Home Improvement (SNES, 1994)

Only in America can a show about a guy who grunts like an idiot and his family become so popular. Given the wonderfully written stories and constantly recycled jokes like “more power” and “grunt, grunt, grunt” it’s a shame that Home Improvement only lasted a mere eight years. Given its unwavering popularity, it’s only natural that a game based off of all the pivotal plot points of the show would follow. You won’t be battling breast cancer here, nor will you fight the trials and tribulations of your children. Instead you’ll be battling horrible controls, confusing level design, and your ever growing urge to scream.

Home Improvement’s storyline is as thin as the attempt to not make this game look like a marketing cash-in. Tim “The Toolman” Taylor is being honored with his own line of tools and just as he’s about to introduce them, “gasp!”, they’ve been stolen! The only clue that remains is a note telling Tim to search the surrounding (and bafflingly large) public access movie lot to find his tools. Thus begins one of the most pointless and idiotic games ever conceived.

You’ll guide Tim through a number of confusing and poorly designed levels such as a prehistoric jungle where he must battle dinosaurs and bugs or a medieval set where you’ll fight knights and the like among a few other cliche themed levels. Each level is separated into three increasingly confusing sections where you’ll have a harder race against time and even more frustrating jumping puzzles to endure. Your goal is to collect a set number of crates within the specified time limit. Your life works on the Sonic the Hedgehog scale where you’ll collect random nuts and bolts throughout the level and if you’re hit, you’ll drop them all and have to struggle to pick a few back up so that you can take another hit. This would work well if the nuts and bolts that you drop didn’t fly around with a blatant disregard for physics and disappear after a second or two. Of course, if you lack the nuts...or bolts for that matter, you're restarting from the last checkpoint. Come to think of it, it's a lot like Sonic, only without all the speed, fun, and furries.
 

Tim will need an arsenal of weapons to take down all of the robotic dinosaurs and surprisingly aggressive dinner theater actors dressed as knights he’s going to come across. Thank Allah there are a ton of power tools around. You’ll be able to fight with a nail gun, flame thrower, and even a crazy ass chainsaw that shoots a fan of electric balls. No matter what weapon you’re armed with, the experience still sucks. You could stand right up against an enemy and attack, only to have your fire go right through them, which means you have to constantly certain distance yourself to do any kind of damage.
 

Aside from the zany weapons, you’ll also have a grappling hook so you can reach those hard to reach places, a jackhammer to take care of those hard-to-reach  bugs, and a sledgehammer to take down walls that block your way. While the grappling hook can be useful for swinging to platforms that may be out of your reach, it can’t really make up its mind whether it wants to hold on or not…making its use more of a life or death crap shoot than a useful tool. The jackhammer is required to find those precious crates that will end your misery of your current level so that you may move on to a higher plane of frustration, but you never know if the ground can be destroyed or not...so you're left constantly jacking to find the right route.
 

It’s bad enough that backgrounds are constantly recycled, and respawning enemies don’t help to clue you into the fact that you’re gaining any new ground. Hills are everywhere, which wouldn’t be so bad if Tim didn’t slip and slide around like he was skating on ice rather than the floor of a jungle set. This especially doesn’t help with the insanely frustrating jumping puzzles the game throws at you where you’ll be doing your fair share of “hail Mary” jumps to nearly unreachable platforms that you can’t get to by means of the grappling hook. You’ll eat up the majority of your time making attempts at these jumps only to miss and have to fight your way back around to the platform to attempt them again. You can try to creep to the very edge to try to make it, but you’ll end up slipping off or not jumping at all thanks to the unresponsive controls. The moral of the story is that your goals are virtually unreachable and not to even try. Levels are designed like a pixelated cell....escape almost seems impossible, so you’d better have your Game Genie handy for this one.
 

The sound rivals the gameplay in overall absurdity. Enemies all have generic sound bytes and bugs sound more like alarm clocks than giant prehistoric fire-breathing dragonflies. Tim will give out grunts when hit, but it fails to sound like the coke head we all know and love. The music sets the mood, but loops endlessly and really tends to get annoying.
 

It’s blatantly obvious that there wasn’t a leg for the Home Improvement game to step on, yet Absolute trudged on. If you check the website of one of the developers, the license was bought, but there were months of deliberation on what the game would be like. After ousting the project lead, they decided to rush out a generic platformer in six months. Kudos to them for making something out of nothing, but this thing was doomed to fail from the start. It all comes down to the marketing geared towards making people buy a game that only loosely resembles the show it’s supposed to represent. Not that the show makes me sick enough, but when you mix in horrible gameplay elements and virtually unreachable goals, maybe then you can understand my overall contempt for this game.
 

I can only think of two things that bombed harder than this game.

And that should speak volumes...
 

This video needs MORE POWER! Grunt, grunt, grunt....sigh.

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Super Special Mystery Bonus! Three 80's sitcoms that should get their own game.

Full House: 

The Tanner family has been kidnapped! It's up to DJ's BFF Kimmy to use her brains, radical side-pony hairstyle, and awesome sense of fashion to save them. Use the Olsen Twins to crawl into small places that Kimmy can't fit into. New characters are unlocked when you rescue Uncle Joey (Bullwinkle exclusive to Xbox 360 and the Woodchuck excluisive to PS3) to play awesome mini games. Now we'll all now how much wood a woodchuck can chuck. Get up to ther game's climactic ending where the family, lead by Uncle Jesse (with unlockable Elvis jumpsuit costume) plays a concert featuring songs like "My Sharona" and "The Boys are Back in Town". The final act brings back the circa 1989 Beach Boys for a fifteen minute remix of "Kokomo". 

Family Ties:

Michael J. fox, haunted by the visage of his dead girlfriend, sets out to put an end to his nightmares so he can FINALLY study for his MBLA exam. It turns out girly commands an army of zombies.

...and you were probably expecting a MS joke in there. BTW, does anyone else think this pic is a little creepy?? 

Growing Pains: 

The Seaver family is hosting a fighting tournament to see just who the true head of the household is! Who wouldn't want to see the ultimate grudge match of Mike Siever vs Boner. It's friend versus friend, mother versus father, and brother versus sister! Watch as Mike uses the powers of Jesus to split Maggie like moses parted the red sea...talk about riding the crimson wave. Carol reigns victorious as uses her powers of drunk driving to reduce Ben to a red smear. And well, we can all guess how Boner finishes fools off. Finally, something to live up to the title of "Growing Pains".