Who Framed Roger Rabbit

Eddie Valiant wakes up in a bar with the faintest memory of what happened the night before. In one hand he's got a bottle, in the other a list of possessions he's just pawned. That's how the legendary 1988 film begins, and that's roughly how this game starts too — written by someone who saw the movie but confused the singing rabbit with your standard arcade shooter.

It's a simple first-person shooter with a limited arsenal. In the streets of Toontown, he scraps with small-time enemies — like the Director sent blind dancers to a waltz. Eddie moves across the screen, fires his weapon, and tries to survive waves of spat-out creatures. It feels like something between Galaxian and a chunk of something far more primitive. The mechanics are bare-bones: movement, shooting, ammo collection. Over and over, the same thing, and boredom sets in fast.

This game was supposed to be simple redemption. Instead it's an exercise in patience — it's not about how well you shoot, but whether you can stomach repeating the same stretch of gameplay not twice, not three times, but around twenty times. Difficulty is handled only by speeding everything up and cramming more objects on screen. The music loops endlessly behind you, the kind that'll make your head spin. And here's the biggest sin — virtually nothing about it captures the atmosphere or humor from the original.

Back in the nineties, this was one of those games you could buy, but didn't have to. Film fans probably picked it up solely because Roger Rabbit was on the box. Technically it works — no glitches, no broken graphics. It's just lazy, like someone took a photo of a famous person and scribbled lines over it.

Today you can play it in DOSBox and it'll be just as grey, just as dull as it was back then. The fun isn't in the effort they tried. You look at it more like a curiosity — proof that a name alone can turn into worthless paper. Definitely not a reason to power up the computer.