My fellow Backloggdians…. after what feels like an eternity of having to endure such shitty products over and over again, I think I have finally cracked the code for these Simpsons games! I’m like Charlie from It’s Always Sunny right now, I feel like I’m onto something here! See, most of the Simpsons games we have talked about so far have been pretty bad, garbage even, and I have found one common element amongst them all that makes it so that they are so bad: Bart is the main character in all of them! Meanwhile, the few Simpsons games we have talked about where he is not the star, such as The Simpsons Arcade Game and that one Itchy & Scratchy game on the Game Boy, have actually ranged from being alright to actually really great. So, as long as we just avoid any Simpsons games that star that spike-haired nuisance, we shouldn’t have to play any bad Simpsons game ever again! But, there’s only one way we can figure out if this is the case, and that’s with a field test, so the game we will use for this field test will be The Itchy & Scratchy Game.

Naturally, I wasn’t really looking to try this one out, but I was admittedly looking forward to it more than the others. Not only did does it not seem to have Bart in any form or capacity here, but it is somewhat following up the other Itchy & Scratchy game we got a year before (according to external sources), so I figured it was gonna at least be somewhat alright. Hell, it could even end up being the second best Simpsons game that we have played so far, right behind The Simpsons Arcade game. However, what I ended up getting out of it instead was… a pretty repetitive slog. I wouldn’t say this game is bad by any means, and it does have some VERY admirable qualities for what it is, but it is one of those games that you can easily take one look at, get all the info you need, and then move on from.

The graphics are surprisingly pretty great, at least, in terms of SNES standards, where the environments are fun and colorful enough to not look like an eyesore or be too boring, and the animations for the characters, specifically with Itchy & Scratchy, look fantastic, being very smooth and well done, especially for a licensed Simpsons game of all things, so I will give the game credit for having some pretty great visuals for what it is, the music is pretty decent, with each track fitting both the setting and the scenario of each level pretty well, even if the tracks themselves aren’t anything I am gonna be going back to listen to on a daily basis, and the gameplay/control is extremely simple, to where you will be able to pick up on what to do very quickly, but also to where you will get tired of what you are doing very quickly.

The game is a platforming arena game, where you take control of Itchy, go through a set of seven levels, each one having its own distinctive theme from each other while being framed as an episode of the cartoon show itself, run around each of these arenas while beating the absolute fuck out of Scratchy until he is a bloody disgusting pile of guts on the floor, gather plenty of different items that you can use to help you kill Scratchy in a more efficient way, and take on plenty of boss fights against…. an even stronger version of Scratchy, which can be tricky at certain points, but most of them are pretty manageable if you have plenty of patience and plenty of cartoony-skill. It is a pretty simple premise, one that is actually fun for a good bit once you start actually trying it out for yourself…… however, that good bit ends very quickly, to where it then turns into a repetitive slog that can’t be recovered.

I will say, the one factor that this game rides and dies on is the quality of the visuals, because they are genuinely very impressive for what we have here. Before each level, you get a fully-animated recreation of the Itchy & Scratchy intro, followed by plenty of level themes that aren’t exactly creative, but they are very well made for the kind of licensed game we are dealing with here. Not to mention, while the violence itself is unfortunately neutered, not featuring any kind of blood or gore like in the actual show itself (which is a huge letdown, don’t get me wrong), it is cartoony and slapstick-y enough to feel like a proper Looney Tunes-type game. It isn’t much, but hey, again, I will give credit where credit is due, as they did a really good job on that front.

However, everything else in comparison leaves much to be desired. For most of the entire game, you will primarily just be doing one thing: trying to find Scratchy, hitting him, avoid getting hit by him, rinse and repeat until you beat the game. You can explore the levels to see what kind of items there are to get and what kind of secrets there are to find, but that in itself is pointless when the main objective is so cut and dry. All you have to do is pretty much just stand around, wait for Scratchy to show up, whack him, and wait for him to come around again to do that again, and while there is a time limit present, you are given plenty of time, so it isn’t anything you need to be concerned about at any point in the levels. The boss fights don’t help break the repetition too much either, as they can be beaten fairly quickly if you know what you are doing, and even they get pretty repetitive as the game goes on too. Thankfully, the game itself isn’t that long, so it’s not like you will be spending hours upon hours doing this, but again, you will pretty much get all of what the game has to offer you in the first level, and with no real ending or congratulations to be found at the end of the game, what is even the point of any of this?

Overall, despite having great visuals and a promising gameplay set-up, this game unfortunately is nothing more than a tedious and boring treadmill that keeps you in the same loop of gameplay over and over again, offering nothing to keep it interesting or fun after the first level other then with the level themes and some items, and it isn’t worth putting all of your time into. I would recommend for people to at least try it for a little bit, playing around with the first level to see if you end up liking what you end up getting, especially for those who somehow liked the previous Simpsons games and the show in general, but for everyone else, there is nothing here to sink your teeth into, so don’t even bother trying to load it up. So, I guess after all of that, I guess my theory was incorrect… even if a Simpsons game doesn’t star Bart, it is still as capable at being as bad or boring as the rest of them, meaning that I will never truly escape this hell-hole of mediocrity………. depressed sigh...

Game #658.5

If you were to ever go into The Amazing Spider-Man on Game Boy expecting to get any form of high quality art out of it whatsoever, then you definitely need to be rethinking your choices of what video games to play. I wouldn’t say it was a completely terrible game, mostly just being exactly what you expect from a cheap licensed Game Boy game based on everybody’s favorite web-slinger, but that doesn’t mean that it didn’t suffer from boring visuals, forgettable music, and some pretty frustrating gameplay that made going through the game a slog at best and a trainwreck at worst. But of course, since this is Spider-Man we are talking about, it still managed to sell enough copies that we would eventually get two full-blown sequels in this new series of games, with the first of these games coming just two years later in the form of The Amazing Spider-Man 2.

Unlike the original game, this game was NOT developed by RareWare, but instead, it was developed by Bits Games, a company who, at this point in time, had developed no original game before, and instead were mainly responsible for porting other games to different systems. That alone was already a bad sign, having a company that hadn’t made a full game themselves before being attached to make this, but of course, I didn’t wanna go into this with a negative mindset. Who knows, maybe Bits Games were gonna knock it out of the park on their first try, making something truly magnificent, so did they manage to do that? Well, my experience with the game alone should be sufficient enough for an answer…… and by that, I mean I didn’t beat the game. I just couldn’t. In fact, I didn’t really get far into the game at all, as what I had played was so bad, so rigid, so completely MISERABLE, that I just couldn’t find the strength to continue. You may judge me for giving up on this game so early, but who cares! It’s a Spider-Man game for the Game Boy, meaning it is a huge piece of shit, and I’m gonna tell you why!

The story is just a little less generic then the original game, where one day, Spider-Man wakes up to find that he has been framed for a bank robbery thanks to several of his most dastardly foes, so it is up to him to swing into action, defeat said foes, and clear his name before it is too late, which is as typical as one of these superhero plots can get, but at this point, I just really didn’t care. The graphics are Game Boy graphics, and compared to the first game, these visuals are… somewhat better(?), with sprites of the characters and locations being much more detailed and less abstract this time around, but it still isn’t anything amazing to look at, the music is, once again, extremely forgettable, so you may as well just plug in whatever song you want to listen to instead on standby and just jam out to that while playing this, and the gameplay/control is somewhat similar to the first game, except with a new spin on it that you think would work in its favor, but instead, it just makes things a hell of a lot worse.

The game is a 2D side-scrolling adventure game, where you take control of Web-Bitch once again, go through a set of five different stages, each going through plenty of the generic locations found in New York, punch, kick, and web up any enemies you come across, while also fighting the game’s mechanics right alongside them, gather plenty of different items to not only help you out, but to also continue through the game, and take on plenty of bosses who……. I assume are hard to fight, but I didn’t wanna torture myself by playing up to most of them, so I dunno. Most of what you see here is very similar to that of the previous game, but with a massive change in gameplay that definitely hinders the experience more than anything else, making it so that I never want to touch it again.

If you somehow couldn’t pick up on it already, rather than being yet another typical licensed platforming game, this game is instead more of an adventure-puzzle game with platforming elements. You are still put in several somewhat linear levels to go through, except now you gotta traverse around, gather different items, trigger specific events, and defeat certain foes in order to go onto the next stage, which, on the surface, doesn’t seem like a bad idea. A Spider-Man adventure-puzzle game does sound like something that would work, and it has proven to work in later games, but the problem with this is that 1.: it is on the Game Boy, and 2.: it plays like ass.

The controls in this game are SO BAD, with you barely being able to control Web-Spider-Bitch-Boy properly, everything feeling stiff to maneuver around, and of course, you have an attack that is more detrimental than anything else, barely being helpful against the many different enemies you will fight. Not only that, but the adventure-puzzle elements in this adventure-puzzle game are pretty obscure hard to get a grasp on, with you not being given clear instructions on what to do in any of the stages, so you pretty much just have to guess work your way around, until you eventually cave in and look up a guide on the internet, because that is the only way you would want to play through this.

I didn’t even end up making it past the first stage, because I was just having such a bad time from what I was experiencing, and judging on what I am seeing here in this longplay on YouTube, the game doesn’t get much better from here. From the first stage onwards, you have to get these crosshairs to shoot a bunch of canisters in an incredibly repetitive fashion, go into a sewer level filled with some of the smallest rodent enemies I have ever seen in a video game, which I can only imagine are a nightmare to deal with with these controls, having to backtrack through said areas to get to even more annoying parts, cheesing bosses that probably would’ve been a huge pain to deal with otherwise, hanging on different moving platforms to reach other areas while having to deal with the abysmal web swing controls, and you don’t even get a credits sequence at the end of the game to signify a job well done. Again, some of the stuff that can be seen here in this game is inventive, and I’m sure if it was given the proper time, budget, and passion, it would’ve ended up being an at-least decent game, but instead, what we got was a trainwreck of an experiment that never should’ve left the station. I don’t even need to play through the whole thing to tell you that.

Overall, despite some creative ideas and some very minor improvements over the original game, I am not ashamed in the slightest to say that I couldn’t stomach playing more than a few minutes of this game, because it is a complete downgrade of the original Game Boy Spider-Man in almost every way, and it is really goddamn bad, being yet another worthless 90’s licensed game to throw right back in the bargain bin along with the others. Don’t bother playing this, no matter if you loved the first Game Boy Spider-Man game or if you love Spider-Man in general, because you will get nothing but confusion, frustration, and a general sense of time wasted from trying this game out. Oh well, at least maybe the third and final game in this trilogy can fix this mess and make something at least somewhat more tolerable. I wonder who developed that one? looks at name of development studio.......... NOOOOOOOOOOOOO-

Game #657.5

When compared to most of the other major fighting games that were on the market at the time, the original ClayFighter wasn’t really anything all too special or good: it was an incredibly standard fighting game with no real unique features or innovations to make it stand out other then the fact that it used claymation for everything that you saw within the game. However, despite how generic it was as a whole, I ended up really liking the game either way, just because of how ridiculous and stupid it was, along with the fact that it was a parody of most other fighting games at the time, which is nice to see from an era that was completely over-stuffed with fighting games. The game also managed to be moderately successful too, which is good to see for a fighting game as obscure as ClayFighter, so it managed to get not only an update later down the road, but also a sequel that was made 1 to 2 years later, which was not-so-cleverly named ClayFighter 2: Judgment Clay.

I didn’t really have any major expectations when it came to how I was going to feel about this game. I really did love the claymation and the overall tone of the previous game, which made it that much more fun and enjoyable for me, but at this point now, the joke has gotten old. If they are going to keep this series going now, and if they are going to continue to make me enjoy it, they need to step up their game, by introducing new mechanics, new fighters, and new improvements that would make this game a slam dunk in every sense of the word. Unfortunately though, ClayFighter 2 barely does any of that, and as a result, it is kind of a bad game. I will say that, if we were to compare the two, this is better than the original ClayFighter in several ways, but it doesn’t do enough to justify itself as a sequel, and it ends up being a pretty bare bones and boring fighter as a result.

The story is extremely generic, where after the events of the original ClayFighter, the evil Dr. Generic Kiln learns of the events that went down in the city of Mudville, and after learning about this, he then makes way to Mudville and creates a whole new set of fighters using residue from the meteor, while also forming the new C-2 tournament, to see which one of the fighters is better than the rest, so it is up to the new fighters, along with some of the older ones, to now battle it out in this tournament to see who is the best clay out of all the clays. It is as typical as fighting game plots can get, which is a shame, considering that this series is supposed to be a PARODY of fighting games, so you’d think they make fun of this trope in some way, but no, they just kind of… do it, and that’s it.

The graphics are ok, once again using claymation for all of the characters, environments, stages and so on, and while it does again look very impressive and charming, the charm is starting to wear off a little and it’s starting to show the cracks in it instead, the music is whatever, just being yet another generic fighting game soundtrack that is easily forgettable, nothing more and nothing less, and the gameplay/control is pretty much exactly the same as the original game, with there being some general improvements made to the game, but when you look past that, it is a cut and dry sequel all the way through.

The game is a typical 2D fighter, where you take control of one of 8 different fighters, with some of them being from the previous game, but most of them are newcomers to the clayfighting scene, take on many opponents in many of the different locations around Mudville, from a boxing arena and an alleyway, all the way up to the North Pole, throw out many different punches, kicks, special moves, and whatever else your weird clay body can produce, making sure to knock your enemy’s HP all the way down to zero, make sure to dodge and block at any chance you can get, just to make sure that you take as little damage as possible, and take on some generic clone bosses to then come out on top as the best ClayFighter to have ever fought clay and reigned victorious. Once again, you pretty much know exactly what you are getting into with this game whenever you hit the start button on the menu, and if the claymation and ridiculousness of what is going on doesn’t end up winning you over, then what we have here is a dud of a fighting game from beginning to end.

There is only one major gameplay addition that was made to this game when compared to the previous game: there is now a tournament mode involved. That’s it, there’s no other changes aside from the character roster, which isn’t even that much of a substantial change to the game, considering Tournament Mode was added to the original game through that update that I mentioned earlier. So, if there is nothing new to see here in this game, does it at least play or feel better than that of the original game? I mean…. kinda? Combat feels very similar to that of the original game, where you will jump around, throwing different punches and other moves of the sort, and it doesn’t feel quite as good as other fighters to pull off moves, lacking the same “umph” and feeling that you should feel whenever you land a hit on your opponent. It really just does feel like you are mashing two different clay figurines together like you are play fighting, with there being no real impact or flow with any of the combat, which you could consider appropriate when viewed at from that angle, but it doesn’t make the game anymore enthralling or satisfying to play.

Which is why, in the end, I consider this game to be inferior to the original at the end of the day: it may be a somewhat better version of what came before it, but at the same time, it feels like a soulless sequel, with nothing to add to the formula other than just a bunch of new characters that don’t have the same charisma or charm as that of most of the original fighters. The original game was able to get away with not doing too much to advance the genre because not only was it the first game in this series, but at the same time, it is also a parody through and through: it is all about these clay figures battling it out, which makes it a lot more charming and fun as a result. This game figures it can do all of that again without putting in any more effort then it needs to while thinking that nobody would notice, but they were WRONG in thinking that! Who knows, maybe they will step up their game for the third game, but for now, this just ain’t it, chief.

Overall, despite still having the charming presentation and being fully aware of what it is, this is one of the most lifeless and pointless sequels to a fighting game that I have ever played, having nothing of value to bring to either the series it is a part of or the fighting genre as a whole, and just feeling like a retread of what came before it that is less appealing and, as a result, less fun. I would recommend it for those who loved the original ClayFighter to pieces, as well as those who are huge fighting game fanatics in general, but for everyone else who had already played the original game, don’t even bother giving this one a shot, as there is nothing here for you to love or get too attached to. But hey, just because this game was somewhat of a dud, that doesn’t make it the end of the world! After all, the next game could totally fix all of the problems that this game has and be a masterpiece in its own way……… what do you mean it got negative reviews?

Game #656.5