"A crappy game from Acclaim"

If you've read some of my other reviews here at GameFaqs you might have noticed that I have mainly reviewed good or slightly above average games and systems. While reviewing excellent titles is all good and well, I feel it is also important that my opinions be heard regarding a few slightly less than perfect games as well. After all what would a real reviewer’s portfolio be without a few crappy games to go along with the good? So today for a change of things I’m going to review a little SNES title by the name of Krusty's Super Fun House.

As I’m sure most of you already know virtually nothing good has ever come out of The Simpsons license, video game wise. In fact the only Simpsons game to date that I can honestly say is worthy of the title is The Simpsons Road Rage on PS2, GC, and X-Box, which is actually a pretty good game and worth looking into, especially if you liked the Crazy Taxi style of game play. On the other hand Krusty’s Super Fun House leaves a lot to be desired. Unfortunately this game does nothing more than add to the already long line of mediocre Simpsons games and was just one of several bad Simpsons games to make it’s way onto the 16 bit systems.

So why do I dislike this game so much you might ask? Well let me break it down for you.

GAMEPLAY:

In the game you play as Springfield's lovable TV clown Krusty. Your mission is to guide Krusty through five levels of insane wackiness inside his fun house. The game play is really lousy to say the least. The levels are boring and repetitive. Simply put the game just isn’t well-designed or fun to play. Things can also become extremely frustrating at times since you will often find yourself getting lost with no idea where on earth you are in the fun house. The game’s basic objective is to help Krusty get rid of a punch of ugly purple rats that are running loose in fun house. To do this you have to lure them into traps controlled by various Simpson characters. By having to catch the rats the game has been given some puzzle elements, which I guess was probably done in an attempt to make the game look like more than your average action side scroller. Unfortunately while Acclaim seemed to have a good idea going here their execution of it was pretty horrible and really this does little more than add to the frustration of the game. The five levels of this game may not seem like much but it will probably take you a long time to beat them because of the frustration of trying to solve the puzzles and figure out where you are. I really wish they would have at least had the smarts to include a save feature in this game, because it would have probably made the game at least somewhat tolerable.

VIDEO:

The graphics are not nearly as good as I would have hoped for (and to be honest I wasn't expecting much from this game). Now admittedly this was a fairly early Super NES game, but it still has a very thrown together over the weekend look to it, even for it’s time. The character sprites are very small and poorly drawn, enemies are uninspired (rattle snakes, blobs, etc aren’t gonna cut it here), and the level designs are pretty dull looking. Krusty’s animation is especially bad. He looks like some sort of deformed midget running around and his same stupid facial expression will start to drive you crazy if you play the game for very long. Come on Acclaim can’t you give us a least three frames of animation on the character sprites? Is that really so much to ask? The one good thing I can say about the graphics is that at certain parts of the levels they include signs and posters giving reference to certain things from the TV show (ex: one poster says eat Krusty burgers). Good job Acclaim I’ll give you a little credit here because you at least did some homework on the show before you created this game.

AUDIO:

The graphics may have been bad but the sound is the worst part of this game yet. Ugh I just can’t stand this crappy music it’s annoying, repetitive, and none of it is even taken from the TV show. They don’t even include the classic Simpsons theme song for crying out load! Oh why Acclaim how could you not include that wonderful theme song we all love so much. Hell if they had just managed to include that song I would have bumped the score up to 3/10. Yeah I know I’m making a big deal out of this but really without the theme song the game just doesn’t feel like a Simpons game. One thing that I thought was kind of cool though, was that they actually managed to include some voice samplings from the show (well one anyway). When you start the game Krusty says his signature “Hi Kids” line. Also during the game’s opening sequence, where Krusty appears on the stage of the Krusty the clown show set, he does that laugh of his (it’s hard to explain but if you watch the show you’ll know how goofy it sounds). When Krusty gets hit or dies in the game he also makes grunting noises that sound a lot like they’re being done by his real voice actor, Dan Castellaneta, they’re certainly a good imitation if they’re not. But nice as those few vocal bits may be they still won’t save the game from it’s lousy stage music. I noticed that Acclaim included the ability for you to mute the volume by pressing the L button (I guess even they weren’t in denial about how crappy the music is). For the most part what little sound effects are found in this game are also poorly done. Once again they’re nothing to write home about.

STORY:

Here we have it people yet another game with a weak storyline. The basic premises of the game are Krusty's Super Fun House has been taken over by a bunch of purple rats. In order to stop the rats from destroying his fun house Krusty and the Simpsons set up traps to capture them. Now it’s up to Krusty to lure the rats into these traps so that the Simpsons can capture them. Kind of dumb but I’ll give Acclaim a break here since great story lines aren’t really necessary in action games anyway (of course they’re still nice to have).

REPLAY ABILITY:

If you’ve read this far then you’re probably figured out by now that this game is just plain bad, so why would you want to play it in the first place let alone replay it? The only reason I replayed this thing was to write a detailed review and to laugh at just how crappy it is. Case in point the game is very straightforward with no secret items or anything else of that nature to find. The replay value is low to begin with and when you factor in all the others areas I’ve covered, well you get the point.

FINAL WORD:

In the words of Mr. T “I pity the fool who paid $80 for this game at launch”. Don't bother with this one or it's Sega Genesis counter part. Krusty's Super Fun House is simply not a fun game and there are too many good action titles available for the Super NES, like Super Mario World and Donkey Kong Country to make this game worth recommending. And so I leave you with this thought, The Simpsons are cool but this game sucks.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 12/16/01, Updated 12/23/02