The Good:
- The soundtrack is really damn good, especially in the Windows version.
- Garfield and the cast of various wacky characters are animated really well, not to mention, the Glitch character has a really cool design.
- Garfield has a different outfit, and different weapons for each level. As Garfield would say, "Nice touch".
- Controls are pretty good, not the best in a platformer, but still good.
- Level design is good in most levels.

The Bad:
- Every time Garfield gets hurt, there's an animation of him getting hurt, which is fine, BUT every time this animation plays, you cannot move. Which is rather annoying at times.
- The "Catsablanca" (ha, ha) level is an absolute mindfuck on your first go, but you'll soon learn the path to get to the end.
- Most of the bosses were a bit bland. The only one that was really a challenge was the final boss.

Overall, Garfield: Caught in the Act is a good game. Not a great one, by any stretch of the imagination, but a good one. This is probably the best Garfield game I've played (which is not that high of a bar, to be honest). If you love retro platformers and love Garfield, check this one out.

Ulan zamanında kaç çocuğun kalbini kırdınız, kaç çocuğun günahını aldınız kim bilir bu oyun yüzünden. Çocuk kitlesine hitap etmeye çalışıp bu kadar zor oyun yaparak elinize ne geçti? Tamam o dönem 60 dolar verdiğin 16 bit bir oyunun 20 dakikada bitmemesi gerekiyordu ama ulan insafsız adamlar elinizin hiç mi ayarı yok. İlk bölümü save/load state yapa yapa zar zor bitirdim ha bu zorluk olayı adil bir zorluk da değil, pezevenkler öyle bir dizayn etmişler ki bazı yerlerde bug'a takılmadan geçmenin, softlock'a düşmemenin imkanı yok. Yani sevgili oyuncu öyle bir oyun hayal et ki bölüm seçme aralarına bile engel koyulmuş, orda bile paket olman an meselesi. Bonus stage'leri anlatmama gerek yok no bonus yazmayan ekran görmedim. Çocukken ilk bölümü geçemeyip bırakmıştım. Şimdi ilk bölümü tamamlayıp amacıma ulaştım ve tekrar bırakıyorum. Kısacası bu oyundan uzak durun.

Don't let the "Garfield" brand dissuade you - lest you're just a pleb. "Garfield: Caught in the Act" could be easily discarded as another awful game abusing the popularity of its licensee. Garfield gets stuck in his television set, must find his way out navigating through channels titled after famous 50s movies, such as Casablanca or Dracula; and is in itself loosely inspired by the 1989 "The Lasagna Zone" of the "Garfield and Friends" TV series. While the soundtrack and graphics did little toward pushing the Genesis' hardware capabilities, they are consistent and fully realized in a style reminiscent of the TV show, or even the newspaper comic. Sega Channels subscribers could download three additional levels - "Bonehead the Barbarian", "Slobbin Hood" and the train segment of "Catsablanca", all of which are now decisively lost with the closure of the Sega Channel and the lack of a ROM dump. Fun fact: one of my closest friends holds a world record speedrunning this game, small world!

Weird little platformer. It has alot of thematic charm too it but alot of frustrating jank as well, mainly from certain parts being rather confusing and with how the combat works making tanking your way through certain enemies the simplest way through. (Like the first boss I actually game overed on and had to look up what to do because I couldn't figure out how to damage him) The game isn't that tough even with these aspects though, since it's fairly generous with things like heals, so it doesn't really get annoying.

Cleared on March 3rd, 2024 (SEGA Genesis Challenge: 48/160)

Going into the game, I thought the game was going to be mediocre at best with some questionable and terrible gameplay designs at worst. The only reason I logged this game is because I thought it looked really good, but surprisingly, the game is... decent... I mean, it's not perfect, but I think there was a remarkable amount of effort at least in the animation department. This is probably the best looking of all the licenses games on the Sega Genesis. The expressions on these characters is so colorful to look at, and the environments really play off the genres from being stuck in a TV which is what the premise revolves around, and the music that goes with it is not bad either.

The gameplay is nothing out of the ordinary as far as platformers go, however. You jump, you can whack things with whatever weapon you have based on the scenery you are in, and you can throw things with whatever projectile you have also based on the scenery. It does have some puzzle solving and it can be really tricky, and admittedly in some cases rather frustrating. It's not as hard to navigate as what I was led to believe it was from reviews, but the enemy placements can be bullshit, and the first boss was admittedly confusing to figure out.

Oh, and I heard there is a softlock concerning the third boss. I don't know how it happens, I did manage to avoid it, but I heard it is a thing. And also the final boss is annoying as hell, and it's not for the reason you'd expect from a typical Sega Genesis final boss. It's not even that hard of a fight since you get plenty of health pick-ups and you have really high health compared to most other platformers on the system which does at least alleviate the difficulty of the game. However, some of the platforming to chase him down can be really precise, he shoots faster and faster as you climb, and his laughter is obnoxious and gets faster as you climb up.

All that aside, it's a decent game. It's not the kind of game that I would just recommend, but if you're into Garfield or just anything well-animated, it wouldn't hurt to give it a shot. Just brace yourself for any frustration that may come at your way.

The history of animation is something that I've studied extensively. There was a point in time where I wanted to animate, after all, and though I quickly realized that it wasn't for me, I still hold a fascination for it. I love watching animation, a lot of my favorite films and TV series are animated, and I love discussing it. The eras of animation are something that I'm all too familiar with at this point.

These eras are pretty hard to pin down in any meaningful capacity, especially once you take into account international animation styles and other mediums like stop motion, but it's definitely easy to see a difference between the works of Ub Iwerks and the works of James Baxter. At the very least, the rubberhose style of the early 1900s is itself very distinct for many reasons.

Unfortunately, however, it's also the one that seems to get the most love, which often leads to its racist connotations being carried over into its depictions. A lot of early animation in America took inspiration from racist minstrel shows, and those sentiments have carried over into the many love letters to that era of animation that seem to either ignore or not care about those things - Cuphead comes to mind with its minstrel gloves and its invocation of old shorts about how black people like to gamble in its main narrative, even if it is unintentional. There is a hyperfixation in the animation sphere on the cartoons of old, and it's often for the worse.

So, then, it's refreshing to see something like Garfield: Caught in the Act, which takes cues from contemporary animation, at least for its time. It's kind of incredible that a significant portion of the stuff in this game was drawn by Jim Davis himself - probably more than the current Garfield comics, which are so lifeless by comparison. This game is so fluid, each of the characters are imbued with so much life. It's a visual delight.

Above all else, I appreciate that it doesn't call back to rubberhose animation, not even out of just its harmful aspects, but just because it's nice to see something outside of it in a time where that kind of animation is held on a pedestal. I'd love to see a reanimated version of this game released today, I'm sure it'd look wonderful.

This game fascinates me for two reasons.
1. This game came packaged with my Sega Genesis and is therefore the first video game I ever owned. They sold Sega Genesis consoles with a Garfield game packaged in.
2. There are lost levels for this game that are considered lost media because, while they were cut from the game, they were made available through the Sega Channel, so there are people with a memory of a Garfield viking level or a Robin Hood level that are just plain unavailable because the levels disappear off the console after the Sega Channel connection is lost. The only way these levels will be found is if a developer who worked on the game actually releases the ROM of these levels. There is Sega Genesis Garfield Lost Media. There is a dedicated effort to finding Garfield video game levels.

As for the actual game, it may be kinda jank and it may have took me too many years to figure out how to beat the Count Slobbula boss (which, to be fair on younger me, is a bullshit boss to start the game on and doesn't tell you about the sunlight thing at all), but I have a soft spot for this game that could either be the result of its two-hit combo of nostalgia and urban legend status or because I just really dig this game's general vibe. It helps that Garfield actually does the whole "trapped in a TV and fighting through different movie genres" plot pretty well, and did it a couple years before Gex even existed.