Re: ✰ GR Creative Highlight: 150 SNES Games at the speed I can handle
Posted: Wed May 20, 2020 4:42 pm
My 158th SNES Review Virtual Bart (I will eventually make a Video of this but I thought I would at least do the written part).
So this is not the first Simpsons game I have reviewed and in fact I have already talked about a game very similar to this one, a game called Barts Nightmare and as this is made by the same developer and published by the same publisher I guess this is basically a sequel in all but name.
This game was released for the Super NES and the Sega Megadrive or as our American friends would know it the Sega Genesis in 1994.
Unless you have been living under a rock then I don't need to explain who the Simpson's are pretty much everyone will have watched there show at least a few times and have some idea of who the characters are. The game does do a good job of connecting to this world, it makes sure that plenty of the shows characters are sprinkled in here and there and the game does try very hard to stay true to the show visually and in tone. When I reviewed Barts Nightmare I described it as a mini game collection connected by a central hub world, a hub world which was incredibly boring and time consuming and I plainly stated that the game would have been a lot better if you just sacked of the hub world and got straight in to the mini games, well its almost as if someone had been listening to my frustrations as Virtual Bart sacks of the concept of the hub world in favour for a spinning wheel which randomly selects which mini game you will play next, so far so good right?
OK so lets start with the games story. It is a pretty simple one, it is Bart's schools science fair day and he wanders past all the other exhibits which are all pretty cool Simpsons references and he sees a virtual reality project. Bart cant resist getting in to the machine, it is once you enter this machine you find yourself spinning on a wheel, a wheel which will randomly select one of six different levels. All of these levels are essentially different mini games. You have a couple of lives to try and complete all of these levels with and when you lose all of your lives well that's game over and you will be treated by seeing Bart stumble out of the virtual reality set and throw up.
I will give them credit for providing a neat little cut scene before each level that sets the scene and also for the fact that every level contains characters from the show. So they have at least tried to show some love to the source material.
OK so lets be deeply honest now the graphics are the only good part of this game. All of the characters actually look good and the backgrounds show scenery that you can recognise from the town of Springfield found in the show. Its a crying shame that good graphics are paired up with rather dull uninspired background music. Sound effect wise there is not much to talk about there are a few screams a few groans and a few laughs but its all pretty pedestrian and by the numbers
On paper this game sounds good because it sounds a lot like a Barts Nightmare 2 which has had the rubbish hub world torn out of it, but only if this was true. The six games on here are all exceptionally bad, even the best one of them cant hold a candle to the worst one in Barts Nightmare. The levels are hard, a lot of them have twitchy floaty controls and they just throw thing after thing at you in a way which just makes it feel like a slog, more than a few minutes on any of these feels like swimming through diarrhoea for infinity. Take the difficulty and the boredom and unless there's something wrong with you then you will not be able to beat this game and you wont feel bad about that in the slightest.
OK so lets run you through the levels or games or whatever youd like to call them one by one. There's a level where your a prehistoric Bart faced dinosaur thing where you run around jumping and smacking stuff with your tail. It soon descends into just climbing up and up jumping from platform to platform with stuff knocking you off.
Then there's a level where your Bart as a baby. In this level you jump from tree limb to tree limb and swing around and get higher and higher, miss time something once and you will fall most likely to your death.
Then there's a level where Bart turns into a pig and must escape a meat packing plant. You run up and down and pull leavers and jump on clowns heads and yeah its another platform style level.
Then you have a level based on Bart’s school photo day. In this level you as Bart need to throw tomatoes at everyone to try and ruin the school photo. This game is pretty darn basic and yet its possibly the best game here because it at least doesn't feel horrid.
Then we have a level which is clearly based on Mad Max with Bart travelling on a bike in a post apocalyptic Springfield with school bullies trying to ram you off the road. It is like all of the others not very much fun at all and is a complete slog
So the final one I have left to talk about is a water slide level. All you do is control Bart by moving left to right in the water slide avoiding obstacles. Occasionally you will need to choose a path picking either to go down the right or the left path, if you pick the wrong one you end up bumping into Homers stuck behind but this doesn't kill you no you then get pushed down the other pipe anyway so it doesn't seem to matter that much. This could have been good if it felt better if there was a better sense of speed and more to see and the problem is that this is the case with all of the games they all feel kind of half arsed, like they had an OK idea but just didn't push it well enough. There were levels in Barts Nightmare such as the Bartman level which actually felt like if they had been expanded on then you could have made a whole game out of the gameplay on offer there, I can not say this about any game here, if any of the bits of this game had been expanded on you would still have been left with a rubbish product.
So If I was going to give this game a score out of 10 I would give it about 2. I have never owned this game nor do I have any desire to own it, I used an Everdrive to play this game in order to review it, although I do remember once renting it back when the SNES was popular and back then I instantly regretted wasting my pocket money on the rental. If you really need this game it actually seems to be pretty rare every time I have seen a cart of it its been about £40 which in all honesty is about £37 to expensive, you should spend your money on something much better.
So this is not the first Simpsons game I have reviewed and in fact I have already talked about a game very similar to this one, a game called Barts Nightmare and as this is made by the same developer and published by the same publisher I guess this is basically a sequel in all but name.
This game was released for the Super NES and the Sega Megadrive or as our American friends would know it the Sega Genesis in 1994.
Unless you have been living under a rock then I don't need to explain who the Simpson's are pretty much everyone will have watched there show at least a few times and have some idea of who the characters are. The game does do a good job of connecting to this world, it makes sure that plenty of the shows characters are sprinkled in here and there and the game does try very hard to stay true to the show visually and in tone. When I reviewed Barts Nightmare I described it as a mini game collection connected by a central hub world, a hub world which was incredibly boring and time consuming and I plainly stated that the game would have been a lot better if you just sacked of the hub world and got straight in to the mini games, well its almost as if someone had been listening to my frustrations as Virtual Bart sacks of the concept of the hub world in favour for a spinning wheel which randomly selects which mini game you will play next, so far so good right?
OK so lets start with the games story. It is a pretty simple one, it is Bart's schools science fair day and he wanders past all the other exhibits which are all pretty cool Simpsons references and he sees a virtual reality project. Bart cant resist getting in to the machine, it is once you enter this machine you find yourself spinning on a wheel, a wheel which will randomly select one of six different levels. All of these levels are essentially different mini games. You have a couple of lives to try and complete all of these levels with and when you lose all of your lives well that's game over and you will be treated by seeing Bart stumble out of the virtual reality set and throw up.
I will give them credit for providing a neat little cut scene before each level that sets the scene and also for the fact that every level contains characters from the show. So they have at least tried to show some love to the source material.
OK so lets be deeply honest now the graphics are the only good part of this game. All of the characters actually look good and the backgrounds show scenery that you can recognise from the town of Springfield found in the show. Its a crying shame that good graphics are paired up with rather dull uninspired background music. Sound effect wise there is not much to talk about there are a few screams a few groans and a few laughs but its all pretty pedestrian and by the numbers
On paper this game sounds good because it sounds a lot like a Barts Nightmare 2 which has had the rubbish hub world torn out of it, but only if this was true. The six games on here are all exceptionally bad, even the best one of them cant hold a candle to the worst one in Barts Nightmare. The levels are hard, a lot of them have twitchy floaty controls and they just throw thing after thing at you in a way which just makes it feel like a slog, more than a few minutes on any of these feels like swimming through diarrhoea for infinity. Take the difficulty and the boredom and unless there's something wrong with you then you will not be able to beat this game and you wont feel bad about that in the slightest.
OK so lets run you through the levels or games or whatever youd like to call them one by one. There's a level where your a prehistoric Bart faced dinosaur thing where you run around jumping and smacking stuff with your tail. It soon descends into just climbing up and up jumping from platform to platform with stuff knocking you off.
Then there's a level where your Bart as a baby. In this level you jump from tree limb to tree limb and swing around and get higher and higher, miss time something once and you will fall most likely to your death.
Then there's a level where Bart turns into a pig and must escape a meat packing plant. You run up and down and pull leavers and jump on clowns heads and yeah its another platform style level.
Then you have a level based on Bart’s school photo day. In this level you as Bart need to throw tomatoes at everyone to try and ruin the school photo. This game is pretty darn basic and yet its possibly the best game here because it at least doesn't feel horrid.
Then we have a level which is clearly based on Mad Max with Bart travelling on a bike in a post apocalyptic Springfield with school bullies trying to ram you off the road. It is like all of the others not very much fun at all and is a complete slog
So the final one I have left to talk about is a water slide level. All you do is control Bart by moving left to right in the water slide avoiding obstacles. Occasionally you will need to choose a path picking either to go down the right or the left path, if you pick the wrong one you end up bumping into Homers stuck behind but this doesn't kill you no you then get pushed down the other pipe anyway so it doesn't seem to matter that much. This could have been good if it felt better if there was a better sense of speed and more to see and the problem is that this is the case with all of the games they all feel kind of half arsed, like they had an OK idea but just didn't push it well enough. There were levels in Barts Nightmare such as the Bartman level which actually felt like if they had been expanded on then you could have made a whole game out of the gameplay on offer there, I can not say this about any game here, if any of the bits of this game had been expanded on you would still have been left with a rubbish product.
So If I was going to give this game a score out of 10 I would give it about 2. I have never owned this game nor do I have any desire to own it, I used an Everdrive to play this game in order to review it, although I do remember once renting it back when the SNES was popular and back then I instantly regretted wasting my pocket money on the rental. If you really need this game it actually seems to be pretty rare every time I have seen a cart of it its been about £40 which in all honesty is about £37 to expensive, you should spend your money on something much better.