Garfield no Isshukan: A Week of Garfield

Garfield no Isshukan: A Week of Garfield

released on May 07, 1989

Garfield no Isshukan: A Week of Garfield

released on May 07, 1989

A Week of Garfield is a 1989 Family Computer title based on the comic character Garfield. It was only released in Japan due to issues with using the Garfield license in North America and Europe. It is the third video game to be based on Jim Davis' Garfield Comics The game is a sidescrolling action game in which enemies can be mice, spiders, birds and other assorted animals. Garfield's default attack is a low judo-style kick when he is standing on his hind feet. There are also several powerups that are limited to how many Garfield has the ability to pick up. A time limit prevents players from wandering aimlessly throughout the level looking for power-ups.


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clearly a work of video game dadaism. what one may perceive as incompetent design is in fact an exploration into the very nature of the video game; why do we play to win? what do we seek to gain from an authored victory? where does simulated satisfaction stop and true satisfaction begin?

if you don't believe me, look no further than the game's title, "Garfield no Isshukan" (A Week of Garfield), clearly an homage to the 1934 artist's book, Une semaine de bonté (A Week of Kindness) by german painter and poet Max Ernst. The contents of Une semaine de bonté are an amalgamation of preexisting victorian art, cut together into entirely new works (dare I say, in a sense, remixed). compare this to both the fashion by which the Famicom's graphics are displayed by the arrangement and rearrangement of so called "tiles" to make "objects" (colloquially and somewhat anachronistically known as "sprites" in many gaming communities), yet also to the form Garfield no Isshukan takes from a mechanical perspective.

In being such a diabolically hamstrung gameplay experience (yet one more entry in the then popular "platforming" genre, and a notoriously poor one at that) the work effortlessly conveys, to those giving it mind anyhow, that all video games, and by extension all art, is remixed. Perhaps, then, all life is remixed as well, preexisting archetypes, ways of being, mannerisms, behavioral patterns, histories, and lifestyles. The times adapt, the nouns change hands with one another, but many of the verbs remain the same.

I HATE THIS GAME I FUCKING HATE THIS GAME SO MUCH IT HUANTS ME IN MY NIGHTMARES GET OUT OF MY HEAD GET OUT OD MYY HEAD YOJU DEMONIC TORTURE DEVICE SHAT OUT OF SATANS ASSHOLE ON TACO TUESDAY YOU MOTHRSEDENTERFDAygteyhAEYRwsyrgtwysrdegttdsdfrggsdrgdsgsddrgfgdfgAZDFGZDFG

I thought I was playing a bit too much quality on my NES lately, so I figured I'd go ahead and give this piece of shit a spin, and my what a glorious piece of shit it is!

The first thing you're going to notice is how fucking terrible the graphics look, Garfield's jumping animation looks absolutely laughable and a bunch of the backgrounds look like something you could've drawn in MS Paint with the line tool. Garfield is also salmon colored instead of orange, and for some reason Odie is half his size.

The second thing you're going to notice is your absolutely pathetic attack, which is a 1-frame kick that hits maybe one or two pixels from within the lower half of your own sprite supposedly MAYBE allegedly. It's actually safer to kick while jumping since it seems to make your hitbox smaller, and with turbo you can attack very quickly since there's no actual animation for kicking in mid-air. Unfortunately, it's super risky to turbo in the air since enemies can still somehow hit you even while doing this, which I found out the hard way. You also go into this "crawl mode" instead of couching, because Garfield is well known for going around on all fours like a normal cat. By the way, if you jump while in your "crawl mode" you can't kick in mid-air. I'm sure they intended that.

People usually hate the high knockback that tend to plague a lot of action games from this generation, this game has very little knockback. You may think "wow that sounds great", but in reality this is absolutely atrocious because of your complete lack of i-frames after taking a hit. This means your entire health bar could be wiped out in a split-second from either a fast moving enemy, or you yourself moving too quickly with this game's version of the high-speed shoes from Sonic the Hedgehog. There will be plenty of times where you'll be gingerly lumbering to the right only for some rat bastard or a bird to come flying in out of nowhere, and hit you multiples times for massive damage or even have Garfield suddenly drop dead with the music going silent for peak comedy.

This game has power-ups you can pick up so you don't need to use your suicidal kick, but for whatever reason the master-class devs over at Mars thought they should be hidden until you move over them. Not only is this system fucking stupid, but it's downright abominable when one of the power-ups you can collect takes away from your HP. This same system also just grinds the entire gameplay to a halt where you're jumping all over the place trying to find the key that goes to the door which leads to the next section of the stage.

I could sit here for probably five more paragraphs talking about all the stupid shit in this game, but you seriously need to experience it yourself. This one is an all-time dumpster fire that can hang with the likes of Mystery of Convoy.