#84: The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare

Worst intro screen... EVER!

Bart's Nightmare is a game I can remember renting multiple times as a kid. There weren't too many games that meet that criteria so this game must have been pretty good, right? Or maybe just really hard? I'm not quite sure...

Bartman VS Barney!

One thing I do know is this game feels like The Simpsons. It has so many little things thrown in to reference individual episodes... Jebediah Springfield's cut off head rolling down the street, for example. Or Blinky, the 3 eyed fish. It has Simpsons music, and Simpsons appropriate voiceovers. It feels like a really good themed tie-in game.

D+ is better than F!

The game itself is a little frustrating. You start off on the street in a dream sequence and need to platform your way around trying to survive until a page from your homework floats down the street. Jump on the page and you get teleported into a minigame. Beat the minigame and make progress towards getting your homework completed. Fail and you get kicked out into the street.

I didn't get to all the minigames this time around, but I could remember some of them from more than 20 years ago regardless. Itchy and Scratchy, Bartman, Bartzilla, a really weird Indiana Jones level, an even weirder level where you're floating in a bloodstream using a tire pump to kill army cells while you collect Smilin' Joe Fissions. I think there are 8 in total? I beat 3 of them this time before I died which is how I got that lovely D+ on my homework.

The minigames are fun but the street section is annoying. You acquire powerups by jumping over things, but that only works if you're on the exact same plane as the enemy and the enemies move across planes so it's annoying to do. A lot of the street level feels like a way to throw in episode references, which is neat the first time you see them, but gets old. Surviving until you find a page isn't a terribly interesting game mechanic and it gets even worse when the bets way to survive is a skateboard that moves so fast you can end up missing pages!

I wonder if there are any glitches in this game to speed beating it up...

At any rate, I was having fun and only played the one time because the sound was messed up in my emulator. I think I may need to download a new one or something because this problem is cropping up more often than I'd like. This was a fun game back in the day, and actually feeling like The Simpsons has to be worth a bump.

Rating: B+