Simpsons, The - Bart's House of Weirdness

Bart Simpson arrives with his characteristic "Ay caramba!" into the weirdest corner of his family — and it's not the school cafeteria or the mayor's office. It's 1991, 256-color graphics are still learning what spray-painted rough edges are all about, and a Simpsons platformer promises you fun from the popular series through jumping around the screen.

The game takes you to the Simpson house, where everything has gone against all common sense. Your task is to navigate through several levels, collect items, jump over obstacles, and avoid danger. Bart needs to get something from one place to another — classic platformer logic without major surprises. The setting is fun only because you're in a series you've seen on TV; without it, this would be an ordinary platformer with zero shine.

The controls work the way they should on a retro DOS platform — arrows, jump, maybe some accelerated jumping that feels right once you get used to it. The animations are clunky as an older roommate in a shelter. Collision detection isn't precise, so you'll sometimes fall through the floor or jump into walls you apparently didn't see properly. The nineties were full of this kind of thing — games that looked like fever dreams but friends made them anyway just because it was a known name.

Today this game will tell you why the Simpsons were everywhere in nineties computers — not because the games were good, but because licenses could be bought cheap. Nostalgia plays the role that playback quality should. The music from the DOS speaker doesn't sound bad, but you'll want to get rid of it after a few minutes. The graphics have the charm of a class drawing — bright colors, which is pleasant for the time, but details are missing because space is limited.

If you've got a hankering for something from the era when the Simpsons were slapped into any software with a wink, Bart's House of Weirdness isn't the worst choice. It's simple, short, and if control errors don't bite you, it might give you half an hour of curious laughs. These days you can run it in your browser and feel how it was — without ambitions, purely for the logo on the title screen.