Overall Rating: 3/5 Stars
Back in the day, during that vague period of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s, kids’ television was arguably experiencing a heyday. Between high-quality Saturday morning cartoons and the amazing plastic toys they hawked, there was much fun to be had, with much of it peddled by Nickelodeon, and much of their peddling done through kid-centric game shows like G.U.T.S. or ones involving lots of green slime. One of these iconic programs was Fun House, and it proved to be popular enough, apparently, to warrant a licensed video game on the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) console.
In 1991, developer Hi Tech Expressions made that a reality. Their previous efforts were, by all indications, hit-or-miss – from other show-based games like Win, Lose, Or Draw to such questionable endeavors as Barbie, from the options-loaded machine of The Chessmaster to the bloated mess of Muppet Adventure: Chaos At The Carnival. How would Fun House fit into company legacy?
Gameplay
Fun House is an overhead-view, screen-scrolling action-puzzler in which the goal to progress through dozens of levels that gradually increase in complexity and difficulty until, ultimately, beating the entire game. The goal of each stage is to throw red balls at certain targets. Once all the targets are hit, sometimes required to do so in order when they are numbered, a key appears; once the key is grabbed, that area is completed.
The mechanics involve something akin to “tank controls,” meaning that rather than use the directional pad to actually move the on-screen controllable protagonist, the player merely uses the NES d-pad to point in a direction, while pressing the A button actually moves. The B button throws the red balls, of which the player has an infinite supply.
A box in the top-left corner shows how many seconds are left to conquer the room, as each has a time limit, usually under a minute. Another line shows how many targets remain, and a third counter displays how many coins have been collected, of which getting 25 neats the player an extra life.
Items are collected on the largely grid-based boards to earn silver coins, or gold coins which are worth five silvers, and perhaps most importantly, time bonuses that add seconds to the clock. Simple point bonuses can also be found, cumulatively adding to the player’s score as play progresses. Oddly enough, hidden items can be found by bumping into the walls. Certain points reward a bump by revealing an item.
The challenge, obviously, is a strategy mix of manual dexterity and route navigation, as the screen may only show a small amount of the whole level at a time. The targets may be in plain sight, but the player given minimal time to perfectly maneuver to them; or the targets may be spread apart in non-adjacent hallways, especially if numbered; or the targets may even be in clustered, but somehow set in such a way to not make the act of hitting them so simple.
Aside from simple routing difficulties, Fun House also provides challenges to the player in forms of on-field obstacles. There are bumper things, for example, that, when run into, violently propel the player backwards a fair distance, and this sentence has many commas. Also, there are stationary guns that slowly rotate, constantly firing a machine-gun spray of balls that serve to push the player back to a lesser extent.
Then there are the surface effects. Yes, the classic “ice floor” is in action, forcing the player to slide along without control once entering its field of effect. There are ramps that slow the player down, even some covered in slime, but perhaps most notorious of all in old-school gaming: Conveyor belts.
The rooms are divided into numbers by Floor. For example, level 3-2 would be the second room on the third floor. There are usually about a half-dozen rooms per floor, and there are a dozen floors in total. For what it is worth, best luck to the intrepid player who dares try to conquer them all. The good news: There are warps along the way that, if a skilled player were to find them, would be able to skip rooms.
Graphics
Although in candy-coated sugar color schemes that distastefully assault the senses with the changing theme of each floor, this is not a bad-looking 8-bit video game. The animated action smooth proceeds at a sometimes-frenetic pace with minimal flickering or slowdown issues. The whole top-down view phenomenon is a little trippy, and may never seem quite “right” for some gamers. One interesting correlation of the visualization is showing the impressive range of nuanced motion given to the player, in actually offering slightly more than eight directions (cardinal, diagonal) to fire in. However, this game’s one big failure is that despite the box art, instruction manual, and in-game descriptions trying to make this sound like a slimy, messy, goopy, grimy sort of game, a player never really receives that impression throughout.
Sound
The sound effects exist in an ethereal, ephemeral sense, barely there for the most part, with the exception of hitting targets and collecting keys. The music is bad. The music is that kind of low-production-value tripe put out by developers who never quite got a handle on the NES hardware, content to produce tinny, high-chiming, non-clarity, no-fidelity background tracks that grate the ears and offend the soul. Yet, weirdly, there is one bit of goodness to be found in the auditory department for Fun House: The quick victory song played at level completion is pleasant and satisfying.
Originality
As a license video game based on pre-existing media, the concept itself can hardly be credited for conceptualization, but the implementation is definitely distinctive for the NES title roster. The soul of the show is intact, though, with the surfer-dude language from the interstitial-screen host throughout, and level names like “Of Ice And Zen” to self-descriptive clues like “Triplets.” Clever stuff abounds, to some extent.
There are bonus points for high-score runs, many levels, an interesting play-control format, but at the final judgment, one element stands out for this reviewer: This game defines the idea of being linear. This among the most straightforward, level-by-level, increasingly difficult, easy-to-grasp-but-hard-to-complete games out there. Honestly, beyond the combination iterations of item placement, routes, and obstacles, the actual gameplay depth is limited. Nevertheless, the result is not terrible, and worth either a quick fun see-how-far playthrough or a true challenge for the retro warriors out there. Good for a rating of three stars out of five.