Used up all their good ideas on the first level and had nothing left for the rest of the game. Alas.
Used up all their good ideas on the first level and had nothing left for the rest of the game. Alas.
Used up all their good ideas on the first level and had nothing left for the rest of the game. Alas.
So that was the GOOD part of the game? Because it was dogshit
Amazingly yes. The game behind it blows
There was no good part of the game, you're just coping
didn't matter. they already knew it would sell like gangbusters because Bart Simpson was on the cover.
it also got ported to an unnecessarily large number of platforms
Bart vs the world would be pretty good if they had just fixed the fricking controls
every level is an ice level
be honest though it wouldve been dogshit even with perfect controls
I had this back in the day and never beat it. It's too hard and too cryptic. I did manage to beat BvtW, though, and even got the pie ending.
The Mexican Runner beat this in like 30 minutes I thought? It's not actually all that hard.
Walkthroughs didn't exist back in 1993.
Video game magazines explained all the puzzles in the game (they're all on level 1). The descriptions of all the inventive interactive shit you could do on the first level was probably half the reason a lot of people bought it.
Not every one bought magazines back in the day.
was that time after he already speedran it to death?
He probably watched hours of video figuring out how to do it.
I beat it as a kid. What is cryptic about it? It's difficult, but not that bad if you take your time.
The hidden platforms when fighting the dinosaur at the museum. I never got past there as a kid.
So this was made by Imagineering and of course they were ex-Atari guys whose idea of game design was still in 1984 or so and couldn't quite figure out NES kinds of games.
It's too bad we never got a Japanese Simpsons game for the home. They knew how to make something simple and appeal. Western devs are too interested in making something convoluted for the sake of it while every other aspect suffers.
I actually liked the idea of exploring Springfield and meeting familiar characters It's like open world games but in 8-bit.
Shame that every other aspect of these games was shit.
I wonder who could make a good Simpsons game. Maybe Konami? They were pretty good at handling licensed stuff.
Software Creations were the only Western NES dev that might have been somewhat ok.
>I wonder who could make a good Simpsons game. Maybe Konami?
Yes, Konami or Capcom. The idea is so god damn simple. Bart runs around with a slingshot and fricks up b***hes left and right. The Konami beat em up was good quality, and their other games were good too.
Konami and Capcom would not have made an open-world game, in the NES era. The closest they ever did was shit like Castlevania 2. What NES Simpsons needed was just a straight-forward action-platformer, it's really that simple. The idea of having adventure game elements isn't completely worthless, but it's obvious that the devs in this instance were being too ambitious. It's way too PC-like, and they probably barely had the time and console limitations to do much.
Western developers had a major problem with trying to do PC games on NES when the hardware wasn't suitable for it. They didn't entirely grasp what it was good at, which was moving lots of graphics objects around.
>trying to do PC games on NES
I think it was just general direction of Western game development at the time, making something overly ambitious. Westerners played point'n clicks and simulators while Nippon was like haha kusoge go brrr.
A Boy and his Blob, Adventures of Rad Gravity, Addams Family - the concepts of these games are good and interesting but they've kinda fricked it up every time by needless over-complexing.
Not EVERY time. I like Die Hard NES (despite its jank), and Maniac Mansion kinda counts. Imagineering's own Ghoul School is surprisingly good (again, despite its jank). And I think maybe there's an okay Star Trek game for NES? I dunno, haven't played that/those as an adult.
NES Die Hard was Japanese, but yeah its presentation is much different/more ambitious compared to most games. Probably because it was semi based on computers.
I can't speak for Adventures of Rad Gravity, but:
>A Boy and his Blob
This was a decent game with two major flaws. First flaw was the dev didn't put enough effort into giving you a reason to use jellybeans other than Trampoline and Umbrella for most of the game. Made the gameplay a bit more repetitive than it should have been. The other flaw was the alien world wasn't a fun place to explore like the caves below the subway. Instead it's a giant noob-trap designed to kill a player who doesn't know what to expect. All fun gets sucked out of the game the moment you head to the alien world.
>Addams Family
This game suffers from one of the most warped difficulty curves I have ever seen, along with a complete and total lack of effort on the areas you visit towards the end of the game. Literally the hardest part of the game is at the start. No other part of the game will ask you to do precision jumps like the crypt where you get the front door key at. Once you actually get inside of the mansion, the rest of the game is much easier. Then it's a halfway decent game up until you finally manage to head out of the conservatory into the woods out back. Then you get screen after screen after screen after screen of the exact same background pattern for 4-5 long hallways each as big as the entire starting area. For the roof, this means seeing the same 8x8 roof tile repeated for 80% of the screen. And if you don't have enough cash to meet the $1,000,000 requirement to enter the final area, you might have to travel to these boring places again.
They have flaws, but neither suffers from being overly complex.
Both games are also very short and easy once you've figured out where to go and what to do.
Thought that game was trash till I saw someone on yt beat it in such a way, you'd have to see it to believe it.
I heard one or two of the later levels are good, if you can make it to them. As for me, I had this game as a kid and could never get past level 2 with the hats.
Level 3 is an amusement park where you pop balloons, play the carnival games for 1-ups, and get to stomp on Sideshow Bob's feet. It's marginally better than the two levels that come after, at least.
everything's a tradeoff. perhaps in an alternate universe Capcom does the Simpsons games and Rescue Rangers is done by shitheap like Radical Entertainment.
licensed games especially would be made under awful time pressure. they probably had like three months to finish.
The first level has the most references, but the rest of the levels are still creative with interesting ideas. It's a weirdass game that's a pain in the butt but I consider it a decent game all the way to the end.
Agreed. It's an honest and interesting failure at worst, and there's stuff in it to enjoy. I liked it as a kid - albeit not enough to play all the way through it twice
>creative ideas executed poorly
yep its a david crane nes game
as anon said he never really did figure out post-Atari game design
>playing bart vs space mutants
>comfy simpsons game with the usual colorful quirky Groening style
>suddenly realistic ass Carnotaur shows up
NOPENOPENOPENOPE
The Genesis version redraws it to look more in line with the Groening style.
It's not a bad thing imo, I said "Nopenope" because it scared me as a toddler, but it made these games unique, I like that weird era of the Simpsons franchise where you'd see weird stuff like that mixed in.
I always thought the clay looking aliens in the intro were spooky. Definitely not Simpsons characters.
The game was made so early into the show's run that Kang and Kodos hadn't been established as THE recurring alien characters yet.
Release date was February '91 which was halfway into Season 2 and development would have been done during 1990, probably taking a few months (since it was a licensed game they probably didn't have a huge time budget). So yes they wouldn't have been able to add Kang and Kodos as their debut on the show was in the first THOH which aired 10/25/90 when the game was in development and probably close to the end (also allow at least three months to get the cartridges manufactured and shipped from Japan).
The Simpsons games were good. They were just too hard for babies.
>Used up all their good ideas on the first level and had nothing left for the rest of the game.
You clearly didn't beat level 2 because level 3 is Krustyland and it's way more fun than level 1 and has a bunch of really creative gimmicks to it. The final level is also pretty good. Levels 2 and 4 are boring as frick, I will give you that.
So, yeah.
It's funny that out of all the versions of Space Mutants released, only the original NES game has unique Game Over scenes for each level, including for the last stage where the aliens finally unleash their ultimate weapon: an army of Homer clones.
The NES version is the best, yeah.
SMS and Mega Drive versions should be better, but they have duller artstyle and don't have the Simpsons theme. At least I'm sure the MD one didn't.
I dunno. The Genesis version looks more like the show, but NES has the theme song and the unique elements like the stage-specific Game Overs.
Nes Simpson games blew. Some isometric skateboard action game might've worked
but then it would just be Paperboy
>Some isometric skateboard action game might've worked
It didn't.
The cool stuff about the NES Simpson games is the weirdness of it all. And the first level of VS Space Mutants if you think of it as an adventure/point and click game.
Otherwise the only truly great Simpsons game was Arcade.
I have a soft spot for Bart's Nightmare though.