Bart vs. The Space Mutants fucking sucks. It's really a shame because by all means it shouldn't.

The presentation starts off really strong, as a puzzle platformer with a particularly surprising amount of detail and references to the show somewhat unheard of in many licensed games of the time. It's a little tedious, but there's a certain level of charm to it at first.

On the other hand though, the game's worst issues reveal themselves simultaneously, almost immediately after starting the game actually: the controls and the difficulty. The controls are so bizarre to me - namely that run and jump mapped to the same button, making movement incredibly awkward and making both individual actions somewhat of a chore. Running jumps are completely impossible as a result, and you'll never really get one no matter how hard you try. Instead, you have to do higher jumps by...pressing A and B simultaneously. You have to work with this while narrowly dodging various (like two or three total) kinds of much smaller but much faster enemies. Also, two hits per life and no continues. Awful.

So in turn the game becomes almost immediately really hard to enjoy, but there's at least still a decent amount of creativity at first, or at least just..something to appreciate at all really. This goes away as early as level 2, where the game decides to drop most of the ideas it had previously set up and just turns into a shitty platformer where you occasionally collect items that require no thinking or problem solving at all. There's almost nothing to interact with from that point onwards, all there is left is to trudge through until you inevitably throw in the towel or reach the power plant. God help you if you reach the power plant. That last level took me over 30 minutes even with savestates.

You know what else? There's only really two songs during gameplay, a dinky rendition of the theme song and some other shit that ultimately just blends in with the former during actual gameplay. It starts to grate on you really fast and just gets worse and worse from there. Combined with the gameplay and the drab colors of the later stages? It's maddening. Demotivating. Depressing.

What's that? There's boss music too? Not really. Two of them are just snippets taken from the fucking theme song again. The third is just the death sound played on a loop. They might as well not be there, but I'm glad they are because they're so amusingly shitty that they were essentially the only form of entertainment I found in this for two thirds of the runtime. That and Bart's weird miserable bird creature looking ass head.

I tried this in June 2021 or so and couldn't power all the way through it, and after finally doing so I just feel hollow and wish I hadn't bothered. It's better than Bart's Nightmare, but the time in elementary school where I just threw up all over the fucking grass in front of other kids was also better than Bart's Nightmare. Maybe this game would be more captivating if it wasn't so obviously rushed out the door. Maybe it'd be tolerable if the difficulty was toned down. Hard to say with what's basically nothing more than hypotheticals.

God this game fucking pisses me off. I wish it was good. I really do.