I wasn’t that impressed by the 1991 Addams Family movie. Like a lot of big budget movies, though, it spawned a tidal wave of licensed crap including a few video games. Turns out that at least one of them wasn’t half bad.
The Addams Family game for the Super NES is loosely based on the movie. Kind of like how riding a bicycle is loosely like piloting a space shuttle. You take control of Gomez Addams and have to guide him through the labyrinthine mansion to rescue your kidnapped family members (who are conveniently in the far reaches of Creation), restore Fester’s memory, and defeat the bad guys. Simple, eh?
Gomez has two secret powers. He can jump on enemies to make them disappear (a.k.a. killing them) and he has a ludicrous amount of extra lives at his disposal. With these two powers, he’d have to try hard to not win the day.
One of the cool things about this game is that the mansion is absolutely humongous, though a bit linear. But the enemies aren’t particularly tough to dispatch, and the terrain isn’t too tough to navigate. But there’s hidden junk absolutely everywhere. You’ll hardly go a dozen screens without finding some secret passage or hidden door leading to a cache of riches and extra lives.
I rented this game one time and was able to sail through the game in one evening of marathon play, so it’s not too tough. I have to believe, though, that the main reason I was able to finish it off so quickly was because I had more lives than I really knew what to do with. Any time I lost a life, I was only set back a couple of screens, so even the tougher bits were reduced to me trying to brute-force my way through by throwing away life after life at it.
Other than that, though, it was a pretty fun game, and probably one that I would have thought about buying had it not been Nerfed into oblivion by feeding you so many extra lives to blow through it with.
And, yes, I realize I don’t have to pick them up, and that would make it more challenging. But, seriously, that’s like telling me I don’t have to pick up all the $20 bills I find on the sidewalk because that’ll just decrease the challenge of my life. It just doesn’t make sense.
[...] he’s sporting. Which means that, even though you start the game with what appears to be a generous allotment of 50 lives, it’s not going to be nearly enough to get through this [...]
[...] more trouble with it, and I’m pretty sure that it’s because there was no way to get a ludicrous amount of lives to kind of nullify the challenge a bit. The most you can start with is seven. Combine that with a [...]