Have you ever looked back into your past and felt that sometimes you've felt some sort of mystic wonder towards the strangest things? Even towards things that may well have just never in any way deserved that honor in the first place? Yeah, it's kind of a silly and mostly embarrassing feeling coming back to this for me. It's mostly because of a video on it I watched when I was a whole lot younger, but for a good while this was a game that I held in some sort of strange regard. Well, I've held that feeling for quite some time until one of my friends came along during their interest in all sorts of games from the 16-bit generation, and came out of with with an experience that caused them tout this as one of the worst games they've ever played. Gotta say, that rude awakening their words brought almost instantly shifted my feelings on this into morbid curiosity. I mean, I've never even seen a single episode of The Simpsons before. Why did this give me a sense of wonder anyways? Just what the actual hell was this game that I took an interest towards as a child?

The only real way to find out was to actually play the damn thing, I guess. And I'm pretty lucky to have kept my knowledge on this game from watching that fabled video so long ago, because if you don't have any sort of knowledge on what to do or any guide to go by then boy oh boy you are in for one HELL of a nightmare, as the title itself promises you. Immediately upon starting, you're cast into the game's main "hub" sort of area; the street stage. No indications, no instructions, out into the deep end with you to figure out just what the hell to do and what the hell is going on before you get killed by everything going on all at once. You better get used to this place, too, as you're going to be here very often, and for a long while. The main thing you're supposed to do here is search out for one of the pages you've lost. Jumping onto one of them will send you into one of the many assortments of frustratingly designed minigames you need to complete in order to retrieve the page from them, and in turn, progress through the game. The real kicker about this is that there isn't any sort of interval as to where or when they show up, and it's basically all up to luck as to when the game will relent and let you forward. You could spend numerous minutes just wandering about in the street stage doing fuck all because the game doesn't seem keen on letting you into another minigame even if you've been struggling here for like 20 goddamn minutes. Plus, you have a complete mess of things going on that you have to attempt to avoid in your desperation as well, and good luck with that with a stiff control scheme like this. Your main life source (the Z's at the top of the screen) in the minigames is, for some reason, your health here. Depending on how spiteful the game is feeling at the moment, your Z's could end up getting very easily whittled away through how much you have to endure. The weird spinning heads rapidly spawn and can very easily swarm you and prevent means over or around them. You could get caught by a fairy Lisa or a puddle of mud and be left incredibly vulnerable. The bus could run you down as you're trying to maneuver to the other side of the street. Hell, a whole TROVE of things can be obscured by the trees in the foreground, essentially periodically blinding you if you're on the lower side. I'm trying to get the the next minigame, goddammit! Why do I have to deal with all of this?! I could even try to replenish my Z's by using my bubblegum to send them towards my bar, but ooooh watch out! You gotta do that in the middle of the screen, or else the extra Z you just got that you used a scarce item on will just flat out miss the Z bar and go past. Literally everything just hates you here, I suppose.

Don't get your hopes up if you reach one of the minigames, though. The main events of the game are all really terrible in their own ways. You only get a choice between two of them, I guess, so pick your poison when you get the chance. The purple door is definitely the most tolerable one, since it's the easiest. You're swimming around in a sort of microscopic area and getting rid of amoeba-like creatures as you try to run into some atom person several times. I believe the only real threat here is the guys who throw the grenades so there isn't much to worry about.

The blue door however, is where the minigames I talk about start to shift into uncomfortable and unfair territory. Here you're flying around some very hostile skies armed with only a slingshot. Your slow movement and the fact that you can only shoot forwards should send you some bad signs already. Whole assaults of missiles and paper airplanes show the issues with your control scheme as you could just be unable to shoot anything out of the way or even avoid them. This is a whole lot more apparent on the bosses though, as they frequently move out of your range and send out projectiles that you can't feasibly avoid due to how damn slow you are. Special mention to the blimp boss due to their projectiles being nigh impossible to dodge and deal damage equal to HALF OF YOUR HEALTH. And it's very fun how that's the only boss that appears TWICE. Really appreciate having the boss that can quickly melt through your lives be the only once with multiple encounters. This minigame could've had potential if your movement wasn't so sluggish or it was built around the direction of your shots, but I dunno what I'm doing asking for this out of Bart's Nightmare of all things.

The next three doors all have two rounds each with one page for each respective round, so get ready. The yellow door sends you directly into an episode of the in universe cartoon, Itchy and Scratchy. I'm not quite sure how you progress here but my best guess is to keep taking out as many enemies as you can. Camping around some corner with the hammer is the most tolerable way to handle the enemies, as wandering around anywhere else makes you susceptible to numerous things being flung at you. The projectile weapons, however, are extremely unwieldly due to the hit detection on them being very awkwardly small. You could miss what you're trying to hit several times and get instantly killed by a vacuum cleaner due to how specific the hitbox on them is. Oh yeah, anything fire or explosion related instantly kills you for some reason. Fun! Sure is easy to avoid that happening when you're desperately slipping around the place.

The green door is where this nightmare starts to get mean. Here you become a kaiju and begin to rampage through a city while military forces are assaulting you at every angle. Practically every button on the controller has an attack for all sorts of different angles, it's very confusing and disorienting. For example, helicopters require you to shoot a fireball straight forward. Tanks require you to shoot a laser diagonally towards the ground. Jets require you to shoot a laser straight forward, don't get this confused with a fireball straight forward since those apparently don't reach the jets in particular. All of the other angles you can attack in don't hit anything that can threaten you so it's easier to focus on those 3. Well, it would be easier to focus on those 3 if anything coming in for an attack will fire out something almost immediately after coming in your range, seriously the margin for error for the tank especially is disgustingly small. Doesn't help that your health is pretty much invisible here as well. The second round of this minigame has you climbing up a building in a much smaller form, and it's a bit more tolerable but not by much. Hooray, it's another minigame with awful controls! The main issue with this one now is that every input you make is unbelievably delayed. You barely have any time to react to anything being thrown at you or you just can't even do anything in time at all. If your in the middle of a movement animation, you're stuck like that until it finishes. This makes for numerous aggravating situations where you get smacked down over and over by things out of your control.

And finally we have the orange door, and it's unfortunately the most convoluted of them all. Your invading a temple and need to jump around stone platforms to reach the end. What you desperately need to know here is that you need to avoid platforms low enough that they emit flames, but this is never explained in any sort of way so thanks I guess. Even when knowing this you can still get a very annoying roadblock in the form of all 4 platforms forward being at the lowest point. There's a whole gimmick that goes on here about platforms rising and falling as you step on them but that's just an annoying goose chase jumping around until you get the way forward to rise. This minigame you have to do twice with no real difference, so I hope you find out what to do quickly.

All you really have to do is finish all of those minigames. The game just ends after you do all of them since you basically get all of your pages back after doing so. I dunno, man. It's just a confusing and frustrating mess. It's a bit embarrassing to look back and think that I found some charm in this. I guess there is some in regards to the whole dream-like theming but it's not much, really. At least a session of finally playing the thing is a way to make that ill-directed mystique all come crumbling away.

I didn't even get an A for all of that effort.

bart's nightmare is a yume nikki game

dreams about a little boy

goes to different sections of the dream by choosing between doors

you must admit there are similarities you must admit!!!!!!

I fucking hate Bart. Ok, that’s a bit of a lie, I don’t necessarily hate Bart, but I never really understood his appeal as a character. He is just a kid who is a troublemaker, and that’s really all that he has going for him, which has been a trait that I have never found appealing in any character. But hey, I guess that somehow makes for an icon that many can love and praise for many years, as well as one that people were just dying to put on whatever merchandise they could back in the day, including all of these god-awful Simpsons video games that I have been slogging through for the past couple of months. So, I figured it was only about time that we get back to them by playing what is definitely one of the most noteworthy titles from the early era of Simpsons video games, one that actually caused a game designer to leave the industry because of its development. That game in question would be The Simpsons: Bart’s Nightmare.

Out of all of the old-school Simpsons video games, this was definitely the one I have heard the most about. There have been many different videos made based on the game by content creators that I am a big fan of on YouTube, and just judging from the box art and title of the game, it feels like one that would be the most “unique” compared to the others. That doesn’t mean I thought it was gonna be good though, as I still went into this expecting another really shitty Simpsons game, and you know what? I didn’t get that. No, instead I got an ABYSMAL Simpsons video game, one that carries a lot of the worst traits that previous games did, and one that tries to more creative and “fun”, but ends up providing something that feels more like torture instead.

The story is completely stupid, just about Bart having a nightmare (who could’ve guessed), and he needs to find the pages of his homework, which will make him somehow get an A in school when he wakes up, because that’s how logic works, the graphics are, admittedly, pretty good for a Simpsons game, and it is definitely the best looking game of the bunch, having plenty of variety in the designs, colors, and environments that you travel through, the music is alright, I guess, with there actually being more than one track this time around (thank god), but most of them are pretty generic and forgettable, so it is nothing to write home about, the control is…………… I don’t even wanna talk about it, because I just might explode while typing this, and the gameplay is one that is filled with quite a lot of variety, but it forgot to bring any semblance of quality along with it.

The game is………. I’m not quite sure, exactly. It is primarily split into two sections, where in the first section, you take control of Bart, walk around on a street in the middle of Springfield, dodge plenty of different obstacles that will come your way while fighting off against them using various items and weapons like bubblegum and watermelon seeds, gather plenty of items that won’t do anything to help you, because this game hates you, and find the many different pages of Bart’s homework scattered around the streets to enter the second part of the game. There’s really not that much to say about this section, as it just serves as a means to get you to the next minigame every time, but I will say that it isn’t fun to play through at all, which I will get more into later on.

The second part of the game consists of a bunch of minigames, each one being one you have to complete in order to gain one of Bart’s homework pages in order to beat the game, and since each one of them is different enough, I will go ahead and go through each of them right now. The first of these minigames is one where you are apparently going into Bart’s body, where you swim around on the screen, kill germs with your pump gun, and you gather several Joe Fissions in order to get the homework page awaiting at the end, and… that is about it. It is definitely the easiest and the most tolerable out of all the minigames, and while it does still definitely have its frustrations, this is the one you will probably spend the least amount of time on.

The second minigame would be the Bartman section, where you will fly around as Bartman, shooting plenty of things with your slingshot, avoiding many different obstacles along the way, and defeating several bosses that resemble several recurring Simpsons characters. This one is somewhat fun to play at first, but then it gets overly frustrating really fast, as you not only are bombarded by a huge amount of projectiles that are almost impossible to see coming at plenty of different times, but the slingshot you have at your disposal completely sucks. It feels like it barely does anything to a lot of the enemies, its range isn’t long enough to justify its usefulness, and you can’t turn around, making several boss encounters a huge pain in the ass. Yeah, you do get plenty of lives, which can help you out with what you have to deal with, but trust me, you will probably lose those lives very quickly.

The third minigame would be the Bartzilla sections, with the first of these sections being where Bartzilla automatically walks to the right, and you have to press certain buttons at certain times to have him attack whatever is in front of him so that you don’t take too much damage and lose. This one is completely terrible because it is incredibly hard to tell what action does what, and which one you need to perform before you end up getting hurt. Yeah, you can memorize what does what and what where goes, but you barely get any time to properly execute a lot of these moves before you are bumrushed by a million things. The second section in this minigame also has you playing as Bartzilla, except now you are climbing up a building while avoiding many different projectiles from either people in the building, or the Marge-Mothra constantly flying around. Not only is the amount you have to dodge completely ridiculous, but the building gets smaller and smaller as you go up, leaving little to no room to fuck up, leading to many frustrating deaths in the process.

The fourth minigame is the Itchy and Scratchy segments, where you run around various parts of the Simpsons house while fending off against not just Itchy and Scratchy, but also plenty of other different household items using either hammers or a gas gun. There isn’t that much to say about these sections, as they are pretty simplistic, but it still manages to bring along the bullshit difficulty that the game loves forcing against you, which does still make it painful to play.

And finally, there is the Idaho Simpson segments, where you jump through a Q*bert-like temple, defeat several enemies using your whip, make sure to step on specific platforms to raise others so you won’t fall, and dodge plenty of obstacles along the way. These segments are, without a doubt in my mind, the worst segments in the entire game. It is extremely easy to constantly fuck up and die here, not just from the enemies and obstacles that you face, but also because of the fact that you never really know how to proceed forward through these segments without getting caught by a trap or an obstacle, leading to plenty of deaths. What also doesn’t help is that, unlike all of the other segments, you only have to get hit once, and then you die, making this the most painful segment out of all of them.

I think you all get the idea at this point, and you could probably gather there are two major things that completely ruin it: the difficulty and the lack of focus. Everything in this game is set on making you fail, as there are always enemies everywhere, you get very limited resources to defend yourself, there are limited lives, no continues, no passwords, no fucks given, and many dead Bart carcasses stacked on top of each other after I tried to get through this game. It is one of the most infuriating licensed games that I have ever played because of this, and this is coming from the guy who beat and somewhat liked the NES Silver Surfer game. It is fun for a little bit, seeing all the weird-ass shit that Bart imagines in his dream world, but once you get past all of that, only pain and misery await you for the rest of the game.

Overall, despite the improved visuals, music, and some of the creativity that can be found here, this may just be the absolute worst Simpsons game that I have played so far, even more so than Bart’s Escape from Camp Deadly. Sure, that game could barely keep itself together without collapsing, and it is as barebones as you can get for a Simpsons title, but at least that one had a clear setup and structure. On the other hand, this game prides itself on constantly fucking over the player, giving very little chance of success in many different sections, and not giving a satisfying enough payoff to make me want to actually try to beat it. Do not play this game, no matter how big of a Simpsons fan you are, or if you actually somehow liked the other Simpsons games released around this time, because trust me, it isn’t worth it at all. I’m probably gonna get nightmares myself after playing this, but thankfully I don’t have any kind of schoolwork to worry about. Nah, instead, I’m probably gonna get fired from my job if I don’t complete my nightmares properly.

Game #430

Paprika (Japanese: パプリカ, Hepburn: Papurika) is a 2006 Japanese animated science fiction psychological thriller film directed by Satoshi Kon.[2] The film is based on the 1993 novel of the same name by Japanese author Yasutaka Tsutsui.[3][4] It is Kon's fourth and final feature film before his death in 2010.[5][6] The script was co-written by Kon and Seishi Minakami, who also wrote for Kon's TV series Paranoia Agent,[7] the character design and animation director was Masashi Ando (known for Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Your Name),[8] the music was composed by Kon's frequent collaborator Susumu Hirasawa,[8] and the art director was Nobutaka Ike, who worked on all of Kon's works.[9] Japanese animation studio Madhouse animated and produced the film.