Beat. This game was much better than Virtual Bart, but still suffered from incohesive and obnoxiously poor/difficult gameplay. The overworld had some interesting mechanics (such as the bullies forcing you to go with them and the music note reversing the controls), but I found the whole thing to be needlessly arbitrary.
Would have been better to have standard platforming stages, …
Beat. This game was much better than Virtual Bart, but still suffered from incohesive and obnoxiously poor/difficult gameplay. The overworld had some interesting mechanics (such as the bullies forcing you to go with them and the music note reversing the controls), but I found the whole thing to be needlessly arbitrary.
Would have been better to have standard platforming stages, or a Zelda style overworld. I started with the Itchy and Scratchy beat em up, which was way too fast and had to be slowed to 30 frames per second. It was interesting how the mallet hit lanes below you, but the gun was a much better weapon. This mode was difficult and required a great deal of save state scumming, especially chef Itchy with the giant kitchen knife that got me every time. The boss fight at the end was easy and lame. This mode felt like bargain basement action gameplay when it should have copied actual beat em ups. Then I did Bartzilla, which was just glorified quick time events. It took me 2 tries to figure out you had to aim by pressing the correct button for each height; a terrible implementation of shooting. This should have been a proper 2D shooter like Contra, or even an isometric shooter like the helicopter Strike series. The 2nd stage of climbing the building and avoiding people dropping stuff was very basic and uninspired gameplay. Especially given how defeating the boss was just a binary choice of which side to climb to attack. Then the Indiana Jones level, which could have been a somewhat interesting tile puzzle, but the projectiles ruined it by being too difficult to avoid. Would have been better to have obvious trap tiles to avoid, but instead you had to rush and the movement buttons were so touchy that it was way too easy to go too far and end up getting killed. The best part of the game was Bartman, but even that was not good by shoot em up standards. I did like how you could move in 8 directions, which changed the angle of shots, but I did not like the inability to face backwards. The shots had terrible range but the ballistic drop was interesting. Unfortunately the boss fights left much to be desired. Particularly the twins going behind you where you could not turn to attack them, Smithers with his 1 hit kill projectiles, and Burns going so fast from off screen that you had to be already be moving in order to not take damage and hope you could inflict some during the couple seconds the boss was actually on screen. Last I did the swimming puff up level, which was weird. Almost like a shoot em up with a melee attack. The music and sound effects got on my nerves to the point where the game was best muted.
5.0/10
