! POW! karate moves when you use your punch.

Where Bartman really shines is in its level design. The first stage is really the only one that’s a straight-forward point-A to point-B platformer. Levels 2 and 3 might contain straightforward segments, but they also contain mazes with branching pathways that are pretty joyful to navigate. No convoluted hidden pathways. Just “pick a door, any door. Whoops, wrong door, try again” type of structures. While the set-pieces aren’t exactly visually spectacular, I enjoyed the navigation quite a lot. It helps that Bartman is certainly the easiest of the NES Simpsons trilogy. By the time I beat the game I’d banked over thirty extra lives. You get five hit points per life, and health refills are plentiful. So is the ammo for your laser eyes. There’s a lot less bullets for freeze breath, but when you NEED it, the game spits out an unlimited supply. The laser eyes are basic pew pew bullets, while the freeze breath is incorporated into some of the platforming, along with a boss fight against Lava Man.

Bartman is a fairly basic game that adds just enough pace-changing breaks in the platforming to work. A couple times it does take those breaks a little bit too far. A flying section that’s structured like a space shmup and an underwater sequence outstay their welcome, but not enough to come close to wrecking the game. Actually, this means nothing in the grand scheme of things, but my #1 complaint about Bartman is just how ugly it is. Ideally, you want a Simpsons game to be playfully colorful. This is just muddy and dirty looking, with basic backgrounds and bland textures. I think they were aiming for a gritty Batman-like noir type of platformer. Instead, it just looks sort of cheap. Thankfully, gameplay is king, and this might be the most underrated Simpsons game of them all.

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The four boss battles are pretty decent, too. They each have a gag, like punching the bad guy through a wall, then chasing them through the hole they made. That’s fun! I mean, the whole game is. It even put a smile on my face that the last boss is fought the same way you fight Ganon in Zelda – Wind Waker. Don’t get me wrong: Bartman Meets Radioactive Man isn’t amazing or anything. Hell, it’s not even so interesting that I felt the need to beat it twice, but I did sample the Game Gear version. I have concerns about the cramped screen, but otherwise, it feels identical. And this was the end of the Simpsons on the NES. Except, there’s sort of one more game in this series that most people don’t realize is actually a Simpsons game. Well, that’s because it’s not a Simpsons game. But, it does use the nearly exact same modified Bart vs. The Space Mutants engine that Bartman Meets Radioactive Man used. It was even released in 1992, making it perfect for this feature. The response to The Simpsons: The Definitive Review has been outstanding, and I really want to show my appreciation for the support. So, anyone up for a bonus review? Oh, and..
Verdict: YES!

What game used the Bartman Meets Radioactive Man engine? I guess I already spoiled this above.

Swamp Thing
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released December, 1992
Designed by Daniel James Kitchen and Barry Marx
Developed by Imagineering Inc.
Published by THQ
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The NES version of Swamp Thing is indeed the dizygotic twin brother of Bartman Meets Radioactive Man. They were developed side-by-side, and play nearly identically. Same engine. Same control scheme. Same sound effects. Same A-running. Same basic but acceptable platforming hijinks. In fact, it’s so close that ROM hacks exist that turn this into a fourth Simpsons NES game. And, like many Simpsons games, the #1 complaint is the difficulty. This really is a spin-off/sequel in all but name. The “twins” analogy has never been more fitting in gaming. But, if they are twins, Swamp Thing is the evil one. That difficulty curve. Yipes. 

Actually, the brutal difficulty is mostly caused by one specific thing: hold-your-breath last-pixel jumping. They’re all over Swamp Thing, and after a while, it becomes repetitive and sloggish no matter how the pixels you’re jumping on look. It’s the same jump with the same distance nearly every time, and it gets old. While Bartman does have a few last-pixel jumps, this is negated by a game that’s much more generous with 1ups and ammo. Swamp Thing offers no such generosity. 1ups are relatively rare, you only get 10 bullets per pick-up (Bartman’s laser eye pick-ups double that), the pick-ups themselves are much more spread-out, and ammo doesn’t even carry over from level to level. Your unsatisfying punch (why did they drop the combo-animation from Bartman?) doesn’t work on what feels like over half the enemies, and your bullets are a LOT more limited than in Bartman. Hell, when you kill an enemy, whatever they drop goes FLYING in alternating directions, left or right. It’s not rare that whatever they drop ends up out of play entirely.

Unlike Bartman, which relied on mazes, Swamp Thing is mostly about hopping around massive playfields. Only one level was really “maze-like” and in that level I took a massive leap of faith when I reached a dead end, fell the length of the playfield and ended up next to the door for the last boss. But mostly, it’s just hopping up gigantic structures, hopping around a graveyard, hopping around a toxic waste dump. Hopping around a mausoleum. There’s really no memorable set-pieces because the same basic design runs through the game. At the same time, as brutal as the difficulty is, I never really got bored with Swamp Thing. With save states, I found it enjoyable enough. Nothing special by any means, but not a complete waste of time, either. Now, whether or not it feels like a Swamp Thing game or not is another question. There was apparently a Swamp Thing animated series in 1991 that ran for (checks notes) FIVE EPISODES. Which, hey, that’s four more than Defenders of Dynatron City. 763 short of Simpsons, though, as of this writing. Oh, and the theme song is set to the tune of “Wild Thing” which legitimately made me LOL. Anyway, this is based on that cartoon.

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The one and only twist is the ability to enter flowers to regain health, and at one point, I entered what looked like a cherry to roll around and avoid enemies. I didn’t even know this was a mechanic until late into the second half of the game, when a lotus-like flower appeared on screen that I entered and got a life refill. So, I started over and went searching for such things in the early stages and saw nothing. I quit searching by the time I reached the third stage. It’s a fun gimmick that’s completely underutilized. This is even considering that the third of four bosses requires you to merge with one of the four trees in the background and shake your fruits off to damage it. Come on! That’s a great gimmick and a memorable set-piece, and still, it feels like the game only scratched the surface of that potential. Gotta save stuff for the sequel, I suppose. Anyway, like so many Dan Kitchen games, this is a title that is better with modern emulation trickery. I imagine a child who was a big fan of that.. ahem.. five episode long cartoon, would have given up in despair with Swamp Thing. It’s tough. But, unlike the Simpsons, the dark tone works for it. I love the use of purples, greens, and blues. Much like its twin brother Bartman Meets Radioactive Man, it’s not the deepest game, and in fact, I’d call it “barely okay.” But, what was here aged better than most.
Verdict: YES!