Tom and Jerry: Frantic Antics
Sega Genesis
Nostalgia Factor:
I don’t have any nostalgic feelings attached to this game. It has been out since 1993, but I didn’t get around to playing it until the year 2019. It is yet another one of my cousin Ryan’s Genesis games that he loaned to me to play through and review. Speaking of that box of Genesis games, I am finally almost through with those games. I’ve got about five or six more left to play and review, and then he can finally have them back. Sorry I have had them for so long!
Story:
If this game has a story, it is told through its instruction manual (which I don’t have) and not through in-game sequences. You save some kids and you beat up an old lady at the end of the game. That's all I got! Apparently it follows the plot of the Tom and Jerry movie which came out in the early 90s, but I have never seen that movie.
*shrugs*
Gameplay:
*sigh*
I’m shrugging, I’m sighing, I’m all over the place on this one. When I first fired the game up, I struggled to make it through the first level. Shoddy controls, bottomless pits, enemies that seemingly couldn’t be dodged or avoided. This is one of the hardest first levels I’d ever encountered in a video game before. And if you die, well I should say WHEN you die, you start back over at the beginning of the level again. There are no checkpoints, no continue markers, nothing. Very frustrating.
Once you get the hang of the game, it gets easier though, right? RIGHT? Not exactly. The second level is even harder than the first. More unavoidable enemies, more bottomless pits. This time they threw in some crappy level design for good measure. You don’t just move from left to right, now you have to navigate this giant maze full of dead ends and wrong turns. If that wasn’t fun enough, there are these giant wrecking balls that appear with almost no warning whatsoever and will kill you in one hit. Yeah. One hit. Back to the beginning of the level you go. And this game does not have short levels.
I actually turned the game off in a fit of rage the first time I tried playing it. That’s right, I rage quit a 90s 2D platformer on its SECOND LEVEL. These games used to be my forte. Had I lost my touch? As it turns out, the answer is no. This is just a crappy, shoddily designed game that had no business being released to the general public.
Being the trooper that I am, I came back to the game in the ensuing days. I will never review a game unless I have beaten it first (unless the game is unbeatable), and I was bound and determined to power through this. Each time I played, I got another level or two deeper into the game. The deeper into the game I got, the worse the level design became. Not only are some levels mazes where everything looks the same, but you have to backtrack and get items in a certain order. More sighing and shrugging and rage quitting ensued.
But then, a miracle happened. The more I played through this game and the more it pissed me off, the more I actually began to like it. Stockholm Syndrome much? Possibly. But the game is so unflinching in its difficulty that I began to take it as a personal challenge. Eventually, finally, WEEKS after I first started the game, I beat it. I expected to complete this game in an hour on my first playthrough, but little did I know it would take me weeks to finish it. I almost have to admire the game for that. Almost.
I’ve spent enough time complaining about the game’s difficulty. What do you actually do in the game? You run through levels, collecting items, fighting enemies, and reaching the finish line of the stage. Simple stuff really, but the way almost everything is handled is very frustrating. You can kill SOME enemies by jumping on them, but you get hurt in the process. So it isn’t worth it. You have to collect items like footballs and light bulbs (yeah really) and throw them at your enemies. Or you can roll into them by running and hitting the diagonal down-forward key on the D-pad. But you can’t see far ahead of you on the screen and enemies tend to just appear with little warning whatsoever, so expecting to make it through each stage unscathed is an impossibility. Pattern recognition and memorizing stage layout is key if you want to beat this game.
As I mentioned before, the controls are shoddy, which helps to make this game even more difficult than it has any right being. Some levels aren’t as simple as just “reach the ending of the stage and you’re done”. Many are laid out like mazes, where you have to collect hidden items. You die, you go back to the beginning of the stage and lose everything you collected in the process. Things never stop being frustrating in this game.
I think you get my point. This game is combination of unfair difficulty and shoddy controls and level design. There really isn’t much else to talk about. I’m going to move on to talking about this game’s graphics before I rage quit this review.
Graphics:
The game isn’t necessarily ugly, but I know for a fact that the Sega Genesis is capable of so much more. There were points when I was playing this that I had to remind myself I was playing a Genesis game and not an NES title.
Things are repetitive. The colors are bland. Animations are so-so. Luckily I am not a graphics snob. As long as the game is fun to play, I couldn’t care less what it looks like. But when a game isn’t fun, and it looks the way this game does, that is when I feel like complaining is justified. So here I am, complaining. Again.
Sound:
There is absolutely nothing memorable about this game’s music or sound effects. Nothing. The fact that I played this game for as long as I did, and I can’t hum even ONE of the game’s musical tracks should tell you something. On the plus side, I don’t remember any of the game’s audio being particularly annoying. Yay for small victories?
Overall:
I would say that I have a love/hate relationship with this game, but honestly it is mostly hate. There is almost nothing good about this game, and I was SO ready to give it the rare final score of F. But I just couldn’t do it. Yeah the game is garbage and it punished the hell out of me every time I would power it on, but the fact of the matter is that it DID keep me coming back for more. As much as I hated the game for being so poorly designed, I enjoyed the challenge. I almost never get challenged by video games anymore, unless we are talking about boss characters from the Kingdom Hearts series. But as far as a game being consistently, unrelentingly challenging from beginning to end like this – that is a rare feat in my books. And no I have never played a Dark Souls game before and no I don’t want to try one (yet, anyway).
So all in all, this game isn’t a complete failure. It comes close, perhaps the closest any game has gotten to scoring an F with me in recent years. F scores are reserved for games that I loathed every second of, and as much as I hate to say it, I did indeed derive SOME enjoyment from playing this.
But can I recommend this game to my friends? No. God no. In fact, if you are thinking of playing this game, do yourself a favor and give it a hard pass. It just isn't worth it.
Final Score:
D-
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