Tag: video game

Krusty’s Super Fun House – Retro Review

Can’t Afford the Exterminators? Send in the Clowns.

Hey, kids! Remember when Krusty the Clown was just Homer Simpson with funny hair and a red nose? No? Well, playing Krusty’s Super Fun House for the Mega Drive will probably jog your memory. In this platformer-puzzler, you’ll play as the titular troubadour as he collects pick-ups, opens doors, leaps from platform to platform, and herds dumb rodents to their cruel and brutal fates. Imagine Lemmings, but in reverse; instead of trying to save the conga-line of critters, you’re attempting to lead them to their untimely demise for the sake of a rodent-free fun house. No one likes rats in their fun house.

Is flattening the rats with a comically oversized boxing glove really the best idea they could come up with? Bart and Krusty, I mean, not the developers.

Players control Krusty directly, his cutesy, deformed sprite sporting a lolling, open-mouthed, buffoonish grin. Krusty circa 1992 is a far cry from the hard drinking, hard gambling, chain-smoking malcontent we know and love today, and players must guide this wholesome version of Krusty around increasingly complex levels, finding collectibles, fending off enemies, and redirecting rodents. Every single rat needs to be mercilessly splattered before Krusty can exit the level and move on, with hidden areas generally containing random pick-ups that contribute to a superfluous-feeling points tally.

The actual vermin-guiding is achieved by finding moveable blocks and placing them around the levels. The rats can step over a single block, but will reverse direction if they hit anything that’s two blocks or higher. Using this information, and the various fans, pipes, and other such paraphernalia scattered about the fun house’s funtastic hallways, players can apply their clever clown brains to place blocks in the correct place so that the rats resume their inexorable march to doom. Things can get quite tricky, with solutions often requiring lateral thinking, extensive trial and error, and quick wits, if the rats are to be located and directed before they can permanently evade capture.

The rat-catching gameplay is fine, but Krusty’s Super Fun House is filled with a lot of unnecessary fluff. The enemies seem mostly redundant and randomly placed, and the stages are almost all far larger than they need to be. Each stage will have a section designed to funnel the rats around, and then an often vast swathe of nondescript back-rooms to explore with no compelling motive.

What part of the Fun House is this? The unnecessary and nonsensical part, that’s what.

The rodent herding is cool, the graphics are okay, and the fun, old-school Simpsons vibe is part of our shared social history, but Krusty’s Super Fun House just ends up feeling a little bit empty. Maybe a lodger will help the place feel more lived in – I heard Sideshow Bob is looking for a place to stay again.

Paint It Yellow

Krusty’s Fun House was released on multiple formats (with the 16-bit iterations adding the “Super” to the title), but it’s actually a reskin of an Amiga game called Rat-Trap, in which a pink-haired fellow places blocks to guide rats into rat-catching machines. Audiogenic, the original developer, took Rat-Trap and gave it the Groening treatment, adding Simpsons-themed posters, replacing the nondescript, pink-haired youth with Krusty, and redesigning the rats to look a bit more like they’d fit in among the alleyways and drainpipes of Springfield.

This article was written for a printed Sega magazine but never used. Played on Mega Drive

 

Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn

Blue Shadow (And a Pink One Too)

A modern remake of a “Nintendo hard” NES game that I’d never even heard of? No, it’s okay, I’ll leave it, thanks. What’s that? It’s got gorgeous, pixelated sci-fi cityscape backgrounds and super cool modern re-imaginings of ’90s ninjas and robotic enemies? Alright, you twisted my arm.

Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn, developed by Tengo Project, is a modern remake of the NES title Shadow of the Ninja, known as Blue Shadow here in Europe. It features two ninjas of the Iga clan, Hayate and Kaede, as they navigate six distinct stages in a direct attempt on the life of the evil Emperor Garuda, whose forces have taken over the United States of America.

There’s a bit of Contra in there, a sprinkling of The Ninja Warriors, and perhaps a slight bouquet of Metal Slug.

This re-imagining updates the visuals in bombastic style, with chunky sprites filled with personality, a grimy tech aesthetic juxtaposed with neon lights and splashed with delightfully garish, luminous colours, and fluid animation bringing bosses and set-pieces to life.

It’s a gorgeous-looking game, but you won’t have much time to take in the sights, as beyond a couple of basic grunt-type enemies, most of the mechs, monsters and mooks you’ll face are perfectly equipped to catch out sightseers and careless wanderers. Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn is challenging, and I can see how the original might have been a very tough nut to crack. This remake allows players to continue indefinitely from the last stage reached, but most areas still took me a lot of tries to get through, and the bosses take the difficulty up another few notches, forcing the recognition and memorisation of some devious attack patterns.

Both Hayate and Kaede control exactly the same, and can attack, crouch, jump, and attach themselves to walls and ceilings, flipping up onto higher platforms if the terrain allows. They both start off with a katana (that can be powered up to launch projectiles) and a kusarigama, which is basically a blade on a chain. The kusarigama packs a punch and can attack at range, but its longer attack animation will leave its wielder vulnerable and, unlike the katana, it cannot deflect enemy projectiles. As the game progresses, it becomes necessary to fully understand the strengths and limitations of each weapon to succeed, and knowing which attack to use and when so as not to leave yourself vulnerable to counter-attack is the key to success.

The heads fly off of these cute little laser horses when they take damage, resulting in a flying head drone and some charging, disembodied legs to deal with.

Successful players will also have to master jumping, as Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn features a few fiddly jumps here and there. The jump button has a slight delay, and this has led me to more than a few health-sapping plummets into nothingness. Luckily, falling off the screen isn’t an instant death, but the jumping is the most unsatisfying part of the game for me, and I feel like it could have been a lot smoother. The ninjas also have the ability to momentarily hover, and this is activated by pressing down and holding the jump button, which was a little too fiddly for an old and decrepit gamer like me at first. It all clicks into place eventually, but not before more than a few frustratingly missed ledges.

The “ninja gear” mechanic adds another element to the game. Throughout each stage crates will regularly hide limited-use weapons – including firebombs, larger swords, and even guns – that can be kept in a limited inventory and brought into action when they’re needed. There is a system where players can purchase unlocked items of gear to start the game with, which is definitely helpful in certain situations, but this starting gear is lost upon death, so if you’re having trouble with, say, the fourth stage boss, and purchased some gear you thought might help you with it, you better hope you get there without continuing.

If you repeatedly die on a certain stage, Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn will start to take pity on you, packing extra health-restoring goodies in your inventory like a proud ninja mum. I have no shame in admitting that I made use of these pity dumplings on numerous occasions. I did find myself getting better at the game, however, and was breezing through the formerly-difficult early stages upon a second play-through. The later areas could still be a bitch, though.

There’s also a two-player co-op mode, which I imagine is great, but I haven’t talked the daughter into trying that out with me yet.

This boss was really tough until I realised I could bash it in the head with a sword. It … wasn’t clear at first, okay?

Shadow of the Ninja – Reborn is a great retro platformer-action game with fantastic visuals and satisfying combat, that’s let down slightly by some occasionally fiddly jumping. It’s a stern test of reflexes, pattern memorisation, and patience, but if you think you’ve got the ninja skills, then I’d highly recommend taking a trip through this extremely dangerous neon metropolis.

Played on Switch