--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Name: Tom & Jerry 3
Developer: Dragon Co.
Release Date: 1998?
Platform: Famicom/NES
Tom and Jerry. One of the oldest and longest running cartoon duos in existence, and MGM's answer to Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies. The concept of a cat and mouse was an overdone idea even for the 1940s, but thanks to the team up of William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, whom you may know better for their Hanna-Barbera studio that produced The Flintstones, Scooby-Doo, etc., the idea quickly evolved into one of the most energetic, slapsticky, and even violent cartoons of the time.
The amount of ideas that could be generated from a cat chasing a mouse were astronomical, especially when both were given a near limitless variety of items to smack each other senseless with! Tom would point a gun at Jerry, Jerry would plug it up and have it explode in his face. Tom would set up a trap with an ax, Jerry would avoid the trap and later cause Tom to run through it, slicing him in half. Tom would charge at Jerry with a speeding toy train, Jerry would smash a hole in the floor and send Tom falling several stories to hit the ground with a CRASH! The timing, the character attitudes, the orchestral score, the breakneck speed of the animation, all were done to the point of PERFECTION in these cartoons, which allowed MGM to take home more Academy Awards for cartoon shorts than even DISNEY! Tom and Jerry are pioneers in cartoon slapstick, a duo not afraid of defying limits, and some of the most important characters in the whole of animation!
While the duo has seen various incarnations over the years, every new feature after their original theatrical shorts unfortunately seems to further tone down much of the violent slapstick that made them so memorable. After MGM ceased production of their theatrical shorts in 1957, after a whopping 114 Tom and Jerry cartoons over 18 years, their first venture into television was by Soviet budget-filmmaker Gene Deitch, who didn't quite get the duo or their timing, resulting in very choppy animation, awkward timing, and the violence coming across as more painful than funny.
Chuck Jones took a shot at it afterwards, and while he brought his sketchy and surreal style seen in many of his other productions(the Coyote & Roadrunner cartoons, How The Grinch Stole Christmas, The Phantom Tollbooth, etc.), and did a better job of handling the timing, a lot of the impacts still didn't have the same weight behind them, due to his smoother and "less wild" animation and the outcry against violence on TV and the new idea of cartoons being strictly "for children."
From there, the cartoons have been passed from producer to producer, each incarnation varying in terms of quality and accuracy to the style of the original shorts. Since 1970, we've had The Tom and Jerry Show, The Tom and Jerry Comedy Show, Tom and Jerry Kids, Tom and Jerry Tales, and a whole lot of direct-to-DVD full-length movies, just to name a few projects Tom and Jerry have been cast in since their original debut.
And the less said about the theatrical movie, the better...
As someone who grew up watching the original shorts on Cartoon Network, I'm both happy that the duo is still around and getting attention, but really disappointed that overreactions to cartoon violence have dumbed down their act to the point you're wondering why they're bothering to still feature them... Yes, the original shorts are violent, with basically everything possible being used as a weapon to harm one or the other, but there's no blood or gore, and very rarely death or any other lasting repercussions. If Tom is chopped up, he puts himself back together; if he's set on fire, he jumps in a lake; if he's stabbed, he pulls it out with no blood. Everything is over-the-top, but almost never realistic. The only major signs of pain are Tom's scream, gritted teeth, and sometimes throbbing fingers, toes, or tail. Tom's a cat, Jerry's a mouse, so it's only logical for Tom to chase Jerry and Jerry to defend himself(even if he's the one who starts the conflict on more than one occasion.)
So to see most of the newer material that not only reduces the violence to quick slaps, fictional weapons(since using anything real would be "harmful to children's minds") and gags centered more around running and escaping than actual conflict just hurts to watch... The fact that most Tom and Jerry material nowadays is more centered around them partnering up in a straight-up adaptation of a random Warner Bros. movie(Robin Hood, The Wizard of Oz, Willy Wonka & The Chocolate Factory) with heavily emphasis on dialog(especially from the cancerous tumor posing as Tuffy) doesn't help either. Tom and Jerry is an unfairly censored classic cartoon duo that deserves SO much better than what they're getting nowadays, and a team whose shorts I hope someday will regain the timing and impact they made back when.
Seriously, their level of violence ISN'T going to corrupt kids! If any kid today can tune into The Simpsons and watch Itchy and Scratchy, or even just watch a full hour of original Tom and Jerry shorts on Cartoon Network/Boomerang in between Adventure Time and Unikitty, I don't see the harm in a return to style!
I mean, they're not Herman and Katnip!
Being one of the most famous and longest-lasting cartoon duos, Tom and Jerry has had a truckload of merchandise made based on their exploits. The previously mentioned movies and TV shows, comic books, DVD collections of their cartoons, a LOT of toys
And even quite a few video games, starting on computers in 1989, and (currently)finishing with DS in 2008(which is around the same time most licensed developers figured they'd make more money with smartphone games than releasing gamed for actual consoles, hence why actual movie tie-ins are so rare nowadays.)
Including a certain one called Frantic Antics, made by Beam Software for the Game Boy and Genesis in 1993. Based on the theatrical movie, this features Tom and Jerry escorting the young billionaire heiress Robin away from her evil aunt and to her father, traversing many different landscapes, interior and exterior, and dodging countless obstacles in the process. All the while reminding you that you could have done so many better things than see that abomination. Like clean Tom's litter box. ...With your bare hands...
It's odd that they made THIS the mandatory movie game adaptation, when the game Tom and Jerry: The Movie was released by Sega the previous year. ...And yet that game has NOTHING to do with the movie! ...Which is for the best. I'm guessing it's one of those all-too-common cases where game development ran too long to be released in time, so the studio found a game nearing completion, slapped their license and characters on it, and released THAT as the tie-in. And when the ACTUAL game was finally released, it was given a different title(and often a cosmetic redesign) and a different publisher, since the buzz was long dead by then. It's only a guess, since obviously nobody's paid enough attention to a sub-par game tie-in to a terrible movie to remember anything about it, but based on similar scenarios(such as the 80s Thundercats games), it's the best guess I have. ...Or they were just incompetent. Either one.
I bring this up, because somewhere around the mid-90s, Dragon Co. delivered unto the world a port of this game to the Famicom, simply known as Tom & Jerry 3. ...Why?
With a lot of other pirated games, it's clear the developers wanted to cash in on a popular game series that wasn't available at the time in their country. Mario, Donkey Kong, Sonic, Mortal Kombat, Pokemon, Angry Birds, and a number of other franchises got the bootleg treatment because the team could steal the assets, port them to a less powerful console that was more accessible in their area, and earn a quick buck from people who were dying to try these games for themselves. Despite getting a horribly mangled and watered down version of what the rest of the world was playing.
Even a couple licensed games got this treatment, since, as was the reason the originals were programmed to begin with, they could sell them based on name value. Even if the movies weren't available in that country, it was likely the population knew about them from their fame and success alone. And that's how we got Aladdin, The Lion King, Hercules, Squirrel King(Chip and Dale), and other demakes for the Famicom and Genesis. ...Hooray?
But for an obscure game like this, I have no idea why they decided it would be worth stealing. Maybe it's the latter licensed reason, since Tom and Jerry is a global icon, but even the original game wasn't that prolific or all that good. It was a budget game, made to make a few bucks by capitalizing on the popularity of the show and meant to be programmed and shipped out as quickly as possible. I can't imagine a company wasting their time and money making a budget game of what was already a budget game! Especially when there were so many other Triple-A titles to demake that have much more global recognition.
The only other reason I can think of for this game's existence is that it served as coding practice for one of the programmers, as The Lion King III: Timon & Pumbaa was for lead Dragon Co. programmer Tommy Xie. Given the obscurity of the game bootlegged, and its many problems and out-of-place elements, this is the most likely hypothesis. And, until someone tracks down Tommy Xie and asks him themselves, this is all we have to go on.
The cartridge I own doesn't have that much going on. It's simply the Tom and Jerry title card from the original theatrical shorts produced by Hanna & Barbera.
Though with an very unconvincing and slightly tilted "3" next to the title.
Other cartridge labels aren't any more impressive, simply reusing artwork from other Tom and Jerry media. Including this one, where they copied the box of the Tom and Jerry SNES game. ...And given the little I can find about this game and the fact there's no "3" on the label, this might just be a pirate of the official Tom and Jerry game for the NES...
Speaking of which, I've come across pirated copies of that game where they confused Sylvester from Looney Tunes with Tom. Because it's not a pirated game without some hilarious misunderstandings!
I already talked about Dragon Co. in my NES Titanic review, so I'd recommend checking that out for more information.
Though there are also "re-ports" by Nice Code, whom I also mentioned in the Titanic review, called "Primitive Man" and "Primitive Woman", which separate the Tom and Jerry levels into two standalone games, as well as replacing the title characters with cave-people. If you happen to own a Dreamgear 150-in-1, congratulations! You own half a bootleg! ...Now if you could only find the other half...
When you start up the game, you'll find that it has not one, but TWO animated title screens! ...Both of them containing completely random animations. The one you get when you first start it up has Tom repeatedly lighting and smoking a cigarette, then catching his thumb on fire and blowing it out, while Jerry looks to his left and right, then something is blown in his face, he takes several deep breaths, and then sneezes. ...I have a feeling this was supposed to be one sequence, with Tom blowing smoke in Jerry's face to make him sneeze, but there was a bit of a disconnect between animators...
And Tom smoking in this game. ...That's not going to sit well with the British public...
The second title screen is a recreation of the Chuck Jones-era of Tom and Jerry, complete with the title font and Jerry floating down into the "Y". ...Except, they replaced Tom meowing in a parody of the MGM lion with their version of Tom saluting, quickly looking left/right, then whistling. ...I guess he was checking for bootleg Butch before welcoming the player to the game?
As with the original game, Tom and Jerry alternate levels. In Level 1: The Alleyway, you start with Jerry. ...And right away, the problems with the game reveal themselves...
For starters, Jerry's weapon is almost completely useless. He throws these apples/acorns/balloons/whatever in an arc, sort of like the flame weapon from Ghosts & Goblins or the rock from Friday the 13th. This alone would make hitting enemies difficult, but thanks to the game's horrible hit detection, you never know if and when you'll hit something with them! It has something to do with them having to hit enemies in the air, as opposed to the ground. ...And seeing as how most enemies are on the ground, you can imagine how tough it is to hit anything in this game...
Luckily, you can exploit a physics-based glitch in the game to give your projectiles a bit more of an arc and hit enemies more easily. If you jump and rapidly throw the projectiles, you'll slowly float to the ground, giving you plenty of air time to throw stuff! This is the only way you're going to be able to hit most enemies in this game, so get used to it quickly...
Surprisingly, I'm not as mad at this glitch as I probably should be. This is Tom and Jerry, after all. Where physics only play a part if they can catch a cab and arrive on time.
After you've slain the first enemy of the game, a frog, you encounter the second biggest problem: YOU'RE TOO FREAKING SLOW! The characters in this game have to have the slowest walk cycles I've ever come across, inching their way across the screen one step at a time! Not only does this make the game a lot longer than it should be, but it makes avoiding fast-moving enemies incredibly difficult!
I DID eventually discover late in the game that you can make the characters run by holding Down and Right. ...But you still don't want to do that. Not only is it awkward to hold a standard D-Pad like that
But enemies will instantly leap out at you from the right side of the screen! And considering how far to the right you are, you're given little/no time to get out of the way! The only way to get anywhere is to sloooooooooowly inch your way across the screen, always being on guard for leaping bad guys ready to drain your health down to nothing, thanks to post-hit invincibility that lasts less than a SECOND! ...Hope you brought a lunch...
Then, of course, there's the classic pirate port issue of "Where can I jump?" Unlike most other 8-bit games where either everything is a climbable surface or they clearly shade and/or define what surfaces are solid, you'll never know what you can jump on or not unless you take the risk! I can jump onto these pillars
But not these! If you're going to separate things solid from things that aren't, DON'T USE THE SAME TEXTURES!
After you've died a few dozen times and spent a few hours getting used to the awkward controls, you'll finally arrive at the end of the screen, which drops you down into a sewer area. You can't walk through these narrow passageways. Instead, you need to hold Down and rapidly tap A! ...Or you could have just made them big enough to walk through, since there are no major obstacles in these tunnels, but their method takes more time, and I guess they had it to spare...
And remember to grab onto the ladder when you drop down at the end, to avoid getting pinched by a crab
Something Tom and Jerry are all too familiar with...
Then you'll need to master the springboard section, avoiding all spikes and crabs(as well as a leaky pipe, which I'm convinced is unavoidable...)
Falling onto the spikes results in instant death. ...I again have a Tom and Jerry clip that contradicts that, but if I pulled one out every time something reminded me of a short, the amount of GIFs on this page would make this review impossible to load. So I'll just use them when I absolutely have to.
Once you've gotten past that part, you arrive at what takes up the majority of this level: Swimming underwater. And considering how slow and clunky WALKING is, you can imagine how long it takes to get through this particular section... Thankfully, there's no oxygen meter like a number of other games with swimming levels have. ...But it makes precious little difference when you're swimming as fast as you walked, allowing enemies to appear out of nowhere and swarm you...
This section is absolutely PACKED with fast-moving enemies, spikes, deadly blue flora, and other hazards, all ready to rip out your entrails like an Itchy & Scratchy skit! It's virtually impossible to avoid everything unless you've memorized exactly where and when everything attacks and can preemptively avoid it in time!
This gets especially bad in these tight corridors where there's barely enough room to maneuver around things to get a key at the end.
Especially since you'll need to swim through ANOTHER danger-filled corridor once you've grabbed it in order to make it to the door! By the time you've successfully gotten the key and opened the door, you'll certainly feel like something that's gone in one end and out the other...
Oh, but I hope you still have some hit points left from that encounter, because not only are we greeted by another underwater obstacle course behind the door
But when we get back to the surface, we get more near-unavoidable frogs ready to pounce on us the second we leave the water(as well as some jellyfish more than happy to zap us if we dive back INTO the water...)
Plus some on the top level that have teamed up with crabs who are eagerly awaiting our heads to peek over the ladder. ...Did the frogs from Frogger finally decide to revolt and are going on a killing spree after years of being run over by cars and eaten by alligators? ...Because that's actually a logical explanation, come to think of it...
And just when you think you can't take any more and you're desperate for the end of the level... There's the end-level boss. And while he doesn't attack directly, his area is filled with unavoidable flame spouts that will whittle all remaining health down to nothing in no time.
And don't think you can hit him by standing slightly outside the fire zone...
The only way to cause damage is to walk directly into his plains of fire, continuously jump and hit the attack button, and hope you deplete his health before he depletes yours. ...Which, considering your health is more than likely already depleted by this point, will likely result in him killing you first, resulting in being sent back to the VERY START OF THE LEVEL! ...This isn't as unfair as I'm making it sound, as I'll explain later, but still...
So, to recap, you need to dodge the first wave of frogs, climb through the sewers, spring across pits of spikes and crabs, dive underwater, grab a key while avoiding underwater creatures and spikes in extremely tight spaces, avoid another barrage of jellyfish and turtles, sneak past ANOTHER wave of frogs, and still have enough health to take on the snake and his continually health-depleting environment! And if you fail, you have to start ALL OVER AGAIN! This is a game that requires the patience of a saint and a controller (and wall) of steel, if you want to make it through with everything intact!
But I did it! Several hours and many splitting headaches later, I FINALLY got to the snake with enough health to withstand his attacks and ruin his stuff! He exploded in a giant fireball, and I got to walk to the end of the screen and see Jerry's super glitchy "Victory" screen, happy in the knowledge that I'd NEVER have to face him again!
And that was the first level! ...Out of five! ...I'm in desperate need of some Ibuprofen. Gimme a minute...
After you've doped yourself on enough painkillers to knock out a fully-grown elephant, it's on to Level 2: Snowy Mountains. ...And this is where most similarities between this game and the game it's supposed to be a port of end.
As I said before, Tom & Jerry 3 is supposedly a demake of Tom and Jerry Frantic Antics, which itself is a game version of Tom and Jerry: The Movie. And while certain assets are either borrowed or influenced from that game(most obviously from Frantic Antics' Street, Alley, and Carnival levels)
Frantic Antics mostly took place in a suburban setting, with levels set in or around houses. It didn't include arctic or forest or construction levels, like Tom & Jerry 3 does. So this is as much of a "port" as most of the unofficial The Lion King games are(which we'll be getting to shortly.) They may share sprites and physics, but the levels and overall aesthetic are almost completely different, making you wonder why they even bothered to call this a "port".
Still, at least it's not as bad as swapping a few sprites and trying to pass off a hack as a completely original game... That's why few, if any, solely graphical hacks will appear on this blog.
Anyway, this is the first level to feature Tom. ...Or the game's interpretation of Tom. Last I checked, Tom was gray, not as black as the game's borders. ...Was there an issue with coloring him gray, like it was over how many colors the Famicom could handle at a time? ...Couldn't they have colored him dark blue, in that case? They managed it with the Game Over and Victory screens, so clearly they had the color palette to spare... Maybe that's why they designed a Tom and Jerry label to include Sylvester instead of Tom?
Instead of an arc like Jerry's, Tom's projectile weapon flies straight ahead. So that's already an improvement on Tom's part!
...But you still have to contend with fast-moving enemies that pop out of nowhere... In fact, magically appearing enemies might be worse in this stage than the last!
Whether you're walking along or jumping to the ground or above platform, a rabid bunny or Hong Kong Phooey with a baseball bat will be waiting to take a chunk out of your health before you can reorient yourself and get far enough away to lob little black dots at them! Enemies are supposed to END their walking pattern as they reach the edge of the screen, not begin whatever they do! This results in SOOOOO many cheap hits and deaths in this game that could have been avoided by making the enemies spawn a little further away from the edge of the screen. Or even setting the characters back a bit, since pirate game developers LOVE situating the main characters nearly right up against the right edge of the screen for some reason! It's an absolute pain I've seen in too many of these, and the major reason it takes so long to complete quite a few of these games...
Still, the enemy placements are fixed, so once you've gone through the level enough times to memorize where and when they'll appear, you can get through with minimal/no damage.
...Until you reach one of the level's skiing sections... And it's these areas that nearly made me smash my controller in anger and give up on this game entirely.
First, you need to avoid this boulder that's stuck in a rolling loop until you get ahead of it. To do this, you need to jump from this sign and land on the slope WITHOUT touching any of the instant death obstacles!
This alone can take a good number of tries before you land safely AND far enough from an obstacle to avoid crashing into it.
Then, once you've found a safe place to land, it's a matter of skiing down the slope without crashing into anything! And this is a lot harder than it sounds, since you're given very little control during these sections. There's no way to speed up or slow down, so you'll need to time your jumps based on where you are or you will be. Plus since the sprites in this game are so large, the obstacles can quickly run you down before you even realize what happened. There's also a slight delay in pushing the button and jumping, and the jumps in this game are rather sudden, further complicating when to jump to avoid the stuff.
My advice is to jump right when you see the obstacles fully show up in the bottom-right corner. It may seem too early, but by the time you're positioned where you'd EXPECT to jump, it'll be too late. Just jump with plenty of space between you and the snowman/pit and you should jump just in time to avoid everything.
...Except the larger pits the game tosses at you to throw you off guard. These are only passable if you're right at the edge of the pit when you jump, and even then, you have to know that these are here! Add on the aforementioned delay in jumping, and even if you're prepared for these pits, you'll likely not make it unless your timing is IMPECCABLE! So basically, it all comes down to monotonous memorization, rather than being a fun platformer. ...Dragon's Lair, you are not...
After a few hours of skiing and having the pattern down to where you could sketch it in your sleep, you FINALLY reach the bottom of the slope. ...Where you quickly have to smash one of the blue dogs and jump on top of the platform before the boulder hits you and makes you do the whole thing all over again. ...Oh, but don't think you can stop to breathe. It's still not over!
Because right after that skiing segment is ANOTHER skiing segment, with a whole other pattern to memorize! Thankfully it's shorter than the previous segment, but it's still another bout of tedious memorization right after you're reeling from how long it took to get through that last one! By this point, you're either revved and ready to take on another section, or, more likely, you're terrified of losing and having to do that last segment all over again!
Either way, expect as much dying as the last slope...
So, after conquering THAT section, which also involves quickly killing a blue dog and taking his place before the bolder hits, you're done with the skiing segments! ...However, the level is still far from over. What else does it have to throw at you?
A SKATING segment, of course! Yep. You do the same thing you did with the previous two section, only this time, it's vertical and you're traveling right-to-left! And it's just as tedious and difficult as the slopes!
...Ok, I tell a lie. It's nowhere near as hard as the previous obstacles. It's slightly slower, and there's much more of a gap between hazards, giving you more of a heads-up when to jump. Besides, by this point, you've mastered the art of predetermined jumping to the point you can dodge a bullet like it was telegraphed to you a week in advance, and you're fully determined to get through this level if it kills you! ...Which, if you're not reading this section, it might have already...
The only other obstacle during this section are these falling icicles. Again, there's no way to speed up or slow down, so if you started skating at the wrong time, they're unavoidable. Thankfully, they just take a hit point and don't instantly kill you like everything else, so if your health bar is full enough, you can just concentrate on the jumping.
Heck, the section takes so much pity on you, it includes THREE attempts to grab an extra life! So even if the skating is monstrously difficult for you, if you get far enough in it, you can theoretically retry from the checkpoint over and over!
Oh yeah, there are checkpoints throughout the levels. Did I forget to mention that? After every major section, such as this level's before and after each slope, the game provides an area to respawn in upon death. For most of this level, this is the only relief it throws your way; not having to begin all over again if you miss a slope!
Until you run out of lives and have to start the level over... Still, it's better than Donkey Kong Country 4 just for that implementation...
So after the TWO slopes AND the skating section, you FINALLY get to the end level boss: a brown witch that might be based on the one from the The Flying Sorceress short(though that might be giving them too much credit.) Thankfully, she's super easy. She throws burning skulls at you, but they only hit in two places. Just keep throwing your projectiles at her and it's extremely likely you'll finish her off before she tosses enough skulls in your direction.
And that was Level 2. ...I'll pause for a second to let you take your therapy session before continuing on to
Level 3: The Forest. Play alternates to Jerry, so it's back to the arcing weapon. But since most of the enemies are flying, it works better in this level than the first. ...That's not saying much, but it's the most I can give him.
The good news is that, from here on out, everything is a straightforward platformer, so nothing gets as hard as Level 2.
...But that doesn't mean the game isn't still unfairly difficult, especially since Level 3 is one of those "WHERE THE HELL DO I GO?!" type of levels...
The area's a literal maze of branches, spread out in all different directions. You're never quite sure which branch will get you back on track, nor even what you can jump on! It's admittedly a little more clear here, since the solid platforms are more defined than the ones in Level 1, but it still lacks consistency.
I can jump on a branch just fine here
But I fall through here! If I wanted to play I Wanna Be The Guy, I'll PLAY I Wanna Be The Guy, thank you very much!
The worst part is jumping from these flippin' flipping leaves. When they flip, they lose their solid quality, causing you to fall through. That's actually easy enough to avoid if you stand in the right place, but the problem is the size of the leaf. As I mentioned, there's a delay in jumping, and there are a number of wide spaces where your jump is just enough to get from one side to another! Positioning yourself for these jumps without preparing for the delay can lead to you simply walking off or falling through the leaves. And falling from high enough is instantly fatal...
No, wait, I take it back. The worst part is this lily pad section, because it's a jumping section AND it's ground level AND it reintroduces the frogs AND it has a number of unavoidable enemies! It's everything wrong with the first level and MORE!
If you manage to survive falling from the trees, this section will help relieve you of those pesky remaining lives and hit points...
Speaking of, we haven't talked about those yet, have we? ...Let's do that.
You start each level off with 3 lives and 3 hit points. Every time you're hit, you lose a hit point. Standard stuff for most platformers.
However, when the life bar runs out, instead of the character dying and returning to the previous checkpoint, it refills the life bar and subtracts a life, meaning you're still in the exact same spot when you lose a life. Basically, this makes the life system less of a standard "extra life" bank and more an extended life bar, similar to Monster Party for the NES.
Lives DO still play a part, though. When something instantly fatal happens(falling into a pit, crashing into spikes or water, etc.), you're returned to the last checkpoint, minus a life and with your health bar unchanged from before. A pain, sure, but it still keeps you from having to play the level from the beginning.
Until, as I mentioned, your lives run out...
While there's no way to regain health(though since you don't actually die, there's no reason), there are two ways to regain lives. First is by collecting 25 of these cans that are scattered through each level
And second is by simply picking up an Extra Life. Apples for Jerry, and meat for Tom.
The latter of which the game likes to place in nearly-unreachable places...
Still, even if you lose all lives, you're given unlimited continues, allowing you to play each stage until you beat it. The only excuse not to complete the game is that you've given up. ...Or you've ripped the cartridge out of the slot and thrown it out the window. That latter one's a bit more likely in this case.
Once you've finally navigated the maze of branches and lily pads and avoided enough obstacles to retain some life, you'll reach the end boss: A fire-breathing lion that again looks like the one from Jerry and the Lion. Like the previous boss, this one's relatively easy. Just jump from the tree on the left a few times and fire repeatedly. You'll take some damage, but you'll likely defeat the boss before he destroys you. Then it's a hop, skip, and a jump to
Level 4: The Suburbs. Tom again, and we FINALLY have a relatively "level" level. No over-reliance on sketchy platforms, no major drops, and no mazes. Just "walk left-to-right" vanilla platforming. And by this point, we NEED something that's just a walk in the park. Like a walk in the park!
Of all the levels in this game, this was the easiest. ...Meaning I died the fewest amount of times here. There were still frogs, squirrels, and spike pits to ruin my day, but since most of the level was level, and since Tom's weapon fires straight, they were easier to avoid and defeat.
...Most of the time...
What was also nice was that they included optional branching paths. You could still go straight along the ground
Or you could jump up the platforms here and grab a few cans and an extra life! It's completely optional, but it's here and it rewards you for exploring. This level feels the closest anything comes to being a real game, and for the titles I've been forced to play thorough, that's one of the biggest compliments I can give any of these pirate games!
Trust me, I have quite a few "non-games" in my collection...
The casualness of the level also lets me admire the beautiful design work the programmers put into this game. For all the game's flaws, and it has a good number I haven't mentioned yet, the backgrounds stand out as the game's biggest strength. Look at all those colors, the variety of objects, and how detailed everything looks!
Only rarely are designs repeated in this game, giving you a number of differently drawn background elements as you scroll along the level! Everything stands out and they legitimately look like backgrounds from the Tom and Jerry era of animated shorts
Plus, they take up the entire screen, unlike Donkey Kong Country 4's method of heavily compressing and removing background elements, leaving mostly black space...
Of course, did I expect any less from the designers of the NES Titanic game? I hope that after their studio closed, they found their true calling as background artists on other games and movies! ...That they hopefully only HELPED to make in that case. There's only so much bad programming I can stomach...
The end level boss here is a dog that resembles the recurring character Spike. He also shoots fire. ...You can tell we're nearing the end of the game.
You'd THINK you could fire projectiles from the chimney, which seems to be level enough with him, yet far enough away to avoid his flames. ...But your firing range is too short to hit in this case.
So either you just do the standard "Jump, Fire, Take Damage" routine you've done for the other bosses.
Or you jump to the platform RIGHT BEHIND HIM, where he can't hit you, and shoot him there until he explodes! ...I could not make this up if I tried! They actually put in a platform right behind the boss where you can wail on him, and he can't turn around and damage you! ...Can I even make a joke about that? I think THAT'S a joke by itself! ...I'll just play the McBain gif...
After defeating Spike, you arrive at Level 5: The Shipyard. This is it! The final level! ...And since it's the last, this is where the game throws everything it can at you as a last ditch effort to make you give up!
Starting with these barely-visible white spikes you can end up stepping on without realizing it.
Followed by construction equipment that materializes out of thin air(again similar to their Titanic game.)
Plenty of frogs and bees, of course!
Don't forget the electrically charged transformer boxes!
And, as the icing on the cake with a cherry on top, and what is mandatory of every construction-themed level: Spinning buzzsaws that are a nightmare to get around! All these obstacles AND MORE are all present and crowding the level, ready to make you throw your controller with such force, you've successfully created a perpetual motion machine and violated the first and second laws of thermodynamics! ...Just add that to your rap sheet with the other laws you've violated by buying, playing, and advertising a pirated game.
However, even with all these obstacles, everything the game's thrown at you, and all the added junk in your way, you're gonna get through this level faster than any of the others. By this point, you've taken all the crap this game has tossed at you, and thrown it right back in its face! You've mastered the controls to the point they're instinctive! You've delved so deep into "The Zone" , you can see the fabric of the coding itself! You've memorized all the patterns to where you can choreograph a dance number based on the enemy movements! You've spent HOURS swimming through the sewers, skiing down slopes, climbing through a maze of trees, and taking a peaceful walk through suburbia, and you're not going to let a level of construction materials get in your way to victory! YOU ARE STRONG! YOU ARE MIGHTY! AND YOU WILL STAND AT THE GATES OF VALHALLA IN TRIUMPH!
After getting through a lot of construction site and loading dock, you finally arrive at the cruise ship christened "Tom Jerry". Heh. Cute.
At the top of the ship is the return of the witch from Level 2, only with more hitpoints. You're going to be taking a lot more damage here, so I hope you've been collecting those cans and apples... But if you have, just keep throwing those apples at the witch, keep an eye on your health gauge, and watch the witch go out with a BOOM!
And that's the end of the game, where, for all your hard work and dedication, they reward you with a static screen that says "The End", accompanied by Tom and Jerry wearing party hats and taking them off in celebration! ...Well, at least this game HAD a custom ending card, unlike Donkey Kong Country 4...
And that was Tom & Jerry 3 for the Famicom! I hope you enjoyed this alternate universe where Gene Deitch also directed the Tom and Jerry game series, and I eagerly look forward to the 25th anniversary remaster for the Xbox One and PS4, where they include a new escort level featuring Tuffy the Mouse across his many direct to DVD incarnations!
...And for those of you who think I'm serious about the above statement...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Design: The cartridge is built like the standard Famicom cart, with a label that's simply one of the Tom and Jerry intro shots with a "3" slapped on the end. Not exactly something that stands out.
Controls: Regular Famicom controls, and regular pirate glitches. For the most part, the characters respond to the button presses and jump and shoot when prompted. However, there is a slight delay in jumping, and if you're too close to the edge of something, you're likely to fall off instead of jump, even if the button was pressed in time. The fact that you move so slowly, yet jump in leaps and bounds can also throw off your timing, though the continual firing while jumping glitch does come in handy with many enemies and especially the bosses. So while the controls don't feel that refined, they're relatively responsive, and I can safely say I've come across worse.
Graphics: Quite a bit of the game actually looks impressively detailed. Each of the levels has several different backgrounds, with little to no repetition as they scroll. There are different buildings and trees in the background when you scroll a screen length, and there's another set of different elements a screen length from that! For a cheap Famicom game(especially one based on the cartoon series that practically invented repeating backgrounds), that's quite impressive! The game also features a wide variety of colors and textures, giving a lot of detail to the backgrounds and static obstacles, which, after having to play a lot of pirate games with colors comprised almost solely of super muted greens and blacks, look great! Sure, this makes most things look like a coloring book, but it's more than even a lot of NES games I've seen incorporate, especially games like Super Mario Bros. that mostly use solid colors for backgrounds. The animations are relatively impressive as well, with Tom and Jerry both having detailed walk cycles and idle animations, and the animated into being a nice(though nonsensical) touch. ...Though the animations for the enemies, the bosses, and Tom/Jerry throwing projectiles leave a bit to be desired with how jerky they are... The major problem I have is the design for most of the sprites. Jerry looks fine, but Tom barely looks like himself! Not only is he mysteriously black, he's designed much more like a real cat, leaving out most of his cartoonish features and expressions, to the point where if I didn't know this was supposed to be Tom, I wouldn't make the connection. And while the main characters and backgrounds look fine, I'm curious if the enemies were transferred from a game for a more powerful system, since they have the same compression and clipping issues as the transferred sprites from Donkey Kong Country 4. Or maybe they were screenshots from the cartoons, heavily Photoshopped and shrunken to leave only close approximations of what they're supposed to be? This is especially obvious with the bosses and the tiny blue dog with the baseball bat, as they look like they were from something else before, but then were lifted to work on a less powerful console. Still, while I can't say that any design in this game particularly "wowed" me, I can say there was quite a bit of work put into the graphical aspects, and I'm impressed with how many original assets they created and ran without compressing the images to a mess of pixels. Also, backgrounds are a plus. ...You gotta appreciate the little things with pirate games.
Music & Sound: The music sounds cartoonish enough, and better than the bass-induced headache that was most of their Titanic project, but still forgettably bland. It's again a string of notes strung together in a rough approximation of what it's trying to imitate; in this case, fast cartoon scores. While they fit the environment and tone, I couldn't hum them if you asked me. I even had to go back and listen to the footage to make sure it wasn't all the same track. And no, unlike Titanic and Donkey Kong Country 4, there's no 8-bit rendition of the Tom and Jerry theme... The sound is again minimal, to the point it's not worth taking about. There's an effect for throwing stuff(which sounds like a highly compressed "whoosh"), a *ding* effect for picking stuff up, and an explosion effect for defeating the bosses. That's it. It's the bare minimum for games, and what is used in every other 8-bit game ever. So while the music and sound aren't distracting, they're not a strong point for the console either.
Gameplay: SLOW! ...But a bit fun, nonetheless. While the walk cycles are really slow, the game never feels that much like a slog, thanks to the varied backgrounds, the variety in the platforms and scrolling, and how much shorter the levels are than other pirate games I've played. Does that make the game good? ...Not really. The major annoyance of the game are the instantly spawning enemies that pop out from the right side of the screen and come at you too quickly to react, meaning you have to very carefully inch your way across and fire every few steps on longer paths, in order to keep from having your health depleted in just a few seconds. A lot of the enemies are hard to hit and/or dodge, and the dodginess of the controls can lead to a lot of cheap deaths in the more intensive jumping sections. And the frustrating sections of the game are REALLY frustrating! I can't tell you how long it took me to get past the sewers, slopes, and maze of trees, thanks to very unclear objectives, a very crowded screen, and a very limited view of the surroundings. ...But with all that said, it's a bit more than just a standard platformer. It's not just "walk right, dodge enemies, collect stuff", as it takes you left, right, up, down, and gives you a number of different environments to navigate and adjust to. It's especially nice on Level 4, where you can choose to go straight, or take one of the branching paths, collecting bonus items along the way. Speaking of, I'm glad to have played a game where picking things up actually results in something happening(e.g. gaining lives), as a good number of other pirate games I've played have items that either don't do anything or are simply there for a score that's erased as soon as you turn off the game. If this was a licensed "real" game, I'd be much more harsh about it, but for being a cheap knockoff of a budget game nobody cared about to begin with, it's pretty good, all things considered. ...Though maybe you'd be better off playing the real thing.
Replay Value: There's nothing else to attempt once you've completed the simplistic platforming, and the frustrating sections are so much so, you don't want to come back to them... I guess if you want to play through it to practice for a speedrun, it's not as tedious as other pirate games, but otherwise, it's not a game that's much fun to play through the first time.
Overall:
It's slightly better than Donkey Kong Country 4, and it has things going for it with its detailed graphics and simple-yet-varied platforming layout, but I still can't say I had that much fun playing it. The gameplay's slow and glitchy, trying to avoid enemies is a headache, the sound and music are uninspired, and it's an unbalanced mess of areas being too easy or too hard. I'd only recommend it if you have an unhealthy fascination with pirate games like I do, and you're curious how a game from the Genesis era plays on the Famicom. Otherwise, I'd avoid this game like the theatrical movie the original is based on. ...Though come to think of it, if the knockoff version is also based on a movie, let me know. Sounds exciting!
No comments:
Post a Comment