Family Dog

"A small, stupid and obcure platformer based on an unpopular tv series guarenteed to offer nothing interesting"

Family Dog was an obscure adult cartoon that started out on Amazing Storys before becoming a real show and quickly dieing afterwards. It was decent show and the charicters were desighned by the great director Tim Burton, however much like alot of his better work it was completely underappreciated like his movies Ed Wood and Mars Attacks! I guess somewhere along the line a company named Malibu Games did what was very popular during the sixteen bit years, they got a TV liscense and made a craptastic platformer out of it. This is that platformer.

Sound effects:2/10
Obnoxious and dumb would be the two best words for these. They sound awful and really weren't recorded very well. The dog's bark doesn't even sound like the dog on the show, it's like they just recorded a generic dog bark. I suppose this wouldn't be so bad if barking wasn't your only attack.

Music:1/10
It'll make you ears bleed, each track is only about twenty seconds long and there are less than ten tracks! It trys to sound cute and succeeds for about ten seconds before you have to turn it off, it's just that bad.

Graphics:5/10
Things look kinda similer to the way they looked on the show but things are just repeated endlessly, you'll probably see the same stupid picture hanging on the wall of the house at least twenty times. Pickups also have the nasty habit of blending into the background and things to bounce on like couches look like they are just part of the background as well, in fact absolutely anything that you can interact with looks like part of the background. Enemy desighn is quite stupid and is mostly just animated tools and other inanimate crap out to get you for no real reason. However charicters do look athentic but considering how easy to draw they are this is no feat. The dog is semi-well animated but his death animation is nothing but him kind of popping into nothingness leaving nothing but dust.

Gameplay:4/10
The typical bounce on this, jump on that kill something formula. For the most part the game is rediculously simple and easy but tends to have spurts of incredible dificulty. Things just don't feel believible either because the house that constitutes the first level is probably about three miles long and contains at least twelve toasters, 10 tvs and no bedrooms. You attack enemys by barking at them and you must collect ammo in the form of little logs (WTF!?) to do so. It's never really fun though and is probably just about the most boring game in existance other than FFVII.

Replay value:0/10
After an hour you will never want to play this again.

rent/buy/emulate
Don't even bother with this unless you like me and my sister are just trying to assemble a Burton collection.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/16/03, Updated 01/16/03