The Simpsons: Bart vs The World
Developed by: Imagineering
Published by: Acclaim
Released in: November 1991 (NA), October 22, 1992 (EU)
In the realm of retro video games, there is nothing more insipid than the licensed platformer. It’s a relief that the “full-priced console game based off of a mid-tier cartoon/family film of the summer you won’t remember in six months/random Sean Connery flick” has been killed off. Nowadays, a popular thing will get a mediocre match-3 app, or perhaps Fortnite skins of the main characters. Some among us may read that series of words strung together and wail in despair for the dystopian consumerist fate of the young; what a vacuous world they live in, what joys they are denied that we once indulged in ourselves!
Not me, though. I’ll grant you that there’s an insidious layer of sleaze that comes with anything that “offers” micro-transactions to children. But if we’re strictly speaking on gameplay experiences, we as a society have lost next to nothing with the death of the crappo licensed platformer. Not to say that every single one ever made throughout history has been bad, of course. There are exceptions to every rule. But unless that shit was developed by Capcom, Sunsoft or Konami, chances were high that any given old-school licensed game sucked cheeks.
Today’s game may be the one of the best examples of a terrible 8-bit era licensed platformer. Just as bad now as it was back then, in all of its shitey glory: The Simpsons: Bart vs the World.
The plot is that Bart wins an art contest put on by Krusty the Clown. His grand prize: a trip around the world! Turns out the contest was rigged by Mr. Burns, because, uh, he hates the Simpsons and wants them wiped off the face of the Earth. Even though he can never remember who the Simpsons are or what they’ve done between episodes of the show. What the hell, sure. Anyway, Burnsie has a topically ethnic ancestor in every country that serves as a boss fight. Totally inaccurate character motivation aside, the cutscenes are a fun highlight for Simpsons fans, as the dialogue is spot-on for those modest early seasons.
And that’s the last time this game resembles the source material in any way. There’s none of the charm or the humour of the show here. Or charm and humour of any kind, for that matter.
Much to my dismay, Bart vs the World is a platformer. As the Bartman himself, you struggle to run and jump your way across four levels represented by four countries: China, Antarctica, Egypt, and the USA. As is bad NES game tradition, those four meagre levels are some of the toughest you’ll ever come up against. At the same time, the levels have some of the most basic and banal layouts I’ve ever seen in a professionally, commercially released game. “Really damn hard” and “thoughtlessly simple” shouldn’t co-exist, but Acclaim was breaking all the game design rules back then.
What do I mean by simple? You can run very far to the left, very far to the right, and climb very high vertically. But despite the freedom of movement, there’s nowhere to go and nothing to see beyond trying to find the hidden exit. Because of course the exit is hidden. Why make a well-thought out platforming level filled with carefully designed obstacles to overcome with skill when you can just hide the exit somewhere really high up or low down, and hope the player gets bored before they can find it?
It’s worth mentioning that lives are limited, and there are no continues, because it simply wasn’t hard enough. No doubt this was a subtle attempt to keep kids from getting far if they rented the thing. But I can’t see a rental convincing most kids to buy Bart vs the World. Being able to try before you buy is the ultimate deterrent to this game.
The only plus here is that this isn’t a “one-hit-and-you’re-dead” type of game. Bart’s got a lot of health, so dying from enemy attacks is uncommon. The bulk of your deaths will come from falling down pits because the jump controls are so bunk, and there are so very many opportunities to fall to your death. To jump higher (which you will often have to do), you have to hold down the B button before jumping. But the B button is also the “shoot” button, and ammo is painfully limited, so this becomes a huge waste of resources. Incidentally, Run and Jump are also assigned to the same button. So if you want to hurry the hell up and have Bart run, you have to do a regular jump first, and then keep the jump button held down to run. It’s awkward nonsense of the highest order. Some of the most unpleasant controls I’ve experienced on the NES thus far.
Of all four levels, the final one is the worst by a mile. It’s this arduous horror movie sound stage, but the real horror comes from the recycling of mediocre platformer tropes that were stale in 1991, let alone today. Teleport mazes – y’know, when you go through a door and get sent to another room with three more doors that all send you to different places – are the bottom-of-the-barrel gutter bucket trash of the platforming world. In my humble opinion, they’re a brain-dead way to elongate games that never need elongating. Teleport mazes are a recurring staple in some of the worst NES games ever made (1), (2). Genuinely my least favourite game design trope of all time, and THANK GOD it’s one that’s died off over the decades. But Bart needs to…to…wait, what is he trying to do again? Some brouhaha about a scavenger hunt? Hell if I know. I stopped caring a long time ago. But whatever it is must be done, so Bart presses onward.
Immediately after the hellish teleport maze is this absurdly long section where you jump along a bunch of precarious platforms THAT HAVE BAD HIT DETECTION, all the way to the right. Did I mention this is the kind of fuckass game where you have to land your character slap-bang in the middle of a platform or else they’ll fall through the sides and die? Once your fate dawns on you, it’s too late to go back. Bart moves up a single floor and you get to do it all over again, but this time heading to the left. Then you get to do this four more very long and tedious times. All while enemies are flying at you and the hit detection on the unending platforms are a constant threat and the dogshit jumping controls are fighting you ever step of the way. There’s a chance that falling here may not kill you, but it will send you back down several floors which will make you wish you were dead in real life anyway.
Nothing in this segment – hell, in this game wholesale – is even close to being fun. It’s a slipshod mishmash of things you’ve seen in better games, done a thousand times worse. The ultimate sign of creative bankruptcy on this title? One of the mini-games between levels is one of these abominations:
A sliding puzzle. A pissing sliding puzzle. Could this be the only gaming trope in the entire world that’s worse than a teleport maze? And it’s present in a game THAT ALSO HAD A TELEPORT MAZE? The shamelessness on display is genuinely shocking. Maybe it’s even inspiring. It takes guts to put out a game this dreadful. I’m jealous of the lack of caring on display here; like, I wish I was capable of giving so little of a fuck about things. Life would be so easy and fun.
Despite being a pale imitation of its golden age for the last…20 years or so (oof), they continue to churn out new, unfunny episodes of The Simpsons every year. It’s often speculated that the show has only stayed on the air so long because of the insane bank the merchandise still makes to this day. Bart vs the World feels like foreshadowing to this. Corporate bigwigs trying to capitalize on the Simpsons name by drawing a vague approximation of Bart onto a sock puppet and hoping that pale imitation of something great is enough to entertain dumb kids. It kinda looks like Bart, sounds a little like Bart, but that ain’t no Bart I know. Bort, maybe, but not Bart.
And that’s Bart vs the World. A painful slog of a platformer with no redeeming qualities. But it was good for something: it made me grateful that these sort of slapdash tie-in games no longer exist in this once expensive and tedious form. Thanks for that, Bart.
Final Rating:
NESJunk 