Bart Simpson's Escape From Camp Deadly: Having a Cow, Man!

The Simpsons is one of the most important cartoons of all time, regardless of your opinion on its quality over its 30+ years of life. It saved adult animation, while still being a product that kids could enjoy. And a product that could hock any old crap. And that seems like an apt way to start an essay on the Game Boy debut, Bart Simpson's Escape From Camp Deadly.

Year of Release: 1991
Developer: Imagineering Inc.
Publisher: Acclaim

By the time Bart Simpson's Escape From Camp Deadly arrived on Game Boy, The Simpsons was in the middle of its third season. And despite two seasons under its belt, there is a definite feel of just throwing whatever you can into a game and hope it works that comes from this game. This is another Simpsons game given to Imagineering, who worked on the less than stellar Bart Vs. The Space Mutants and Bart Vs. The World, among other licensed games in the tail end of the NES life cycle. But did this outing at least feel like some lessons were learned over their past endeavors?

Not much of a plot to this one. Bart and Lisa have to literally do what the title says and escape from Camp Deadly run by Ironfist Burns. Another random Burns family member added to a game to be an antagonist. It oddly happened more than usual. At least it's not as awkward as Fu Manchu Burns. You control Bart as you walk to the right and sometimes vertically until you can escape the camp. Pretty simple scenario all around.

The game is pretty straightforward, literally. As Bart you travel through multiple levels dealing with generic campers, bees, and a bear to escape the camp. A jumps while B attacks, basic stuff. You have a basic shot attack that won't take out foes, but upon finding boomerangs from Lisa, you can use them to take out foes. You can collect health as well that is represented via donuts. One positive is you can collect health that can exceed the amount shown, which is useful for some of the more annoying sections, but that can all go away if you lose a life. Which thanks to this game's stiff controls while platforming, that is bound to happen. There are also special outfits you can find that can help in some areas, like a beekeeper's outfit to avoid bees and a football outfit to act as invincibility over foes for a brief period of time. 

You'll mostly do the same stages over and over again. There's the stages where you'll climb trees and platform over rivers, followed by cafeteria areas where you must dispose of the bad food while avoiding foes. This is where you can rack up a ton of health. After a while you'll have to climb a mountain which means more careful platforming, then one more tricky section like the first before you can finish the game. 

Going back to the stiff controls, I think this is where the game suffers the most. A lot of the time, I find that when I go for a long jump over the river pitfalls I end up falling off the tree branches earlier than expected. And sometimes even normal long jumps can still fail. Like at one point I swear I clipped through a tree branch and still fell. That aside, it feels better than previous attempts from Imagineering on the control side. Even the boomerang, which doesn't exactly scream Bart Simpson, works pretty well and you can actually shoot it diagonally up, which can be helpful in some areas. 

On the graphical side, the game looks really generic. Aside from Bart, Lisa and Nelson (a later boss in the game) none of the enemies really feel Simpsons-ish in look and feel. The stages also blend together, again feeling like a generic forest game with very little deviations. Audio-wise, the game sounds just okay, but you can tell Imagineering recycled from Bart Vs. The Space Mutants with the music as both the rendition of The Simpsons theme and one of the level themes from that prior game appear as the game's soundtrack. There are also very tinny Bart sound effects when he gets attacked or loses a life. In fact, if you've played most Imagineering games you'll hear quite a few sound effects that often get recycled by the company.

In the end, I'd say Bart Simpson's Escape From Camp Deadly is far from the worst Simpsons game, even on Game Boy itself, but suffers from a lot of issues. Stiff controls and a very generic game overall stifle the license from really doing anything fun with it, which again, given it's The Simpsons, feels really lame. Although points to this game for doing a camp story a year before Kamp Krusty premiered. It gets a point for that I guess? But the uninspired plot really feels like the ultimate boiling down of a company like Acclaim and their handling of licenses. Buy up those hot licenses and throw out mediocre shovelware that will no doubt be bought because it's from said hot license. And ay carumba, did The Simpsons ever become the perfect case study in that, especially with the next Game Boy Simpsons game. But that juggernaut is one we'll take down another time. In the case of Escape From Camp Deadly, I'd ultimately give it a C+. Not the worst Game Boy game, but unlike Bart's boomerang, there's not much that will make you want to come back to it.