 Ssssssss... That's strong. Hi there, today let's take a look at the four Simpsons games on the Super Nintendo, Barts Nightmare, Virtual Bart, Krusty's Super Funhouse, and the itchy and scratchy game. Each of these got ports on the Sega Genesis and a couple other systems, but as usual I'm only going to be looking at the Super Nintendo games. The first game that came out was Krusty's Super Funhouse, and this one is probably the best of the bunch. The goal here is to lead all the rats in each level to some kind of death trap, And you do it by directing them through what are kind of interactive mazes. It starts out pretty straightforward, but eventually some mazes require really quick timing and pinpoint accuracy. You're usually using blocks and pipes to create a path, but if you mess up the timing just a little bit, and just one rat gets left behind, then you gotta start over. It's pretty frustrating. There's a little bit of platforming here too, and the controls for this aspect are mediocre at best. I mean, you're just crusty throwing pies and other random stuff at aliens and snakes. That's the thing with this game. It definitely does not feel much like a Simpsons game. Sure you play as crusty, and you see Homer and Bart and sideshow Mel manning the rat death machines. But as far as how the Simpsons world is represented here, that's about it. Still, the strength of crusty Super Fun House is in the puzzles. Overall, the game isn't bad, and it can usually be had for less than $10. Next is Bart's nightmare, and here's where things really start to go south. So Bart decides to study for once in his life, and of course he immediately falls asleep. In his dream, all his homework notes go flying out the window, and he has to retrieve them while dodging rabid mailboxes and school buses. Your health meter is represented in Z's, and you can obtain more by blowing bubbles at them? I mean, good god, this is so freaking weird and confusing. I seriously barely know what the hell is happening or what I'm supposed to do. And the controls here are really awful. This first section here is kind of a bad 3D perspective, and there's no shadows, so it's hard to gauge the depth of things. Jumping also feels strange. It turns out what you're supposed to do is jump on a homework page, and that opens up a mini-game. Everything from fighting itchy and scratchy, to blowing stuff up as Bartzilla, to whatever this is supposed to be. And really, that's the whole game. It's just a series of bizarre mini-games, and they definitely look much better than they actually are. Like the Bartzilla game here, you just lumber along on a singular path with two attacks. It gets old quick. Or the Bartman game. Flying is awkward, and your slingshot attack goes on this odd trajectory. It's just not very good. So yeah, Bart's Nightmare is the opposite of intuitive. It's poorly designed. The controls suck, and it's just not worth playing. Next is Virtual Bart, and this is a little better, only because it gets rid of that god-awful street level that was your only way of accessing the rest of the game. Here, you thankfully just have a randomized menu. As for the rest of the game, yeah, more mini-games. This time, you hop around in a platforming setting as an anthropomorphized dinosaur, ride a motorbike in a road rash kind of a race. You jump around as a baby. I mean, was it really too much to ask just to have a straight ahead Simpsons game on SNES? Yeesh. Virtual Bart really isn't very good, again, because the controls are just so awkward. And not only that, once you feel like you've got a decent grasp of things, this game is just so effing hard, just brutally difficult. And really, I can't say it's worth the trouble. However, I will say it is marginally better than Bart's Nightmare. Last, there's the itchy and scratchy game. Finally we have just a straight ahead side-scroller, but the game lacks the stuff that made itchy and scratchy funny in the first place, like the theme song and the absurd cartoon violence. Come on, that's like having a Terence and Philip game without any farting. Anyway, this game just isn't good, mostly because of the hit detection. It's all over the place. The platforming is pretty slippery too. After playing this, I think I'd rather play a worker and parasite game. So there you go, all four Simpsons Super Nintendo games, and they're all pretty unmemorable. The best of the bunch is Krusty's Super Fun House, but that's not saying a whole lot, because the other games range from lousy to a clusterfuck of confusion, and that's disappointing, because like I said earlier, all anyone wanted was a simple Simpsons game where you play as all the characters in the Simpsons universe, you know, like the Konami arcade game that was around at the time, which just so happens to be one of the best arcade beat-em-ups ever made. So yeah, if you want to play a Simpsons arcade game from the Super Nintendo era, set up your main emulator and play that instead.