YMMV / The Simpsons: Bart's Nightmare

• Anti-Climax Boss: After getting to stomp your way through Springfield as Bartzilla, using fire breath and eye lasers to blast apart dozens of tanks, helicopters, and jets, the idea that you get to face Momthra and King Homer in the second part of the stage sounds awesome. Alas, Bartzilla is hit by a shrink way and turned to human-size, and he subsequently has no means of defending himself except temporarily generating an electrical field around himself, said field has no effect on Momthra, and King Homer will be taken out in one zap.
• Awesome Music:
  • Say what you will about the gameplay, but the Windy World theme is pretty catchy and funky.
  • It gets a bit repetitive, but the Bartman music isn't half-bad either.
• Best Level Ever:
  • The Bartman stage is a fun side-scroller with a much more manageable difficulty level and the enemies and bosses are cool and fun, leading up to Monty Burns in a bi-plane as the final boss.
  • The first Bartzilla stage. It's unlikely the military will do enough damage to kill you before the level ends, so you just get to enjoy being Bartzilla rampaging through the city shooting Eye Beams and fireballs at everything in your way. Just try to not go overboard and accidentally kill the shrink ray.
• Bizarro Episode: The bloodstream stage: Bart dives into a bloodstream to use an air pump to blow up viruses dressed like military commandos, until the page appears surrounded by a force field. By blowing up specific types of virus, Smilin' Joe Fission will appear and Bart has to touch him to bring down part of the force field; repeat until the page is freed. Aside from Smilin' Joe, nothing in this stage resembles anything in Simpsons media.
• Cheese Strategy: The amount of pages you collect has little, if any, impact on Bart's grade when he wakes up; it's your score that counts. It happens that both visits to Itchy & Scratchy have spots where you can stand still and just hold fire to kill an endlessly respawning supply of enemies, with no risk that they'll hit you. With patience to keep the A button pressed and waiting a while, you can rack up hundreds of thousands of points and boost Bart's grade with minimal effort.
• Demonic Spiders:
  • Vacuums in the Itchy and Scratchy stage can deal a One-Hit KO with their emission. In the same world, the oven's fireballs can do the same, but it can shoot them from off-screen at you.
  • There's also Itchy, who has a Rocket Launcher which will turn Bart into ashes if the rocket makes contact with him.
  • The blue devils in the first Temple of Maggie level will push you into another pillar, potentially killing you if it is low enough, but you can easily dispatch them with your whip. In the second level you get green devils who disappear by themselves after a while, but if you whip them, you'll automatically die.
• Difficulty Spike: The Itchy and Scratchy world seems perfectly fine at first, Bart fights Itchy and Scratchy and they're all armed with mallets. Then after killing them too many times, the duo rush in with a flamethrower and a rocket launcher, which they fire pretty much the second they run onto the screen and will likely kill Bart before the player even has time to notice what happened. The stage doesn't let up after that, either.
• Goddamned Boss: Baron Burns is very difficult to hit because he constantly appears for a few seconds, then goes off screen after he attacks. The player has to hit him in his cockpit, which isn't exactly safe because he constantly fires bullets at Bart.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Due to the wonky collision detection and perspective, it's possible to "jump" over some enemies in Windy World without actually jumping over them, just jumping close enough in their vicinity will register as jumping over them.
  • When Bart steps up or down from the road in Windy World, it registers as a jump, and if a page is nearby he'll enter it. This can serve as an unintentional nudge for players who have no idea how to enter the pages.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!: The major problem most have with the game is how damn difficult it is. There's no way to save progress, password or battery, and there's a lot of Demonic Spiders within the levels.
• It's Short, So It Sucks!: The other problem is that, once you know what you're doing, you can play through the game in an hour or two, provided the randomly-generated Windy World isn't stingy on spawning pages. After all, there's only five levels in the game, six if you count the second visit to Itchy and Scratchy.
• Scrappy Weapon: The soda can in the Itchy & Scratchy levels. The fridges constantly give them out in pairs, but each can has only one shot, it has a short range and takes a moment to shoot. And when the cans are gone, you're back to using the mallet (which is at least faster than the can). You're much better avoiding them.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The idea is perfectly sound, but the terrible gameplay and steep difficulty curve make it a total mess. It's still widely considered to be the best Simpsons game on a home console prior to the PS2 era (except for maybe the PC title Virtual Springfield), but then this trope is in effect for most early Simpsons games save for the arcade game, so that isn't saying much.
• That One Boss: Smithers' blimp in the Bartman stage fires rockets that take off half a health bar. While it's possible to kill them by firing at them, they move so fast that it's unlikely you'll manage it, so you just have to try and avoid them. Also, you have to face Smithers twice.
• That One Level:
  • Windy World. Yes, the Hub World. Because its randomly generated, you can walk down the street for several minutes without seeing one of Bart's homework pages rolling by, and in the meantime you'll be assailed by numerous enemies that tend to require precision jumps or specific power-ups to beat. And as you collect more of Bart's homework, not only do enemies become more numerous, but mailboxes (the only enemies that drop power-ups) become more rare. Surviving Windy World until you see a page is by far the most difficult part of the game, once you get to play an actual level they're nowhere near as bad.
  • The exception to the above is the Temple of Maggie. The temple is full of stone platforms where each time you jump on one, another raises, and if one is too low when you jump on it, it collapses and you die. Figuring out how to progress when the platforms ahead of you are too low to cross safely amounts to randomly jumping on the platforms you've already passed and then going to check if one of them raised the low ones ahead. You get to do this while also evading demons who poke Bart to make him jump to other platforms and avoiding triggering the pacifier projectiles from the statues in the background. To make things worse, in the second part of the temple you get to deal with a second demon type, and if you try to whip them to kill them like you did the first, the pillar Bart is on instantly falls. Finally, trying to grab the bird eggs that appear, which serves as a one-up, will often cause you to get grabbed by the bird instead if you aren't fast enough, costing you a life for trying to earn a second one.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The show's use of specific Simpsons characters and settings can be dated to the show's first couple of seasons. Single-episode oddities like Smilin' Joe Fission, Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish, and the head of the Jebediah Springfield statue are plentiful, as is the game's focus on Bart (the show's Breakout Character and face of virtually all of its initial merchandising blitz) over the other Simpsons, who appear in very minor supporting roles. Characters like Itchy and Scratchy, Sherri and Terri, Otto the Bus Driver, and Apu (who shows up on a flying carpet, something that would not fly if the game were released today), who were major players in the show's early years but are virtually absent today, also abound.

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