Retro Video Game Review: Fisher-Price Firehouse Rescue

Overall Rating: 1/5 Stars

Fisher-Price is a toy company. In 1992, their work with developer GameTek, who was responsible for some game-show titles on the NES, resulted in the abomination known as Fisher-Price Firehouse Rescue.

Gameplay

The player controls a fire truck. There are two modes of gameplay: The overhead view, which is like a maze, and the player must navigate the fire truck to the house, which is conveniently labeled “HOUSE”; and the side view, during which the player must move the fire truck in such a way that the ladder is under the victim, which is either a person in a house or a cat in a tree, who is then rescued when the A button is pressed.

There are four difficulty settings that gradually add bigger mazes, even to the extent of scrolling; a time limit of 50 seconds to complete the tasks, starting at level 3; two houses to rescue people from; and, confoundedly enough, difficulty 4 adds this obnoxious flashing key somewhere in the maze that must be collected before entering the certain house. The incredible aspect of this is that is can actually be quite legitimately challenging to navigate through a multi-screen-sized maze, grab the key, go to the two houses, and save all the victims in the scant time of 50 seconds. Luckily, the stages can be memorized. This is bad design, when the game is super hard until the mazes are simply memorized due to sheer repetition, not requiring any skillful controller manipulation or similar talent.

The houses are never actually on fire, likely because the developers rightly believed that it might disturb children to put the enormous responsibility of saving lives on the screen in front of the. Imagine the horror of driving up to the blazing house, victims screaming within, their clothes catching fire as smoke billows from the windows, their faces contorted into expressions of pure agony, as the timer counts down to zero and everybody dies.

Do not worry about forgetting how to play or what all the difficulty settings mean, because it is all rather exhaustively explained, word for word, in plentiful detail, if you so choose at the title screen, which is among the blandest ever created.

Graphics

There are some backgrounds used. The mazes are tile-based. The trees and grass look like pixelated trees and grass. There are several different house designs. The people look like the Little People line of Fisher-Price toys. It could be supposed that the graphic artists were not completely lazy. It could also be observed that this is not a pleasant-looking game. The animations work. Perhaps it is a benefit that there are no slowdown or flickering issues.

Sound

The title screen track is that carnival tune that, at the moment, cannot be remembered, in terms of the name. Otherwise, there is no background music at all. The sound effect when rescuing someone is that 8-bit “boop” sound, like an elevator arriving at its floor, sounding very familiar to any who hear it. The highlight is the low, throaty hum of the engine. Fair warning: It is also rather constant.

Originality

Well, there is no other game quite like this one. Do not mistake that as praise, as people should thank Jesus that there is no other game quite like Fisher-Price Firehouse Rescue. It is dull, it cannot possibly be educational, no kid would like this more than a typical NES game, and it cuts corners in its astounding minimalism. It is best played as a drunken group, where people can laugh hysterically when the wrong path is chosen in the mazes. Otherwise, there is little true merit to be found here. Actually, honestly, they should have just used the maze-navigation engine and produced a whole video game just for solving intricate mazes. That would have been superior. But, no: One star out of five rating for this tripe.

Oh, if you “win,” you get a congratulatory screen that shows a toy fireman lying next to a blue ribbon and the text says something like “WELCOME TO THE FORCE!” Blech.


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