Anyway, today I wanted to talk about another one of those games from my childhood. You know the type; it's the kind of game that your cousin owned and the two of you played it nonstop, despite the fact that it probably wasn't a very good game. Or maybe you rented it from the local video game rental store for the weekend just to see what it was like, and that one weekend back in June of 1993 was the entire extent of your time playing it. It's not a game like Super Mario Bros. or the Legend of Zelda or Sonic the Hedgehog, which were classics that are still talked about and played endlessly to this day. No, this was the kind of game that not very many people had, but you developed a special connection with it over time, simply because it reminds you of your youth. And one such game, for me, is Krusty's Super Fun House for Sega Genesis. But before we discuss that, let's talk about The Simpsons.
So, what could possibly be said about The Simpsons that hasn't already been said at some point over the last 30 years? It's one of the longest running television shows of all time and its cultural footprint is massive. Whether you love it or hate it, you can't deny the sheer gravity of its presence; everyone knows the Simpsons, everyone has seen at least one episode at some point in their lifetimes, and everyone has seen the Simpsons somewhere other than on television- in film, in merchandise, and yes, in video games. There's a huge amount of Simpsons games, almost as many as some of the most popular video game franchises. Perhaps the timing was just right- what many would consider the "golden age" of the Simpsons, that being the early to mid-90s, was also a period of time when the video game market was exploding.
Anyway, Simpsons games were all over the place. If you're a gamer and you haven't played any of the home console ones, you most likely have at least played or seen the 1991 arcade game, a beat 'em up made by Konami. I personally had two growing up- The Simpsons: Bart Vs. The World for the NES, and Krusty's Super Fun House. Bart Vs. The World was a pretty bad game, as AVGN will tell you. Krusty's Super Fun House, however, has always had a certain special appeal to me. It was a game I played very often as a kid, and even though it might not be the best game in the world, I'd probably consider it one of my nostalgic favorites- as in, it takes me back to the good old days every time I play it. So, let's step into the fun house for a bit and check it out.
I'm going to focus on the Sega Genesis version since it was the one I had as a kid, but as far as I know the SNES version (and every OTHER version of this game that came out for just about every console at the time) is nearly identical. While the game is set in the Simpsons universe, it was actually the first video game in the franchise that did not focus on the Simpsons themselves, but rather the lovably cynical Krusty the Clown, a frequently reoccurring character on the show. The Simpsons themselves do appear as minor characters in the game, but I'll get to that in a moment. The game is centered around Krusty, who must rid his "fun house" of an infestation of rats by leading them into machines in which they can be squashed, vaporized or sliced to pieces in a true display of good old-fashioned cartoon violence. The rats simply walk back and forth and as Krusty, you must place blocks and create pathways for them to walk into the aforementioned death contraptions. Clear a level of all the rats, and you're finished and it's on to the next one. The pathways you must create get much more complicated as the game goes on, often requiring you to build multiple pathways and run back and forth all over the level to do so.
So, it's basically a platformer-puzzle game, pretty much in the literal sense in that you must solve puzzles by literally building platforms, very similar in idea to a game like Lemmings.
The game has 5 different overworld levels, each of which has a number of sub-levels within it ranging from 8 to 14. The objective within each of these levels, as I mentioned before, is to exterminate all of the rats by getting them to walk into one of the extermination machines. Simple as that. And who is controlling these machines? Why, none other than one of the Simpsons themselves! So they are technically part of the game, but really are more or less just relegated to being background objects. Anyway, the rats won't simply walk into the extermination machines- no, they wander around just out of reach of one, usually below a raised up platform. So how do you get them into the machine? Scattered around the levels are numerous blocks, which you can pick up and transport. By pressing down when you are standing on top of one, you can carry it to another part of the stage and drop it there, as long as there is nothing above you that would block it. Rats will climb up on top of blocks, so you can effectively create "stairs" using two or more blocks that the rats will walk up to their doom. You can also use them to block off certain areas, create bridges, or just give yourself some added jump height.
The puzzles get more complicated as you progress, but a majority of them simply boil down to "build some stairs."
At first, things start off simple- rats walk around on the floor, the extermination machine is somewhere a step above them, and you create a step stool for them using the block. They walk up, you wait for all of them to get smushed, and it's on to the next level. However, things start getting much more complicated as you progress. Later on, there will be tubes everywhere that the rats can fall into which transport them to other parts of the level, fans which blow them all over the place, jars to put them in and carry around, and combinations of the three that get very intricate. Levels are usually forgiving, in that you'll be able to attempt a puzzle again when you screw up- however, in later levels, more often than not, if you mess up on a puzzle and rats fall into somewhere that you can't get them out of, you'll need to start over again from the beginning. It can get frustrating, but after a little bit of problem solving through trial and error, that feeling of getting everything right and then watching the rats get exterminated is pretty satisfying.
The graphics are decent for the Genesis. Everything is very colorful and cartoonish, much like the show the game is based on. The Simpsons themselves don't move much when you find them; they'll pretty much just push a button and smile while the rats are obliterated in front of them. However, they're represented well enough. Krusty himself also looks pretty good and faithful to the show, but he is very...small looking. Kind of like a tiny architecture of himself. Also, the music is okay. It's nothing spectacular, but it's goofy sounding and appropriate enough given the source material. One annoying thing about the music though is that each overarching world has its own music theme that plays through every single sub-level within it, so it starts to get quite old after a while when you've heard the same tune over and over again.
Some of the familiar Simpsons characters show up, but they don't do much besides providing some silly means of annihilating the rats in the background.
It's definitely a fun game with enough puzzle solving elements to keep you interested, but there are a lot of small, tedious details which begin to build up after a while that detract from the overall experience. For one thing, the rats walk around very slooooooowly. Sometimes you'll be sitting there for quite a while just waiting for all of the rats to walk to where you need them to be. Then, once they do, you have to sit and wait while every single individual rat gets squashed before you move on. Then there's the issue of transporting objects. So, as I mentioned, you'll need to move a lot of blocks, fans, jars, and pipe pieces around, especially in the later levels. However, there's a major hitch- you can only transport one object at a time. So, if 4 block are all the way on one end of the level and you need to bring all of them to the other end, you'll need to go back and forth 4 times just to get all of them to the right place. It would've been way simpler if you could carry at least more than one of them at a time.
Only being able to carry one item at a time (as seen in the upper left corner) can get really frustrating. In this situation, only one item is needed, but later on a majority of the time you'll spend in each level is just relegated to moving items back and forth. One. At. A. Time.
The combat system is also a little counter-intuitive and frustrating at times. Enemies don't pose that much of a threat to you, as most of them just wander back and forth in simple patterns and don't actively attack unless you get close to them. You can destroy them by throwing tiny pies at them, which serve as your only attack. However, you can only hold 10 pies at any given time. You can often find more of them inside of little purple blocks that are scattered about levels, but these are finite, and if you've found them all and used up all 10 of your pies, you're basically screwed as far as defending yourself. The pies fly out in an arc in front of you and sometimes it can be a bit hard to hit your mark, so you'll likely end up wasting a few, and because you're limited to just 10 pies at a time, that leaves very little room for error. It would've been nice if the game was a bit more generous on ammo, or just made it unlimited.
And that leads me to another issue. You can get a secondary weapon, which is basically a cannonball you can shoot that ricochets off of ceilings and walls. It can be used on enemies and is stronger than the pies, but unlike them, it also has a secondary function that's absolutely necessary to progress. In certain levels there are breakable tiles that you'll encounter that you'll need to blast through in order to move forward through the level, and the cannonball is the only thing that can break through them. However, you get even less cannonballs than pies- only 5 as opposed to 10. And because the cannonballs ricochet in a zig-zag pattern, you'll usually need at least 2 to clear a path. Often times, you'll fire one off and it will follow the exact same pattern as the first, leaving you unable to move forward unless you launch another one from a different angle. Just like the pies, if you run out of cannonballs, you aren't getting any more and you'll have to restart the entire level if you want to try again. This whole aspect just seems really unnecessary and annoying, and it would've been a lot easier if there were some other way to break open the tiles, you were given more cannonballs than just five, or they just did away with these breakable tiles to begin with.
Whichever jackass decided to program the cannonballs to only move in a zig-zag pattern can eat an actual cannonball.
There's also no indication of how much health you have left. Krusty can be damaged in two ways- taking hits from enemies, or dropping from too great a height. The former makes sense, but the latter doesn't really, given that this is a platforming game where jumping and falling are pretty much fundamental mechanics of the game. It doesn't happen too often, since you do need to fall from a really big height in order to be hurt by it, but why even include that at all? It kind of feeds into this game being very tediously slow at times as I've already mentioned, since you'll sometimes need to wait quite a while for rising platforms to reach you at a great height instead of just jumping down and hurting yourself. Anyway, back to the health issue, the only indication you get that you're running low on health is that when you're standing still, Krusty will start heavily panting. But even then, it's impossible to tell how many more hits you can take before you die. You can replenish your health by finding various fast food items inside the purple boxes I mentioned before, but again, you'll have no idea how much you'll be replenishing your health, if at all. A simple health bar would've really made that a lot more clear.
Finally, a lot of things are just plain strange. Sometimes, for example, you'll manipulate a puzzle in such a way that you won't be able to recover from a mistake, and as such you'll need to reset the entire level and start over. Fair enough, but how do you do that? Pressing the start button and having a menu that would allow you to do so would be the simplest option, but instead, you have to go back to the entrance door to the level, AND THEN press start (which pauses the game) and the C button to exit a level. Oh, and think that's explained in the manual? Nope, not at all.
Also, there's a simple password system to pick up where you left off, but it's so poorly implemented that it might as well not even be there. As I mentioned earlier, there are five "worlds" in the game, each with a different number of sub-levels within them. It would be nice if you were given a password between each sub-level, but instead, you're only given a password once you complete all the sub-levels in a world. And by "complete," I mean you have to kill all the rats in the level AND find all the secret areas, AND THEN make sure to collect ALL of the bonus items in the secret area. Yeah, there's plenty of those in the game. Once you do all of those things, the level will be locked for good and you can move on. After dealing with all these issues over time, it wears on you and kind of makes you not want to play anymore. But since passwords are only given to you between worlds, you have to soldier through every single level in each world if you want to make any progress.
The password system works, but it still requires you to devote massive amounts of time to the game in one sitting.
So, picking up this game without ever having played it before and having to deal with all these issues, yeah, I could understand that you might have more fun chucking the cartridge into a bonfire instead of playing it. However, as I mentioned, it's more the nostalgic appeal than anything that makes me enjoy playing this game. It's always interesting to me how games like this one, or Blasto for PS1, or Ghostbusters II on NES, which are not very good games at all still manage to get enjoyment out me simply because I liked playing them as a kid (and are not-so-coincidentally games I've already reviewed here). If you can manage to get past all of tedious issues that it has, you might enjoy the puzzle solving element a lot. But if you're a Simpsons fan and you're looking for a better gaming experience, try the arcade version instead. You can never go wrong with that. Thanks for reading.
