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

June 16, 2025 by 2 Comments

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

Sometimes the game is pretty ugly, and other times, my jaw literally dropped from how detailed the backgrounds were. Game Boy games are quite capable of looking fantastic. Too bad the game is horrible.

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 character sprites are pretty good for 1991 Game Boy. But, and this is a strange complaint, there’s too much animation. When you use the slingshot, there’s frames for aiming that I’d swear the enemy placement and level design logic (as in when a player should logically be expected to react to the element) don’t factor-in. It’s as if they were added after the game was finished. It’s so weird. I don’t remember ever thinking that about any other game.

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.

Safe
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.

For the most part, this is a generic 90s Game Boy platformer. If you can’t get sick of those, you’ll probably like this more than I did. At least they remembered to make everything oversized.

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.

1st Boss
2nd Boss

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.

This is also auto-scrolling. The giant catches you if you linger too long on any platform.

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.

There’s too many bonus stages. This one plays like Pooyan. By the way,

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.

It’s a glitchy game. I went to dodge this boss and scrolled so far over it wasn’t on the screen anymore. When I scrolled back, it was gone but the door was still locked. It seems like it would have been a soft lock if I hadn’t rewound the game. I think what happened is it clipped through the left wall and got trapped in the room next to it. That room is gated off by a locked door that you can only open by killing the boss. At one point, the sprite was starting to go through the wall, and when I scrolled away I’m guessing it continued on. By the way, these bosses were such a boring slog that they were the final nails in the coffin.

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.

Most levels end on a boss at the top of the screen, but it’s usually the other enemies that continue to spawn and attack that makes these battles a pain in the ass.

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:

Pretty lame, Milhouse.

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?

I was getting Seta Tom Sawyer flashbacks here.

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.

I don’t know if this is a bonus stage or if they got distracted playing Rainbow Islands.

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

Here we go again.

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.

This uses Mode 7. No, I’m not also doing the Genesis version.

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

Three whips of a tail to defeat Barney right here would have worked as a typical, totally average platforming challenge. How many whips does it actually take to defeat him? Eight. Most of the enemies in this level are like that. The people who made these games presumably aren’t morons. How did they not grasp that this sh*t was boring? I assume this is classic “rental proofing” but if it doesn’t add to the challenge and instead makes the game a slog, isn’t “rental proofing” going to assure kids who rent these games would never want to actually own them? How is it possible they never understood that?

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.

Hmmph.

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.

This does the whole “split pathway that’s supposed to have depth but it doesn’t work because it’s a 2D game and there’s no shadows, so the platforms look like they’re on the same plane” thing. I hate it when any game from this time frame does this. It NEVER works right.

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.

Always fun to have boss fights where the boss is so high up that you can’t even see them. This won’t be the last time something like this happens in this feature, either!

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.

“Why didn’t they use Maggie?” asked, well, basically everyone in my family. It’s because in 1994, Bart was still the “main character” of the show, before it became the Many Occupations of Captain Wacky (later renamed Homer). But yeah, it should have been Maggie. The dinosaur segment probably should have been Homer. This feels like it wasn’t made by fans of the show.

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.

I almost coughed up my heart when Homer climbed in the thing. I thought I was going to have to keep going.

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. 

What the actual f*ck?

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

Logically, shouldn’t it be Itchy you play as? Scratchy is the one who is constantly mauled, maimed, and mutilated in the cartoon series. This is hella violent, too. Look, I just decapitated Itchy with a frisbee, with visible gore dripping. This came out two months after Nintendo caved in to public pressure and allowed Mortal Kombat II to be published on the SNES uncensored. “Nintendo folded! Quick, add dripping blood!”

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.

Or perhaps the worst part is being a Game Boy title instead of the SNES or PlayStation. This is such a one-off experience that I wish it had the highest audio-visual presentation possible for the era.

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.

Every hole culminates in a typical miniature golf trope. And yes, the ball becomes airborne if you hit it hard enough off the hill.

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.

This is bad golf etiquette. You’re supposed to wait until after the person takes their shot to throw a knife at them. Pssh, this must be taking place at a public course.

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.

The underwater level is actually a door maze, and was, for my money, the trickiest level in the game. But the wise design continues even in it. You can’t enter any door the ball didn’t already enter. You won’t get lost, BUT, it still works as a great twist on the door maze trope.

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.

Here’s the worst part of the game: after you finish, when you enter in your name for high scores, if you get nine high scores, you have to manually input your name nine times. It doesn’t automatically go to the same letters you used the first time you put your name in. How the hell did they make such a great game and screw up the “enter your name” bit? I’ve never seen that happen. BTW, apparently I didn’t even come close to the best possible scores. This game is going to have a seat in my regular rotation.

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

(SNES) See the pig snout on the right side of the screen? Yeah, I spent a while fighting this thing, and the only way I could figure to actually damage the boss is to stand on the platform I’m on and throw the bricks at it. Oh, you wanted the satisfaction of actually seeing the boss be damaged? Well, too bad. It’s almost like the people who made this didn’t actually play video games and thus didn’t comprehend the basic reasons why people like them.

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.

SNES
SNES

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:

Game Gear
Game Gear

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.

Game Gear

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

Game Gear

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.

(SNES) Reminder: these two just starred in one of the best licensed Game Boy titles ever made.

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!

For MOST of the bosses, just sit and spam the attack button. You’ll win the life slap fight.

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

Just what everyone wants: a game that leans extra-heavily into exploration that also runs on a timer. Was there some kind of rule that you could only develop a Simpsons game if you repeatedly smashed yourself in the head with a cinder block?

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.

Ah, Super Mario Bros. Deluxe. This is my go-to emulator test for Game Boy/Game Boy Color. This plays so smoothly. Which reminded me how inexcusable the sloppy movement and jumping of Treehouse of Horror is.

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.

The second level, where you take control of Maggie Simpson after she’s turned into a fly, is certainly the best executed level in the entire game. You fly around searching for three microchips, then have to activate five light switches to open a portal. This actually wasn’t bad at all. It played so well I have to assume it was made by someone who wasn’t involved in the platforming bits. I wouldn’t want a whole game of this, but this was, dare I say it, pretty good for two or three minutes. Now, I should note that most of the levels just unceremoniously end and return you to the treehouse level select screen. There might be a dancing animation sprite, but the Maggie stage just ends. It’s a really half-assed game.

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.

What makes the timer REALLY aggravating is that there’s a lot of situations built to work the timer. Like, in the level based on “If I Only Had a Brain” from Treehouse of Horror II, you can’t actually fight anything. There’s no combat at all (though enemies do die if you touch them), and the starting room that you have to return the target items back to one at a time always has guys on the only ladder out of the room. Eventually, I realized I either had to accept damage and count on finding health refills (which don’t seem to respawn on this level like they do others) or I would time-out.

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!

Is the game implying Bart murdered Homer, cut off his head, and then submitted it as a science fair project?

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)

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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

June 6, 2024 by 3 Comments

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?”

MCGA Build
EGA Build

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.

MCGA
EGA

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.

You can tell this is early in the Simpsons run, because a goose is so random.

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.

Bart vs. The Space Mutants II: DOS Bart.

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.

This is the section in question. You have to heel-toe to avoid getting hit when the level starts. I’ve never been a fan of GOTCHA! style game design. There’s nothing clever about it. It’s not something the player can reason out. It’s uncouth.

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?

Most of the pits are instakill. But, when you fall into the radioactive sludge in the sewer, you just get a reset with a tiny bit of health missing. There’s no consistency to the rules at all. You’ll want to play this one with save states, but don’t bother saving making incremental progress. Just save at the start of each level and use that. Deaths send you back to Bart’s room anyway.

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.

Despite what Mr. Burns is saying, this is NOT the final challenge. In fact, this is only the mid-point of this level. I get a feeling this might be a relic of an earlier build where Burns’ Mansion was the final area of the entire game. The length of this stage, combined with it having spongier enemies and more GOTCHAS! than any other stage gives “I Wanna Go to the Movies” a climatic vibe that I couldn’t shake.

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.

See the mallet at rest? Yea, that’ll hurt you. The action moves so fast and frantically in this level that it’s often hard to tell what’s killing you or not. Even when Itchy & Scratch aren’t physically on screen, bombs rain down continuously in this stage, and they have BIG splash damage. It’s simply too frantic. Slowing the pace down would have made this intense by making players plot their movement carefully. This violates Hitchcock’s suspense/intensity principle. The happenings are so rapid-fire that you don’t even have time to process things like excitement or thrills.

“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.

MCGA
EGA

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.

If you do reach the top, your reward is a brief tribute to Pitfall! It even has similar timing.

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.

There’s really no way to fight Sideshow Bob without taking damage. You just have to make it to him with full health and then allow yourself to get hit once for every three shots you get on him. Miss once and you have to start the whole level over. Or, save and reload at the beginning of the fight. It’s what I did. It’s such crap design that I literally can’t believe what I’m about to do. The old me would have torn this game a new asshole. I’ve gone soft.

(#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.

Do you like waiting for elevators? You’re in for a treat, you f*cking weirdo!

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.

(shrug) It’s technically okay. And boring. So very, very boring.

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.

I ended up putting in a password and playing later levels to see if it got more interesting. It just got more convoluted.

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

Moe’s Tavern Shove Fest, one of seven mini-games that make up Bart vs. The Juggernauts that sees you trying to push the female Juggernaut, then Barney Gumble, off Moe’s pool table. This made for a good screenshot, but when I discovered the running headbutt was almost never blocked or countered by the Juggernaut or by Barney, this event became the easiest one to win quickly.

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.

“Krustyland Hammer Slammer” is exactly the type of spinning plate game you’d expect to find in an LCD game, or rather, this feels like a Game & Watch Gallery “modern” version of a simpler LCD. Here, four Juggernauts slowly climb down poles, but Bart can send them back up by hitting a carnival hammer that sends Krusty’s head straight up their ass. Once again, the Simpsons predicts the future. The “hit the hammer, knock person in the ass” bit would later be used in the second Jackass movie.

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.

My #1 complaint is the random nature of the playfield. Sometimes it changes in a way where you’re surrounded by double-black squares on all sides. That shouldn’t be possible, nor should it be possible for, when the change happens, that the square you’re standing still on turns black. If they hadn’t done it this way, Hop, Skip and Fry might have been the best mini-game this weirdly common wacky sports genre has seen.

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.

No, sorry, I don’t believe Bart Simpson would go on an adventure to get his homework back. Not even in his dreams. Suspension of disbelief gone. Verdict: NO! Bring on the next game. You know, I made that joke before I started actually playing the game. Now, I wish I had gone through with it.

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.

Apparently the person who made this level never worked in gaming again. Good riddance.

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 stage. 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.

How sad is it that Mehtastic Voyage is the second best game in Bart’s Nightmare?

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

I sampled this a few years back and didn’t like it at all. I must have been in a bad mood or something, because this was pretty okay.

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.

If you find a power-up that looks like a flickering planet, you enter this bonus stage with floating rocks. Zap an alien with your laser eyes and it drops an icon that allows you to fly for a while. It’s really well done.

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.

Up to this point, Bartman was doing pretty good. So, when a section where you have to use your freeze breath on falling mud monsters to create platforms popped up, I got pretty nervous. Thankfully, this set-piece isn’t overdone. You don’t have to climb up a mountain the size of Everest. One screen. Lasts a minute. Really well done.

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

Honestly, with emulation tomfoolery, this isn’t bad.

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. 

I have two major complaints, and I can’t decide which is worse. The first is the collision is bad, and this is made worse by the inconsistency of WHEN and WHERE it’s bad. Just walking or running around, your box is a little bigger than the character sprite. Big enough that it’s VERY annoying, as stuff damages you when it doesn’t really come all that close to your sprite. But when you duck, it seems like a perfect one-to-one box. Stuff that would damage me when standing doesn’t when ducking, even though the actual distance from the top of my sprite to the offending object is exactly the same.

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.

Not all jumps in Swamp Thing are cruel. This section, for example. Let this be a lesson to developers: this is equally, if not more exciting, than last pixel jumping. I think that nerves alone can offset any entertainment value that insane last-pixel, edge-of-ledge jumps would induce.

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!

Continue to Part Three: Bart & The Beanstalk, Virtual Bart, two Itchy & Scratchy Games, and Treehouse of Horrors: The Game!

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