In my mind this forms a duology with Bart's Nightmare, so I should take the opportunity to talk more about that one as well. Both are crap and I didn't have it in me to finish either of them, but out of the two Bart's Nightmare is far more difficult, obtuse, ugly and all around putrid in every aspect. Probably one of the worst games I've ever played.
To actually get to the minigames in Bart's Nightmare, you have to wait for papers to spawn on the road and jump into them, but they spawn randomly and only occasionally, so you can (and I did) spend like 30 minutes in real time just fucking waiting around on the side of the road for one to show up. There are enemies, too, so you can't just sit there idly. When you actually do reach the minigames, they're horrible, clunky, and sometimes unwinnable with just a tiny mistake, meaning you have to go wait on the fucking street again. There's also no music half of the time, and what actually is there predictably sucks ass. It has this outright unfinished feel to it, which is worth noting because the main programmer fucking hated working on this one and actually walked out and left the game industry before it was done. I think they outright shouldn't have released it, personally.
Virtual Bart has better minigames and no street level or anything of the sort, but it's still pretty awful. There's really less to say about it honestly, one of them has you as a pig and the sprite work in there looks nothing like the rest of the game which was kinda funny. There's also one as a dinosaur with annoying sfx, and that's about as far as I got before I was just completely burnt out. I did skim through the other minigames, but I couldn't get the hang of them and I definitely couldn't make myself at that point. So instead I just looked through a full playthrough on youtube, in which NintendoComplete called it "waterboarding in a cartridge", so I'm not convinced this is just a me thing.
So all in all, fuck both of these games. Worse than the NES ones honestly, which is a really low bar. Don't play these, and don't play those. I guess if you tried REALLY hard, or were a Simpsons fanatic, you could find some charm in them (except Bart's Nightmare lmao), but not me unfortunately.
To actually get to the minigames in Bart's Nightmare, you have to wait for papers to spawn on the road and jump into them, but they spawn randomly and only occasionally, so you can (and I did) spend like 30 minutes in real time just fucking waiting around on the side of the road for one to show up. There are enemies, too, so you can't just sit there idly. When you actually do reach the minigames, they're horrible, clunky, and sometimes unwinnable with just a tiny mistake, meaning you have to go wait on the fucking street again. There's also no music half of the time, and what actually is there predictably sucks ass. It has this outright unfinished feel to it, which is worth noting because the main programmer fucking hated working on this one and actually walked out and left the game industry before it was done. I think they outright shouldn't have released it, personally.
Virtual Bart has better minigames and no street level or anything of the sort, but it's still pretty awful. There's really less to say about it honestly, one of them has you as a pig and the sprite work in there looks nothing like the rest of the game which was kinda funny. There's also one as a dinosaur with annoying sfx, and that's about as far as I got before I was just completely burnt out. I did skim through the other minigames, but I couldn't get the hang of them and I definitely couldn't make myself at that point. So instead I just looked through a full playthrough on youtube, in which NintendoComplete called it "waterboarding in a cartridge", so I'm not convinced this is just a me thing.
So all in all, fuck both of these games. Worse than the NES ones honestly, which is a really low bar. Don't play these, and don't play those. I guess if you tried REALLY hard, or were a Simpsons fanatic, you could find some charm in them (except Bart's Nightmare lmao), but not me unfortunately.