The Addams Family

"So This Is What Killed Raul Julia..."

On a Saturday afternoon when there's nothing better to do, one of my favourite things to do is dig out the old NES, turn it on, and have a fun adventure with that famous video game hero... Gomez Addams?

*blink blink*

Okay, I'll admit that the Addams Family wouldn't be my premier choice of license for a video game, but then, I'm not a programmer. We can trust these guys, right? They know what they're doing, right?

Wait a minute. That's what I said about Superman 64. I guess we're on our own.

The story picks up with Gomez arriving at his mansion, where his family has previously gone to reason with an evil lawyer who wants the family fortune. I guess the wimpy millionaire only puts himself in the line of fire AFTER his family has been kidnapped. So, instead of calling the police, Gomez ventures into his mansion alone, where the various creatures and furniture have seen this as a chance to callously murder Gomez. Guide Gomez, if you can (bet you can't) through the mansion, rescuing his family and collecting $1,000,000 for Morticia's ransom.

There is a lot of problem-solving involved. You must rescue family members to obtain keys and items that will help you reach more family members, items, keys, and so forth. Nearly all of these quests involve trekking across ridiculously long expanses, which are crawling with enemies and dotted with bottomless pits. As you may expect from the gloomy, gothic theme, death is frequent. Your death, that is. Enemies are everywhere, from vicious venus fly-traps in the garden, to bouncing skulls hanging from the trees, to spiders in every bloody room, to bars of soap(!) patrolling the bathroom. And if one of these creatures touches you, you take damage. However, you are not bounced away, nor are you made temporarily invincible. Gomez merely turns a pleasant shade of blue (or green or orange) and he stands there like a doofus as the enemy continuously charges him, draining life away. Indeed, a single enemy could kill you if you don't move fast enough. This is perhaps the game's biggest problem, but it isn't its only problem by any means.

GRAPHICS

If we are to believe the print media which comes with the game, the characters are modelled after the actors from the live-action movies. In that case, I'm surprised the artists didn't get their butts sued off by angry actors, as the so-called ''artwork'' of these people is laughably amateurish. And why does everybody have orange skin? Gomez comes off the worst, as he always has bulging eyes and a big goofy grin plastered across his beach-ball-sized head. It's perhaps scarier than anything else in the game. He has a simple one-two-three walking animation, and whenever he jumps his leg sticks straight out as if he has a cramp. The enemies are lucky to have two frames of animation. The backgrounds have a minimum of detail, and there are some ''clever'' touches, such as having doors in the foreground represented by a small bar on the floor with the word ''door'' on it. Auteur! Auteur!

CONTROL

Gomez ambles along like he's taking a pleasant stroll. Yeah, man. No need to break a sweat. Grandma being roasted in the volcanic furnace is no reason to panic, right? Jumping is rather ''drifty'' and it's very hard to land precisely on an enemy's head, which is the only way to defeat them. Swimming and climbing stairs are much more of a chore than they should be. And don't even ask me about the freezer level. Just don't.

SOUND

The Addams Family theme song is not my favourite piece of music, but hearing it loop several dozen times has not improved my opinion of it at all. There is another piece of music in the game, but it's some half-baked composition that seems pulled from another game. Oh, yeah. And when you get hit by an enemy (which, as I mentioned, happens a lot), Gomez makes this screech which sounds like somebody choking while playing a slide whistle. You can tell a lot of care went into the making of this game.

CONCLUSION

Never before have I seen a game crafted with more naked contempt for the gamer. It seems that the programmers, rather than trying to challenge you, were deliberately trying to keep you from completing the game. How else to explain the propensity of money to collect (you need to collect practically every piece of money in the game), the proliferation of enemies, the moronic damage system, and the dearth of health and life recovery? And how could I forget the death traps, which you fall for like a sucker and must remember for next time to avoid them? Or the mysterious door you can never, ever unlock? This game, plain and simple, is not fun, and extremely difficult to complete. If you still want to play this game, I guess you've got nobody to blame but yourself.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 03/07/02, Updated 03/07/02