The Addams Family (1992) NES Review

The Addams Family (1992)
Developed by: Ocean Software
Published by: Ocean Software
Released in: NA

The 1991 film adaptation of The Addams Family made nearly $200,000,000 at the box office, so a video game adaptation of the creepy kooky ooky spooky family was all but inevitable. That number is in 90’s dollars by the way, so when adjusted for inflation today, that’s a lot of doubloons.

Personally, I have heaps of nostalgia for the film. Just as it’s always happy hour somewhere in the world, The Addams Family was always airing somewhere on TV during the 1990’s; I watched it and the even better sequel whenever channel surfing happened to bring me to the Addams’ doorstep. As I actually had a vested interest in the source material prior to firing up the NES game, a glint of child-like naivete had me hoping that it would have some of the humour and charm of the movie…but after playing it to completion, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the Addams Family themselves have an NES with this game all hooked up and ready to go in the deepest depths of their torture chambers.

By that I mean it sucks.

The Addams Family technically belongs under the “Metroidvania” umbrella, as it has all of the trappings of that genre. As Gomez, you’re given the unfun task of running around the labyrinthian Addams family mansion to find all of the missing family members, and more than a few hidden key items that are needed to complete the quest. Breathing this game’s name in the same sentence as a genre that’s spawned many games often considered to be some of the greatest ever made somehow feels offensive to the medium of video games as a whole, however, so I’ll publicly apologise here and now so the UN doesn’t force me to do it later.

As was often the case with movie tie-ins, work on The Addams Family game began long before the film was out in theatres. The team of four developing the game weren’t even given the luxury of an advanced screening to help their project along; rather, they were simply given the movie’s script and expected to fill in the blanks themselves. Considering the circumstances they were thrown into, they did a great job with cooking up the different level/room ideas; everything feels like it slots into Chateau Addams just right. Overall the game’s greatest strengths lie in the visual department, boasting some nice choices of colour palettes and parallax scrolling. The music on the other hand is dire, with a godawful plinky-plonky 20 second loop of the Addams Family theme song droning on incessantly. In a way, it’s the perfect compliment to the asinine gameplay. Give it a listen here…if you DARE! AHHH!

Speaking of the gameplay, that’s a whole other can of worms. You do away with the kindergarten haunted house enemies by stomping on their heads a-la Mario, but the hit detection is wack and flat out refuses to work half of the time. Thanks to how shoddy it is, Gomez’s life bar gets unfairly zapped away as he is flung through enemies, even though you as a player have only done what the game has asked you to. Platforming itself is a slippery disaster, so there’s not a single thing going on here that’s enjoyable.

So, let’s say you’ve got a tolerance for pain so high it borders on deviancy, and you actually manage to claw your way through the godawful collect-a-thon and end up on the final bosses doorstep. There’s actually one more piece to this puzzle from hell you need to complete before you’re allowed to even attempt the fight: one million dollars.

Oh yes, that’s right. On top of navigating the confusing mess than is the mansion, collecting ALL of the Addams family members and ALL of the useless crap along the way, you ALSO need to find a minimum of $1,000,000 laying around the mansion if you’re actually looking to beat the game.

Allow me to explain how much this blows with an analogy. In the original Super Mario Bros. on NES, there is a total of 1,089 coins to collect in the entire game. Now, imagine if we lived in the darkest timeline in which Shigeru Miyamoto was off his gourd and thought it would be a brilliant idea to make it a requirement for players to collect a minimum of 1,040 of the total 1,089 coins before being allowed to beat the game. Should you roll up to Bowser’s castle with even a single coin less, you’d be turned away and told to replay older levels to search for the remaining coinage. Not only that, but you need to actively rely on hard to find secret rooms and warps to hit this quota, else you won’t even come close to the number you need unless you know the game like the back of your hand. Pretty scary, right?

Though this remains little more than a terrifying what-if for Mario, that’s reality in The Addams Family. There’s only a finite number of cash scattered throughout the mansion, and more than a few hundred thousand of that is hidden in impossible to find hidden rooms. Unless you’ve got a real nose for item hunting or a walkthrough that tells you where everything is, the game quickly deteriorates into irritating busywork. I hate it I hate it I hate it I hate it I hatey hatey hate it so much God do I ever hate it.

Anyway, thanks to a helpful GameFAQs guide and the grace of good luck and fortune, I finished this thing. Didn’t like it any more after seeing the super cool and totally worth it ending, which is just the below screenshot. What you can’t gauge from a mere screenshot, however, is the downright manic way Gomez and Morticia are frightfully flung from one side of the screen to the other. I think it was meant to look like they were dancing, but it instead made them look like they were used as the ball in a ping pong game from Hell. Great.

Since creating this blog, this is the NES game I’ve despised the very most. It was an exercise in pain tolerance, and I really can’t recommend it to anyone, for any reason, under any circumstances, at all, in any way, ever. Watch the movie instead! Read a scary book! Carve a pumpkin! Use your imagination! Do just about anything else! Don’t let it happen to you!