Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival (NES Review)

Muppet Adventure: Chaos at the Carnival
Platform: Nintendo Entertainment System
Released November, 1990
Developed by Mind’s Eye
Published by Hi-Tech Expressions
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Funny enough, I didn’t know when I selected this for review that Mind’s Eye also developed a pinball game for Amiga computers. One of the reasons I’ve not updated a ton over the last few weeks is I’m prepping a series of Definitive Reviews for July for this site’s 15th birthday. One of those will include pretty much the entire history of video pinball before the modern era. The list of games covered in Classic Pinball Video Games: The Definitive Review currently sits at 101 releases spread over dozens of platforms, making this the biggest feature I’ve ever done. Anyone can check out my progress and even the YES!/NO! status of the games before the feature goes live, and you can suggest games that I need to include in the comments. In the coming days, that list is going to grow, and a game called Pinball Brain Damage from Mind’s Eye is likely to make the list. I can’t do EVERY video pinball game, but by gosh, I’m going to try to cover every one that anyone could possibly bring up.

I’ve played plenty of NES games where I questioned why they exist at all, but Muppet Adventure might be the most baffling. It’s not an educational game, yet I imagine it’s aimed at children. Except, I can’t imagine young children finding much entertainment value in it. In fairness, I can’t imagine anyone from any age group doing so. The game is divided into five distinct gameplay styles, four of which you can choose to play in any order, so I took them from top to bottom. The first was a vertical-scrolling dodger themed around river rafting starring Kermit. There’s no attack and you just have to avoid rocks, logs, whirlpools, and whoever the heck the enemies are supposed to be. The collision is pitiful, which sucks away what little potential there was for excitement. It doesn’t help that the game dickishly starts by immediately placing you directly in front of a rock. “Think fast kids, or life will bitch slap you!” On the other hand, you start the entire game with a whopping ten lives (“rides”), get five hit points per life, and you respawn where you died at. Plus, health refills and extra lives are plentiful in most stages. I’d say I think it’s unlikely a person could game over, except, well, you’ll see.

It just looks boring, doesn’t it? That is one ugly f*cking game.

The second level sees you controlling a fast-moving bumper car using Animal. You have to just avoid bombs. Anything else doesn’t damage you. Like every other stage in the game, this goes on long past when the game has run out of ideas. It’s safe to say the bumper car segment is far and away the worst in the game. Because the car moves so quickly and controls so poorly, you have to basically heel-toe it through the course. It’s not optimized for dodging. Normally I’d say that the worst is over once you beat it, but Muppet Adventure’s best level isn’t really that fun. It’s a space shmup level starring Gonzo in a UFO that can fly in eight directions using a thruster that pushes you in the opposite direction. You finally get an attack, a basic pea shooter that offers no power ups. Like other stages, there’s no “blinking” when you take damage so if you find yourself in an enemy’s attack path, you could go from five health to none in a second or two. Thankfully, there’s so many full health refills that sometimes more than one appears on the screen at once.

The Atari 2600 had a similar Muppet’s themed genre buffet called Pigs in Space that’s actually one of the more underrated games on the platform. I reviewed it in the woefully outdated Atari 50: The Games They Couldn’t Include. It’s too bad that the team behind this couldn’t use the extra power of the NES to just remake that. It would have turned out so much better. Actually, based on what I experienced here, that’s probably not true, either.

Even though the space level almost rises to the level of competence, it’s still very, very basic and boring. Plus the lack of blinking and relatively tough movement controls will probably be too frustrating for young children too, so again I ask: WHO is this for? I thought the fourth level might be for me, hence why I’m playing this game. It’s a top-down “maze chase” starring Fozzy Bear. But even this is a disaster of bad design and bad programming. The object is to grab a bow, a present, and a bow. One appears at a time and it only takes a couple seconds to reach them. I thought it looked like a crate-shoving game, but that’s not the case. Instead, there’s pathways and you just have to glance at the screen to find them while avoiding one or two chasers. There’s also items that are dropped that you can use to……. I’m honestly not sure. One of them knocked out a specific type of enemy near the end of the thirty-maze level, but the others I couldn’t find any use for. I think one of them might have stunned the little weasel thing that chases you around the maze for a second or two, but otherwise, I never figured out if they do anything. It doesn’t help that the controls are unresponsive and you can’t actually turn to face enemies if there’s no pathway to turn into.

Fozzy’s level.

Fozzy’s level.

After beating all four levels, you enter the game’s finale, which is like an ultra-stripped-down version of Wizards & Warriors where Kermit is armed with a feather instead of a sword (“so basically the same as Wizards & Warriors’ sword?” Yep). As best as I could figure, the only thing the feather was useful for was the pink enemy in the middle screenshot. below After making your way through a mostly empty final stage that starts with a bat life slapping you as soon as the game loads, you face a final boss, “The Grump.” You have to throw a heart up in the air and try to get it to land on the top of his head a few times to rescue Miss Piggy. Weirdly, I would have game overed on this level. Apparently I died in the wrong spot for the pink enemy. Because you respawn where you die and the enemy was already in place, I couldn’t hit it fast enough without being pushed off the edge myself to my doom. After deciding I couldn’t make any progress, I used rewind to go back to where I stopped to fight it and, this time, I made it to the second of the four platforms. It worked and I won against the pink thing in a single shot. So after all the progress, if I hadn’t been able to rewind, I would have lost a ton of lives and game overed because I died in the wrong spot? I would ask if anyone play tested this, but I mean, come on.

Final level.

Final level.

Last boss.

And that’s the entire game. I’m not even kidding when I say that four out of five of the levels sincerely feel like they could have been taken from Action 52 and re-sprited with a Muppet theme. 80% of Muppet Adventure is every bit as ugly looking and sloppily coded as that infamous NES cash grab, and I’m just as mad at the thought of it as Action 52 made me. Muppets is a big theme and I really got a vibe of a bunch of people finding out their boss scored the Muppets license, groaning, and phoning it in because it wasn’t a game they wanted to work on. As far as I could tell, nobody who worked on Muppet Adventure ever did another game, and that’s fine. This is a TERRIBLE video game, for anyone of any age. The best things I can say about it are that the sprites pass for the Muppets and that a single level was good enough to be classified as simply being bad. But the truth is, Muppet Adventure was never meant to be a good game. It was meant to have good cover art that promised Muppets quality entertainment to unsuspecting parents.

Even the title screen is half-assed. This might be the most out-of-f*cks licensed NES game. At least Peter Pan and the Pirates had a good static screen.

Nobody involved in this gave two sh*ts if it actually delivered on that, and that should piss anyone off. When it’s a product aimed at parents trying to do a nice thing for their kids, that should make anyone furious. I’m guessing that, as a video game, Muppet Adventure was probably one of the more expensive Muppet products of its day. When it comes to licenses that specifically target parents and not the kids themselves, when the game turns out this bad, I find it disgusting. When I’m comparing a Muppets game to Action 52, that’s alarming enough. But then I remember this came out just months after Jim Henson died, and it just makes me feel dead inside. So it might not be worse than Where’s Waldo (and that’s debatable, as honestly Waldo is better programmed than this) but Muppet Adventure is every bit as hateful.
Verdict: NO!