The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare (SNES) - Guest Post

I'm sick of these sci-fi games. We've had space robots, space dogs and space Marines all bunched up together.

I want to play something more colourful today!

A Simpsons game. Safe, predictable and probably a platformer. No getting lost in the darkness or hours of planet searching. Let's go!

"The Simpsons...."

Good start. Points for the attention to detail and the sampled speech.

Once upon a time, Bart spent all day in his room, doing his homework.

That's unusual for a start! Maybe this is the nightmare!

After sitting completely motionless for hours on end, Bart's circulation gives out. He slumps over, dead.

No, wait, he's just sleeping. In his dream the fan turns on and blows the pages out of the window. Real sampled Bart scream!

Guess I'll... JUMP OUT THE WINDOW.

Yeah that was a great plan, Bart. Haven't you ever seen Beetlejuice? You jump out the window of your house when you're dead and you end up on Saturn!

Nope, not Saturn. Springfield. He did fall a long way through some clouds though. Who can say.

Alright. Score. Some other numbers. Some horrible music. Let's go-go-go to the right!

There's all kinds of Springfield sprites floating about. There's mailboxes dismantling themselves and sliding across the street, the school bus driving past (every five seconds). Here's Lisa as a fairy. And she flies off to the left of the screen. Okay.

Eugh! A second copy of Lisa snuck up behind me faster than I could move and turned me into a frog. Thanks, maaan.

Now this old woman wants to kiss me. Is that good or bad?

I limp about as a frog until I'm ganged up on by spinning severed Jebediah Springfield statue heads. Unlike Mario or Sonic, Bart doesn't travel through the air like a thrown ball when he jumps. Instead, he just rises sharply while you hold the button and falls just as sharply when you let go. There's no avoiding these damned things.

Everything fades to white... Some of the music tracks have faded out and I can hear distored samples of Bart's voice playing at different pitches.

Bart's well and truly dead.

F?

I think that's a little harsh. It's not as if the homework really flew out the window. Bart didn't finish the work, but he wrote at least two pages of it (eight if you believe that Bart's chasing the correct number of pages in his nightmare).

I scored 20 points. That doesn't sound very good. Try again.

SPLAT.

Am I missing something here? There's no sign of any pages anywhere. There's no platforms to jump on, no coins, rings, gems, dollar bills or comic books to collect and I can't enter the buildings. I can walk to the right all I like, but this street is either infinitely long or it loops.

It's possible I have to defeat the enemies somehow to get them to drop the pages, but I can't figure out how to do it. I can blow watermelon seeds, but they don't affect anything on-screen and I can blow a bubblegum bubble that floats around harmlessly. There's probably some kind of way to use them together like the Shock Rifle from Unreal. Nope.

Page! Page! It's a page, just blowing down the street! Get back here!

I'm splattered by a mailbox that squelches across the road to attack my feet. Bart's down for a second, but then I'm back on my feet and wrestling with the page.

Man, that was hard. You don't just walk into the page to activate it, you have to jump onto it. Repeatedly. I had to jiggle and zig-zag all over the place with that stupid jump to get the page to activate.

Now that I'm down here, I've got two doors to choose from. I'll take 'orange'.

Suddenly, I'm Indiana Bart! No music. (That's a relief.)

Completely different controls in here. I can jump from block to block and whip in the four directions. Jumping on a block makes it fall and causes another block to rise. I think I have to find my way all the way to the right without stepping on the wrong blocks and finally do a tense switcheroo to recover the page from a booby-trap.

This blue devil hops along the blocks too, hoping to push me to my death with his pointy fork.

I'm momentarily distracted by the giant mural of Maggie and get hit by some barely visible cannonball shooting out the background.

Fade to black.

Bart's still asleep at his desk and I've recovered no pages.

Wait, that's all I get? Fall off the ledge once and it's game over?

Not quite. I'm chucked back on the street again.

So that's how it is... wander the street for hours until a page deigns to show itself, then stamp on it until I get the doors, then complete a minigame challenge to earn a page. Why didn't they just say so?

Green door: Bartzilla.

Yeah, I often have the nightmare where I'm an invincible giant dinosaur with fire breath and laser eyes. It's so awful.

This game's got different controls to both the street and the Indy game. Still no music.

Each button and direction seems to fire a different attack in a different direction. I can fire above, below or straight forward and hit the foreground or background, but there's no way of knowing what plane each enemy lies on, so all I can do is hammer the buttons in sequence hoping that I hit the right things.

It looks like it's working for now. I don't have a health bar, so this might be the warm-up to the real one-on-one encounter with an evil Lisa-saurus.

Bart starts glowing pink suddenly and the level ends.

Great. No pages. Next game!

Blue door: A side scrolling shoot 'em up starring Bartman! Some appropriate music at last, and explosion sound effects all around.

My only weapon is a slingshot that fires really weedy rocks that barely make it half way across the screen. I can hold fire to charge up a shot that can span the full width of the screen, but it doesn't do any more damage. There's so many things on screen that it's suicide to do anything but tap fire repeatedly and move back and forth to create waves of safety.

The first enemy is a sneaky-looking Apu flying outta nowhere on a magic carpet, accompanied by a barrage of missiles from the bottom of the screen and smaller homing darts shooting out the back of the carpet.

After dodging that mess, I must fight the first boss. It's Sherri and Terri in a hot-air balloon!

This isn't so bad. I can actually dodge their water bombs pretty easily and flying next to the balloon doesn't hurt me. All I need to do is keep dodging, tapping and surviving.

Does that earn me a page? Nope. Alright, let's continue.

Another boss: Barney riding a nauseated elephant. Looks daft as a cartoon, but imagine what this looks like from Bart's perspective.

The duo attacks by barfing up green clouds that explode after a short time. They were even easier than the twins as they could only shoot forwards.

This screenshot doesn't look right. Simpsons characters are never pillow shaded, damn it. The characters in this game seem to alternate between being flat-shaded, as they should be, and pillow shaded.

On the title screen, they're right. On the game over screen, they're wrong. Here Bartman's right and Barney and the elephant are wrong.

KABOOM. Elephant guts for all.

Do I get a page yet?

Nooooope.

Yet another boss: a green-haired Smithers riding a dirigible covered in rocket-propelled darts.

As well as avoiding the darts, I have to avoid the craft itself as it flies towards me. Most of the time, I'm trapped at the right edge of the screen, unable to do anything. When Smithers runs out of darts, he tries to escape off the top of the screen. I tap like crazy and make him explode just in time.

My fingers hurt.

Radioactive clouds around the nuclear plant. Touching them damages Bartman of course, and he barely fits through the gaps between them. It's difficult, as I constantly fly to the right and can't back up to the left.

This minigame isn't so bad, really. I've got a health bar, I can hit the enemies and there are extra lives lying around if you keep moving up and down. I think I might just win this one.

After the clouds, there's another set of Apu's missiles, some homing invincible stormclouds and a second identical Smithers with a new set of darts.

Oh goody, it's Apu again.

So... is this three full loops around Springfield or four? I've lost count.

I've got one life left. Please let this be the final boss.

Mr. Fucking Burns flies in with a screen-filling biplane with a machinegun. Touching any of his bullets or the plane itself is enough to sap my entire health bar.

The end.

What's been happening in Evergreen Terrace while I've been away?

Ah, right. Being bashed to death by near unavoidable Jebediah heads again. Losing a minigame or getting hit takes a Z away from the meter at the top of the screen. Lose all the zeds and everything goes white. Get hit again and it's all over.

I don't even know what the hell this is. There's a horrible whooshing, gurgling sound playing at full volume and there's multiple layers of coloured pulsing shapes flying around. Bart's can swim through the plasma freely but leadenly and he's armed with some kind of bicycle pump.

These monster germ things float in from the edges and either try to stab Bart with their helmet spikes or chuck grenades at him. I can pop the germs by floating right up to them and hammering the A button to pop them (like Dig Dug).

After wasting much time popping the germs and not getting anywhere, the page finally slides down from the top of the screen. I can't pick it up yet, though. I need to listen out for the "Hello, there!!" speech and collect the Smilin' Joe Fissions as they slide up the screen almost as fast as I can swim.

Each Joe removes a section of the rings around the page...

I've got one spinning segment left before I can claim my first homework page.

One hit from a grenade annihilates Bart and I'm back to the street. ONE BLOODY HIT.

Hey, it's Principal Skinner! What awful nightmare does he have in store for Bart?

He wanders towards him with a coat hanger and spins him into his Sunday school outfit. That is pretty scary, if you think about it.

Like this I walk slower and can't blow seeds or gum. Hard to believe, but I'm even more defenseless than I was before. Pounce on a page for our final adventure!

It's a side scrolling beat-'em-up level based on Itchy and Scratchy! Cue the wacky chase music!

I'm trapped in the hall of the Simpsons' house with both cat and mouse running back and forth, trying to flatten me into a pancake with hammers. I can't exit the screen until I've defeated all the Itchys and Scratchys in the house.

I started off unarmed but there was a useless mallet waiting for me miles down the corridor to the right. It's really difficult to hit anything with it; Scratchy's got a longer reach due to being miles taller than me.

Now Itchy's got a bazooka. That's just cheating.

And Scratchy's got a flamethrower. I can't get anywhere near either of them before they blast me into a pile of ashes. I'm out of lives and back on the mean streets.

I think that's all the minigames. I've been playing for more hours than I can count and I've yet to score a single page. After much deliberation, I would have to give this game an...

Bart's Nightmare completely fails to entertain in any respect.

I wanted to play a colourful game to cheer me up and it's done the exact opposite.

This game seems like it was made by multiple separate groups of people united only by their love of The Simpsons and their hatred of games.

Don't play it.