The Simpsons Video Games: The Definitive Review Part Three – 5 Full Reviews for Game Boy, SNES, Game Gear, and Game Boy Color + A Bonus Famicom Review

Welcome to the final part of The Simpsons: The Definitive Review! Make sure to read Part One and Part Two. Sorry this took a year for me to get to, but when you see the lineup, hopefully you’ll understand why I’ve been putting this off. Here’s the lineup. The Simpsons games were so low-quality that I threw in a bonus review for a Japanese-exclusive NES game based on Jack & The Beanstalk.

• The Simpsons: Bart & The Beanstalk for Game Boy
• Jumpin’ Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari for Famicom
• Virtual Bart for the SNES
• Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness for Game Boy
• The Itchy & Scratchy Game for the SNES
• Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror for Game Boy Color

This is not going to be pretty, BUT, the #1 ranked Simpsons game from a classic platform is in this feature. Alright, do the Bartman! Lucky for you, you only have to read these. I have to play them. I’m in deep, deep trouble.

The Simpsons: Bart & The Beanstalk
Platform: Game Boy
Released February, 1994
Designed by Brian Ullrich
Developed by Software Creations
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The thing I had the most fun doing with Bart & The Beanstalk? Using it as a coloring book! Seriously, I enjoyed this a lot more than actually playing the game. I think I did a pretty good job, too! My parents were so impressed that they patted me on the head, then they followed my suggestion that they print it out and stick it to the refrigerator! They then went into another room, locked the door, and started to cry! I heard them say “did you ever imagine this is what she’d be like in her mid-30s?” Do you know what that means? I have exceeded their expectations so much that I made them weep! I love you too, Mom & Dad! You’re the best parents!

The sad thing is, this had potential besides a play activity for my inner 6-year-old. It actually does closely follow the story of Jack & The Beanstalk. The first level is climbing the beanstalk. The second level is entering the castle, then after some adventures inside an oversized cupboard or hopping along floating things in a bowl of soup, the final two stages are escaping the castle and parachuting down the beanstalk. I personally think Jack & The Beanstalk is hella boring, but if you’re a fan, this might be the most accurate video game of it ever made. It’s too bad the gameplay is every bit as dull as the source material. The core gimmick is that you’re not simply trying to get from point A to point B. You have to collect X amount of coins in stages one through five. This is only really a challenge for level one. The first time I played this in 2024, I failed to collect the minimum when I reached the end. I was so happy I put this off for a year.

The combat just isn’t very good because the slingshot is a very boring weapon to use. Each enemy takes two shots to kill unless you can find a power-up that doubles the power (at least against basic enemies), but that usually doesn’t show up until the end of stages. I still took a ton of damage anyway because enemy sprites are large but the screen is small and there’s a pronounced delay to your attack. Normally, that by itself should be a deal breaker, but it isn’t. You have a life bar so big that they could have shot Titanic on it and had room to spare for the next Bond movie as well. It renders every non-boss encounter pointless busy work. Plus, I kept refilling my life, though I’m not even sure how. One time was from grabbing a harp shaped like Lisa, which the game never mentioned as a goal but it’s part of the lore so I imagine it was necessary. I wasn’t even looking for it. I just stumbled upon it. Same with the goose that lays the golden eggs.

You’ll notice I’m taking damage in the right picture, but actually, I’m taking damage in both! That level was a huge pain in the ass where you start taking damage just by touching scenery that’s in the background. No other stage did that. That rule is sprung on you specifically in this level. Well, that’s because you’re supposed to “stay out of the light.” What f*cking light? It’s a Game Boy game! Some of Bart & The Beanstalk’s graphics are pretty dang good, and it had been full of background graphics by time you reach the “don’t touch those background graphics” rule. Take a look at these screenshots. On the left, I’m safe. On the right, I’m taking damage.

Notice how, like, the entire background is lit up like that? Because you take damage everywhere during some stretches of the stage. There’s no way to avoid it. It’s not like there’s a complex series of dodging moves or ways to sneak around. It’s a life-slap! It’s such an obviously bad idea that it should have been killed on the drawing board, and certainly never should have made it past play testing. It’s not exciting, which would be the only reason to add such a danger element that makes no sense at all from an artistic point of view. The level designs are not the worst I’ve played. Not even close. The mechanics in that stage, though? Oof.

The bosses are even worse. The first one takes an outrageous twenty hits to kill, but that’s reduced to a measly fifteen if you got the slingshot upgrade. Then there’s the second boss. I thought I had the upgrade, but apparently it doesn’t matter if I did or didn’t. I stopped counting hits when the thing was still alive after two dozen shots, PLUS I’d hit it with a stick of dynamite at the start of the battle. Eat my shorts, game.

If those are only the bosses for the first and second level, you can imagine how spongy the remaining bosses are. Especially the last boss, which is obviously the giant! Why, it must take a hundred shots, right? Well, no, because there are no more bosses, meaning you never fight the giant. Seriously? I mean, yeah, I’m relieved because the two bosses they actually programmed are so spongy that they rank among the most intolerable boss fights I’ve ever experienced in my life. But still, you set it up and everything, game. What the f*ck? Instead, the game climaxes on an auto-scrolling escape out of the castle, then a set-piece that sees you parachute down the beanstalk.

It’s not the worst idea for a level, but it makes for a terrible finale. It feels more like a mid-game type of set-piece. Once you reach the bottom and grab the axe, that’s it! The game’s over! It’s weird that they thought to put bosses at the end of the first two levels, then just dropped that. Something is horribly off about this game. I’d be interested to know about its development. It shouldn’t have been “rushed” because it’s not like they had to time the game’s release to coincide with anything. By 1994, it was a safe bet the Simpsons was firmly entrenched in pop culture. Yet, it feels like a rushed, half-hearted game. It’s nowhere near the worst Game Boy release I’ve played, but it feels so soulless and uninspired. The worst thing I can say about it is that Bart & The Beanstalk was so enthusiasm-sucking that I delayed this feature by a year to avoid playing it.
Verdict: NO!

Since this feature is flooded with terrible games, how about a bonus review of a Jack & The Beanstalk game that you’ve probably never even heard of. I know I hadn’t. I literally found out about it before hitting publish.

Jumpin’ Kid: Jack to Mame no Ki Monogatari
aka Jumpin’ Kid, aka Jack the Giant Slayer
Platform: Famicom
Released December 19, 1990
Developed by Now Production
Published by Asmik Ace Entertainment, Inc
Never Released Outside of Japan (legally, at least)
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

From the same development team that brought you Jackie Chan’s Action Kung-Fu (read the reviews of the NES and TurboGrafx-16 versions in Kung-Fu Master: The Definitive Review) comes a halfway decent take on the Jack & The Beanstalk fable. My use of “halfway decent” was carefully chosen, by the way. The other half is generic, half-hearted crap. Jack the Giant Slayer is nowhere near as well done as the Jackie Chan games were, nearly rising to the level of “okay” before cratering in the home stretch. Initially, I decided to post this here instead of as a separate review because I wanted to show how it shouldn’t be THAT hard to make a bland but acceptable game based on the Beanstalk Multiverse. Well, maybe I should have posted this separately since I ultimately am giving it a NO! as well. This feature is cursed, and it doesn’t even come with a free Frogurt.

This is a boiler-plate hop ‘n gunner with a focus mostly on vertical levels at the start of the game and side-scrolling at the end. I mean, obviously. The main hook is you have to acquire temporary items that allow you to jump higher, which allows for easier navigation. You also collect beans that increase your attack power. The combat is straight out of Mega Man in that you can only shoot straight ahead. Try not to miss, because if you do, you’re screwed. Only one of your bullets can be on-screen at a time, and they travel fairly slowly.

There’s two major problems with Jack the Giant Slayer. The first is that you can’t actually kill most non-boss enemies. After the first beanstalk level, the majority of them are just stunned and very, very quickly come back to life. That wouldn’t be an issue if not for the second major problem: the collision detection is awful. You clearly have a very big hit box, and so it’s not enough to just try to avoid enemies. You need a LOT of space between them and you. Take any damage at all and all the jumping and shooting power you’ve accumulated is reset to the beginning. Granted, it doesn’t take much effort to accumulate a max load-out, but that’s not the point. I’ve never seen a game with poor collision ever rise above being barely okay. It kills immersion, dead. It kills the sense of accomplishment. Plus, Jumpin’ Kid is one of those games where the poor collision only seems to work one-way, as well. As far as I could tell, the enemies require direct shots with your projectile.

Now, if you could somehow make this sprite-accurate, this would be a decent game. So decent that the studio who did Bart & The Beanstalk would have been better off licensing this for adaptation and re-spriting it into a Simpsons game, then converting THAT to the Game Boy. It’s a lot better than Bart & The Beanstalk. It’s still a bad game. At least there’s a battle with the Giant! Here it is:

That’s the world’s tiniest giant right there. I don’t know what else I expected since the whole game has a sense of smallness about it that doesn’t really fit the whole Jack & The Beanstalk theme. But the level design is mostly fine. There’s some good jumping layouts here. Actually, the NO! was secured after those levels ended, especially in the very, very dull castle finale. I really think if they had stuck to the vertical theme and just traded the beanstalk facade for a castle facade, this MIGHT have barely squeaked out a YES! It was heading towards it, even with all the warts! The levels are all pretty small but well-designed, and there’s a wide variety of set-pieces, including the goose that lays the golden eggs (actually it’s supposed to be a hen) and a pirate ship for some reason. Seriously, is that part of the Jack & The Beanstalk lore? How did I miss that part of the story?

What’s NOT here is the Giant’s house, including oversized, well, anything. I guess they had to cut stuff to make room for the pirate ship. I also don’t remember seeing a harp. The fun set-pieces totally end during the final stretch, ending with a trio of really horrible bosses that take forever to kill and then the letdown final battle with the giant. I can forgive the bad boss fights, but not having the oversized belongings of the Giant? Why even do a Jack & The Beanstalk game? Gameplay is king, and poor mechanics apparently override decent level design because I spent most of my gameplay session wanting to be done with it. Okay, so Jumpin’ Kid shouldn’t have been included in this feature because it’s not even an example of a good Jack & The Beanstalk game. It’s better than Bart & The Beanstalk, but not significantly so. It controls better, which is usually the tiebreaker if I can’t decide between two games.

If you could somehow tighten the collision and maybe eliminate the “stun enemies only” aspect, this would be a decent game. I get how this could have been popular at the time, too. Apparently, this was a BIG hit on Famiclones in Central and Eastern Europe. I get that, because it certainly stands out among platforms of 1990 and games based on popular fairy tales were just getting a start. Jack the Giant Slayer just didn’t age well because collision detection has come a long way. It’s got a lot of heart, but heart doesn’t make for a good game in 2025. Apparently, this was earmarked for an American release but it didn’t happen. It’s probably wise, because had this come out in 1990, they would have heard “fee-fi-fo-fum” in an Italian accent.
Verdict: NO!

That was really stupid and pointless to include. Now if I were reviewing Family Guy games, a lazy cutaway review would make more sense. Anyway, back to the Simpsons.

Virtual Bart
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System
Released September 26, 1994
Directed by Hal Rushton
Developed by Sculptured Software
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Virtual Bart uses the same format as Bart’s Nightmare: a series of disconnected mini-games. Hell, if I didn’t know better, I’d swear these are all segments deleted from other crappy games. This time, they wisely ditched the hub-world. You just select which of the six games you’re stuck with using a roulette. For NO REASON, they also added a whammy, the skull and crossbones, which takes away a life. Well, that’s stupid. Timing the wheel is a cinch, by the way, as whatever you press the button on is eventually where it will stop. Anyway, since the developers recycled the same formula from Bart’s Nightmare, so shall I recycle my format from the Bart’s Nightmare review. These are in the order I drew the games. Plus, since they all seemingly have no names, I’ll have to make them up.

MAD BART

aka THE BART WARRIOR

It’s a combative motorcycle game, though the object is simply to make it to the finish line. I never came even a little close to timing-out, but I was probably one hit away from death when I crossed the finish line. You get a pathetic pea-shooter type of weapon that I never successfully killed anyone with. Whenever I tried using the brakes on the assumption the enemies would pull out in front of me so I could shoot them, they just stayed alongside me, which sucks with Kearney because he whips you with a chain. In fact, Kearney was the only baddie I know for sure I defeated (and multiple times at that). Using the shoulder buttons, you can perform a kick move. It takes a few shots, but it works, and you get a speed boost for it. The Bart Warrior is a shameless Road Rash knock-off, but honestly, this was way better than anything in Bart’s Nightmare. So far, so good, I guess.

WATERSLIDE

aka “WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!”
“WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!”
“WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!”
“WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!”
“WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!”
“IF I DO THE REVIEW, WILL YOU QUIT BUGGING ME?”
“OF COURSE! SURE! WELL, WILL YOU TAKE US TO MOUNT SPLASHMORE?!”
“YESSSSSSSSSSSSS!”
“THANKS CATHY!”

Well, this is lame as hell. You go down the world’s most overpopulated water slide, swaying left and right while trying to avoid other sliders, sharks, and other hazards. It takes several minutes to finish this stage, assuming you don’t pick the wrong direction. There’s multiple forks along the way, and if you pick the wrong direction, best case scenario is you run into Homer clogging the slide and get reset to the previous junction. Worst case? You die. I had a cow when this happened only to discover that, the next time you spin this stage, it starts you off at the previous junction you passed. Okay, so the developers weren’t TOTAL tools this time. So, how do you know which direction to take?

Do you see it? Well, I didn’t until Angela’s friend Jason pointed it out to me. The lines on the bald guy’s shirt are pointed one direction or the other. He shows up right before every junction. I’m sorry but that’s too damn subtle, especially considering the speed and the stakes. Hell, they could have done a satire of Dragon’s Lair and had the correct direction flash on the screen and it would have landed much more as both a gameplay mechanic and a joke. This whole sequence was too long and very, very boring.

JURASSIC BART

aka BART-A-SNORE-US REX

Why stop with Barney? Krusty and Marge here, fought back-to-back, each take eleven hits. Eleven!

If a dinosaur using its tail as a whip isn’t enough to shatter every bone in a human in one shot, that must be one brittle-ass dinosaur. When enemies take that many hits to kill, even if you have a nice WHAP sound effect, it feels weak. Because, you know, it is weak. It’s some of the worst combat I’ve ever experienced, so I hope it makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up when I say that the platforming and level design is even worse. First off, cue Smalls because this level goes on FOR-EV-ER. It’s gaming hell because none of it even rises to the level of mediocre. We’re back in Bart’s Nightmare territory here where this segment has no redeeming value. None. Just an ultra-repetitive series of platforms, cheaply-placed enemies, and GOTCHA traps. Like, there’s a point where you have to climb up a tall series of platforms, only some of them crumble underneath you.

When the platforms crumble, they’re gone until you scroll off the screen. Well, as you can see, there’s no other path. It usually means starting all the way over. If the climbing was something like the castle level in Wizards & Warriors where the screen is full of platforms and you can find your own jumping rhythm and pathway, that’d be one thing. But this is just creating soft resets of progress. It’s a roadblock, but not one that makes the game flow better. What makes it all especially infuriating is they did clearly measure the jumps, because a lot of them were fine tuned for the shallow jumping height.

The enemies are measured too. This is a game where you can jump on most enemies to avoid damage. In fact, that inflicts damage on baddies. But, to counter this, you BARELY can reach the height required to get up and over the enemies. Most of my attempts at both swinging my tail and jumping on enemies ended with me being damaged. The only saving grace for this whole sorry-ass level is that life refills are plentiful.

I didn’t realize until I reached the end of the stage that the point isn’t for players to lose by being damaged to death. They’re either counting on you to die via a bad jump or by timing out. The final stretch of the last part of this miserable slog of a stage is the dreaded slippy-slidey ice trope. This one leans heavily into moving platforms that you have to wait quite a while for, which runs out the clock. Then, as if to truly salt the wounds, the ultimate boss of the level takes place on a moving platform while the clock is ticking away. Moe and Homer throw stones at you while you whip with your tail at the stack of sheets they’re on, trying to completely destroy the stack. Except, the platform moves back and forth between them, and the playfield is so big that you can’t even see both bosses at the same time. You can only get a couple shots at most per pass, but the stacks are pretty big. I timed-out in my first attempt and barely won the second time with seconds to spare.

Here’s my question: who the hell would want this in a Simpsons game? Instead of playing as a normal Simpsons character in a Springfield setting, you play as a ugly-ass dinosaur in a prehistoric setting. For f*ck’s sake, just make a normal, non-spongy, non-cheap platformer starring Bart Simpson! How f*cking hard is that? Capcom, even with a massive time crunch, did an Aladdin game that had only a couple bosses, an entire tension-free, enemy-free auto-scrolling segment and the whole game was f*cking amazing. What the hell is this? Were you guys working on a dinosaur game and decided to just copy and paste the work you had done over to this for a quick buck? If so, good call not stretching this into a full game, because this was the absolute sh*ts. There’s no way Virtual Bart recovers from this.

BABY BART

aka NON-TRADITIONAL PLATFORMING BUFFET

Finally, one of these 16-bit Simpsons games has something that’s ALMOST a good platform segment. Almost, but not quite. This is kind of like a series of extra gameplay mechanics that would enhance any other normal platforming game, only without, you know, the normal platforming mechanics. You can swing off pegs to launch yourself high in the air. You can ride a balloon, where you have to move up and down on the strings to avoid obstacles. You can balance on a tightrope, which is the closest the segment comes to feeling like a run of the mill jumping game. You can use your diaper as a parachute for a second before it fails. Then, out of nowhere, there’s a section where you ride in a baby carriage and have to move up and down a few channels, avoiding hazards.

It’s so radically different from everything else in this segment that I wonder if it was meant to be a seventh game in Virtual Bart, until they figured out they couldn’t stretch it out to five minutes. It’s basically a glorified LCD game. After this, it’s back to the peg-swinging, trampoline-bouncing stuff for a circus-themed finale. In truth, this is probably the strongest overall segment in any 16-bit Simpsons game so far. They really did seem to try and make an exciting, well-constructed mini-quest with unique mechanics. It even had decent combat for the first half of the game, as you can shoot your pacifier eight directions and enemies didn’t take dozens of hits. So, naturally they took the combat away completely at the end and then spammed the course with enemies. Of course they did. Baby Bart wasn’t the worst, but when the segment was over, I was happy to be done with it. That’s usually not a good sign.

PIG BART

aka SPIDER-PIG: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE

How sad is it that it took this long to get a decent platforming stage? And when I say decent, I mean BARELY so. I’m not even sure it’s really okay in a vacuum or just okay compared to all the crap that came before it. Pig Bart has a spring-like move that you can use after jumping that lets you get to higher platforms, and otherwise, this features the same crappy platforming physics and hop-on-heads combat as the dinosaur stage. But, the level design works. The segment is divided into four stages. The first is far and away the most interesting. You have to locate and rescue trapped pigs in a maze-like series of doors. This section closes in a hunt for three different keys that each match a specific door. It’s not amazing or anything, but it’s a nice, solid platforming maze.

Sadly, the rest of Pig Bart isn’t so interesting. There’s a couple traditional A-to-B sections, with the only twist being a room where you have to push five pigs frozen in blocks of ice to spring, then time when to activate the spring in order to launch them into the air where a hook catches them. While this happens, a clown that can’t be killed walks back and forth and freezes YOU, and it’s so annoying that it almost ruined it. I wasn’t sure if I was missing a step because five blocks is a lot. After this, you do another platforming segment before fighting a terribly sloppy trio of generic businessmen bosses. You actually can’t damage them directly. You have to get them to attack next to a bookshelf, so the books fall off and hit them. Apparently, a lot of people consider this the worst segment. I didn’t think it was THAT bad, especially compared to everything else in Bart’s Nightmare or Virtual Bart. It’s fine. Nothing special.

SCHOOL PICTURE DAY

aka Oh Thank God, It’s The Final Segment

Okay, this really would be like a between-levels bonus stage in any other game. In the first level, characters walk in a straight line back and forth and you throw tomatoes at them. In the second level, they move diagonally and you’re throwing eggs instead. You have to start a meter that quickly travels in a straight line down the center, then press it again to throw the object. While you can aim left and right after you throw, I only successfully hit one single person trying this the entire time. You can still hit every character by just waiting and throwing straight down the middle. You have unlimited ammo (I think) and are just basically working against the clock. Hitting any grown-ups automatically ends the round and, if you didn’t hit every single classmate, you have to start over.

Once you finish all six segments, the game just ends. No finale, just like Bart’s Nightmare. Homer gets into the contraption, it starts to spin, he screams, and then the credits roll so you can tell everyone listed on it to go f*ck themselves. If the 16-bit games were any property but the Simpsons, they would be considered among the worst games of this era. Saying Virtual Bart is better than Bart’s Nightmare is faint praise. Unlike Bart’s Nightmare, there’s no segments like the Godzilla or Indiana Jones stages that cross the line into unplayable. The dinosaur level comes the closest, and it’s simply a sh*tty platform game. There’s a LOT of those on the SNES. Worse ones, actually. So, Virtual Bart is better. Technically, half of the six segments would get a very pained YES! vote out of me and one other (Baby Bart) comes very, very close to it. 

But, the net gains of the three okay segments don’t even come close to outweighing the net-negatives of the tediously long and boring water slide and especially the excruciatingly terrible Dino Bart segment. It’s also worth noting that the level I personally enjoyed the most, Pig Bart, is often cited as one of the worst parts of the game by others. Had it been the full game, I probably would have gone the other way too, but just as I was starting to lose patience it ended. The second best segment is a really shallow Road Rash knock-off, and the third best would be an average-at-best bonus round in any other 16-bit game. So, while Virtual Bart technically went 3 for 6, read everything above. Does Virtual Bart sound more fun than not? If it did, please note that I was THRILLED when I finally finished the review process. That should tell you everything you need to know. I’d rather be stuck watching the Principal and the Pauper on repeat than ever play this or Bart’s Nightmare ever again.
Verdict: NO!

The Simpsons: Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness
Platform: Game Boy
Released November, 1994
Designed by James Halprin
Developed by Beam Software
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

Well, this is the best Simpsons video game on a classic gaming platform. I figure that should get the Simpsons Arcade fanboys to back off by noting I said “classic platform” which in theory excludes arcades. Heh heh heh, that ought to hold the little SOBs. So yeah, I had a lot more fun with Itchy & Scratchy’s golf game than I did the coin-op or Bart’s House of Weirdness. This isn’t “miniature golf” either. Ever play Ninja Golf, the famous Atari 7800 game where you hit a golf ball, then fight enemies on the way to your next shot? This is like that, only instead of a very basic, highly-repetitive Kung-Fu Master wannabe mixed with all the fun of stopping a meter in time, this mixes all the fun of stopping a meter in time with a very clever platforming game that heavily factors in the ball itself. It’s so insanely ambitious that it hurts my heart that it’s so far under the radar.

First thing’s first: this is a seriously very, very violent game, and it’s even pretty gory for a Game Boy title. You decapitate Itchy (completely with dead, vacant postmortem eyes), cleave him in half, and shoot him dead. And the ending? Seriously, I’m going to spoil the ending of the game right now in the slideshow below after the gameplay pic of Itchy being cut in half, because it almost doesn’t seem real for a 1994 Game Boy release. Had the ESRB been in effect by this point, this would have almost certainly gotten an M rating.

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Jesus Christ, dude! JESUS CHRIST! Not that I’m objecting or anything. It actually makes me kind of proud that we live in an era with video game violence so awesome that it makes even the most grizzled, dead inside, flint-hearted people physically ill. But, the practical person in me notes that publishers care about ESRB ratings and the graphical content of this alone might actually prevent it from ever getting a re-release. Imagine putting a collection of Simpsons games out that wears the M rating because of a f*cking Game Boy golf/platforming hybrid where a cat performs an unscheduled vivisection on a mouse. I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the game doesn’t actually need it. If I must choose either glorious cartoon violence or one-of-a-kind, genuinely fun gameplay, hey, I can get the violence from TV. I think there’s whole shows based around it and everything!

I can’t stress enough that if you think of this as a golf game, you’re going into it with the wrong mindset. Perhaps you should stick to Nintendo’s game? The golfing here is more like a series of timing/platforming tropes, only instead of just doing the jumping alone, you also have to manipulate a ball to the goal along the way. There’s no timer and, as far as I can tell, there’s no actual penalty for going over par. If there is, I never got it, and I did bogey at least one hole. You can even explore the full level to figure out the path you’re going to need to take to get to the hole. It’s not a straight line. In fact, many stages are downright maze-like. Now, if you do explore, you have to manually make your way back, but I still enjoyed doing this. The level design is actually fantastic. They didn’t half-ass this concept at all, nor were they conservative because the concept is experimental. Rare, but bold and very admirable.

At the start of every level, you walk up to the ball and press UP to take position. Instead of the standard triple-click mechanics of the 80s and 90s, this is a double clicker because there’s no English to put on the ball. It’s a 2D side-scroller, so you can’t hook or slice it. That’s mostly because you can’t manually make the ball lift off the ground. You need a hill or some object like a magnet for that. After hitting the ball, you chase it down. It’s not hard to locate thanks to the helpful radar that appears when you’re not taking a stroke. Instead of having pars like 3 to 5, the pars are anywhere from 9 to 28. You can also find hidden erasers in the levels that shave a stroke off. That’s how you can tell it’s not real golf, where you normally just wait to finish the hole and then lie about how many strokes you needed. Oh, and Itchy tries to kill you the whole time.

Itchy is actually the easy part. I figured he would probably screw with the ball, but he never does. Actually, no enemy does. Itchy’s goal is to kill you directly. No matter his attack gimmick in any situation, he’s a one-shot kill every time. In addition to being able to use your club, there’s a wide variety of weapons to dispatch him. Where the golfing gets tricky is that there’s often moving platforms that you not only have to get the ball onto, but you also have to leave enough room to be able to square-up to it so you can take a shot. The good news is that every moving platform, or at least the first ones in a sequence, go lower than the ground, so you don’t have to have EXACT timing. If you position the ball in the center of where the platform will eventually go, the platform doesn’t crush the ball and will scoop it up. They were really wise with the design in general. There’s only nine levels too, and the variety of gimmicks keeps things fresh.

I don’t know what critics at the time had against Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Mayhem. Not only does it offer a truly inspired premise, but it has the gameplay mechanics to live up to that premise. It even goes the extra mile, as stages are full of secrets and hidden passageways that contain items, extra lives, or the valued erasers. The jumping mechanics and the platforms built around them feel natural and intuitive. The golf meter is really well done, as it’s simple to use but hard enough to clock that I still didn’t manage to have it down completely cold in two full game play sessions.

Not only is Itchy & Scratchy’s golf elite in the realm of Simpsons games or licensed games in general, but it’s actually one of the best original Game Boy titles I’ve ever played. Plus, I love violence, and this is overflowing with so much of it that I have a niggling desire to hit my father over the head with a mallet. The best Simpsons game before Hit & Run? I think so, actually. It offers a lot more replay than the coin-op thanks to the golf score mechanics. Whoever owns the rights to this, I have to say either the ROM or a full remake of it could easily anchor a collection of Simpsons games if you can’t get the rights to the arcade game.
Verdict: YES!

The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product
Platform: Super Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Gear
Released March, 1995
SNES Version Developed by Bits Studio
Game Gear Version Developed by Bits Corporation Limited
Published by Acclaim
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

The Super NES version of Itchy & Scratchy is a good looking, boring video game. The Game Gear version crosses into actual developmental incompetence. Both games have the same basic objective. Although framed like a normal mascot platformer, they’re not. Instead, levels are playfields and the object is to whittle down Scratchy’s life bar. You’re given a mallet as a default weapon, but throughout the playfield are various other instruments of violence that are usually tailored to the level’s theme. On the SNES, Scratchy takes a stick-and-move approach, but at least when you swing at him, contact is made.

The same can’t be said about the Game Gear version. Sometimes I went several minutes without seeing Scratchy. There’s a radar that purports to point you in the correct direction, but I’d end up reaching a wall only for the arrow to suddenly point the opposite direction. It probably took me around four or five minutes to beat the first SNES stage. If I beat the first Game Gear stage in under thirty minutes, I’d be stunned. Maybe it just felt longer. The combat is horrifically bad on the Game Gear, with some of the worst collision I’ve experienced. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Scratchy’s hit box was a single pixel in the center of his chest. That’s especially annoying because YOUR hit box is so big and so sensitive that, during multiple instances, I was damaged by the poofs of enemies that I’d already killed, even if they weren’t even a LITTLE close to me. Look at this sh*t:

I really do hate saying this to game makers because it’s really mean to say and sometimes they have nightmare deadlines, but there really is no excuse for collision THAT bad. So, here it goes: have a little f*cking pride in your work! This is a game aimed at kids, and if you think kids don’t deserve better than this, you should not be working on products made for children. Itchy & Scratchy: The Game on Game Gear is Action 52 levels of broken, and I’m not even really done. Scratchy almost always won the quick draw against me even if he wasn’t facing the right direction and even if the sound effect for what would be a normally on-target whack sounded before Scratchy began his weapon’s attack animation. Look at this screenshot below. Despite the blades of a hedge clipper encompassing his full body, I’m not doing damage. Oh no, I’m taking it.

And here’s how THAT ended, without Scratchy even turning around.

Huh. They charged money for this experience and everything. Even when you do score a hit, it’s not fun. Scratchy feels like he takes hundreds of hits to kill. On the SNES, you can do a powered-up charge attack, a move that’s gone on the Game Gear. I hit Scratchy so many times that I had to rewind to make sure that his health was actually trickling down faster. I’m not even sure if *I* killed him or he died of natural causes. Oh, and they cut out the bosses, which should be a positive since they sucked ass on the SNES. But, it’s still pretty telling that they didn’t even attempt them on the Game Gear. Itchy & Scratchy on Game Gear is so bad it’s the rare game I wrote-up that I didn’t finish. I have my limits and I couldn’t take it. It has to be one of the most half-assed, broken games EVER on a Sega device.

At least in the SNES game, when you hit the charge attack or especially attacks with weapons, it quickly drains the cat’s health. The problem is the combat, for a game that’s ENTIRELY combat, is boring. You can’t do any jumping attacks at all. If something is right above you and the weapon you’re using has a swinging animation that looks like it’s going from up to down, EVEN IF the enemy is in the space of the motion blur, the attack will miss. It sure feels like this is one of those games where everyone involved regretted getting the assignment and couldn’t be bothered to do better. Maybe Acclaim should have hired studios that had inspiration instead of just going with whoever made the lowest bids. I mean, come on! It’s not like you’re building a hospital!

Occasionally you’ll get a wedge of cheese that makes you run as fast as another blue animal, but I found no practical use for this except losing Scratchy’s position. Which you’re not actually trying to do. The only interesting idea is that you have to kill little versions of Scratchy to build up ammo that only can be used on the boss fights. In fact, the bosses are immune to your hammer and MUST be killed by these weapons, which have different sprites but are all just identically-behaving throwing items. Okay, it’s not THAT interesting. You know what’s the saddest thing of all? Itchy & Scratchy: The Game is the best 16-bit Simpsons game. They bite, alright. And bite. And bite and bite and bite. Bite bite bite, bite bite bite, it was the Itchy & Scratchy Game!
Verdicts: NO! and NO!

The Simpsons: Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror
Platform: Game Boy Color
Released March 19, 2001
Directed by Jonathan D’Cruz
Developed by Software Creations
Published by THQ
NEVER BEEN RE-RELEASED

I feel like this is the first time I’ve played a retro Simpsons where it makes me feel EXACTLY how I feel watching the show. That’s because being letdown by Treehouse of Horror is an annual tradition! Actually, this takes a page out of the SNES games by offering a few distinct play-styles in bite-sized vignettes. I was going to do the review the same way, but I changed my mind since three of the seven levels are the same basic concept: a platforming scavenger hunt, and a fourth uses the same engine for a door maze. Also, I legitimately screwed-up this review. I didn’t realize until after I’d turned off the game that I forgot to switch back to my normal emulator. I normally use mGBA, but Treehouse of Horror was so damn sluggish that I swapped emulators and tried other games to make sure everything was running right. You never know if the kids monkeyed around with the settings.

But, for whatever reason I forgot to swap back to mGBA and instead played this on an emulator that made a lot of my screenshots look like this:

Whoops. Always check your progress, Cathy. In fact, I got so few usable screenshots I had to use passwords to grab better screenshots today before publishing, but I wasn’t upset. It wasn’t like this was an unbearably dull game or anything. Sigh. Anyway, nobody screwed with my settings. The game just plays really, really poorly. Movement is stiff, slow, and sluggish. Except for Maggie’s stage, which is a-okay.

What frustrates me is EVERY stage runs on a timer. It’s REALLY slow moving, so while I never timed out, I was still pretty annoyed just by its existence. In games where you’re dropped-off in a big maze, I want to be able to explore. I felt like I was being given the bum’s rush instead of being allowed to go at my own pace. Not that it matters. It’s a very short game that, once you know where all the doohickeys are in each stage, you could probably finish in under thirty minutes. But, while I didn’t enjoy this all that much, I concede there are some good ideas. In fact, the level design COULD have won me over, but not with the technical mechanics this poorly coded. Again, the big book for most of the game is you’re placed in a maze and have to search for macguffins. For Bart’s stage and the Robo-Homer stage, you have to retrieve the target items one at a time.

In the first level, that item is fuses that you have to return to the basement of the house. Returning the fuses turns on lights in the home which allows you to search the three keys which eventually lead you to the attic. Did you follow all that? The combat is just awful, and it took me all of a minute to figure out to just accept damage because the life refilling donuts respawn unlimited times just by scrolling off the screen. There’s a lot of backtracking and red herrings in the platforming segments, but if the game controlled well, they would have been fine! A lot better than the TERRIBLE Marge top-down shooting section where you have to shoot zombies with manure or puddles of water before fighting an ordinary, non-zombie Krusty the Clown. It’s like a really poor version of Zombies Ate My Neighbors. I quickly realized the best option was to just leg it past the basic zombies until I reached one of the four bosses.

Homer’s robot level is the same basic idea as Bart’s, only without the ability to attack. You have to just accept damage. This one introduces the ability to search drums and cabinets. If it’s a searchable thing, an eyeball will appear. If they had implemented combat, this wouldn’t have been such a frustrating stage. The final fetch quest is easily the best. Based on the “Nightmare Cafeteria” segment from the best Treehouse of Horrors episode (the fifth one, duh), you play as Lisa trying to find five keys and then the corresponding jail cells to rescue your classmates. There’s a stealth element to this one. While you can’t defend yourself, you can hide up against walls to allow the adults to pass you. It’s the only platforming stage I liked.

Okay, so sneaking past the baddies wasn’t exactly the hardest thing. You just wait for them to walk past you and, once their sprite has cleared you entirely, you bolt for it. They’ll never see you and you’ll have a clear path to escape. But, once again, the level design is really well done for this, as only the first key unlocks a kid who is right there. The rest requires you to search them out and it’s, gasp, genuinely satisfying! I wouldn’t have minded a whole game like this! It’s certainly better than the mediocre door maze that makes up Homer’s first level, based on “Bart Simpson’s Dracula” which also includes a long, sloppy “escape the rising floor” segment. And then there’s the finale, King Homer. It’s a god awful Rampage wannabe where you can shrug off all the damage as you make your way towards the tall building on the right side of the map, where you’ll fight a boring airplane boss.

After beating King Homer, a UFO sucks all the Simpsons family members out of the treehouse. I figured there was going to be one last level where you fight Kang & Kodos, but I guess the developers were as bored making this as I was bored playing it, because the game just cuts to the title screen. That’s it. The end. Now, I’ve played a lot of bad Simpsons games over the last year. Thirteen, to be exact, but this one kind of frustrates me the most because it certainly had the most potential to be good. Well, I suppose Bart vs. The Space Mutants did too, but that one actually was fixed (see Part One). Everyone loves Simpsons Halloween Specials, so getting fans excited for a game based around them should be easy, right?

Well, they had the right idea. I’m not being sarcastic, either. I don’t know if this was the BEST way they could have done a Simpsons Halloween game, but the fetch quest stages are well mapped. As bad as this plays, and it plays horrifically bad, the levels are so short that they don’t really leave too much time to become exhausting. Only the Marge stage (WTF were they thinking?) and King Homer (ditto) are unmitigated disasters. The other five could have worked, and had they controlled like even an average Mario knock-off, hell, this could have gone down as the second best console/handheld Simpsons game ever. It had no shot at beating Itchy & Scratchy Golf or the Japanese version of Simpsons Arcade, but third place was on the table. Some people train their whole lives just to make the podium. Instead, it’s just another mediocre Simpsons game. I can’t imagine why Hit & Run didn’t sell as much as they were expecting. The franchise had such a great track record!
Verdict: NO!

FINAL RANKINGS

1. Itchy & Scratchy in Miniature Golf Madness (Game Boy)

2. The Simpsons – Japanese ROM (Arcade)
   

3. Bart’s House of Weirdness (MS-DOS)

4. Bart vs. The Space Mutants Redux (Genesis ROM Hack)

5. Bartman Meets Radioactive Man (NES/Game Gear)

6. Swamp Thing (NES)
   

7. Bart vs. The World (NES)

   **TERMINATOR LINE**

8. The Simpsons – International ROM (Arcade)
   

9. Night of the Living Treehouse of Horror (Game Boy Color)
   

10. Bart & The Beanstalk (Game Boy)

11. Bart Simpson’s Escape From Camp Deadly (Game Boy)

12. Krusty’s Super Fun House (SNES)

13. Bart vs. The Space Mutants (NES/SMS/Genesis)

14. Bart vs. The Juggernauts (Game Boy)

15. The Simpsons Arcade Game (MS-DOS)

16. The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product (SNES)

17. Virtual Bart (SNES)

18. The Simpsons: Bart vs. The World (SMS/Game Gear)

19. The Simpsons: Bart’s Nightmare (SNES)

20. The Itchy & Scratchy Game: A Genuine Simpsons Product (Game Gear)