Fisher-Price: I Can Remember

Name: Fisher-Price: I Can Remember
Year: 1990
Publisher: GameTek
Developer: Beam Software
Genre: Educational
Hours Played: Don't know, fell asleep
Beaten: Yes, at least once

When I started this blog, I picked for my first post Color a Dinosaur, because I was confident it would be the worst game I ever reviewed for the NES.  Well folks, I'm only about thirty games in, and I may have found one that's worse.  I've played a lot of bad video games, but I've never in my life found myself nodding off during a game before.

At it's core, I Can Remember is just a game of Memory.  There's a set number of cards on the table, and you take turns flipping over cards two at a time; if the two cards you pick match, they disappear and part of a picture appears below.  Match all the cards, and the entire hidden picture is revealed. Not particularly inspired, but unlike, say, dinosaur coloring, it's at least an actual game you can actually play.  So what exactly is the problem here?

Well first of all,  everything in this game takes forever.  You pick a card, it slowly flips over.  You pick a second card, it slowly flips over.  They don't match?  They slowly flip back.  They do match?  They slowly disappear, and the hidden picture slowly reveals itself.  I literally found myself fighting to stay awake at one point.  Secondly is the pictures themselves: they're all Fisher-Price toys!  You can flip over cards with toy telephones, or ring stacks, and when you reveal the hidden picture, it might be a rocking horse!  All available at your local toy store!  I see people mock games like M.C. Kids for their in-game product placement, but this is about the worst I've seen that wasn't a free game included in a box of cereal; even the Burger King would be embarrassed by this.

But the biggest problem here is just how little effort seems to have went into this.  Seriously, this is the first NES game I've ever played where I've seriously wondered if it was made by one guy.  For instance, if you play on the highest difficulty level, the game deals out twenty cards, and they fill the screen.  So when you pick the easiest setting and it deals only 12 cards, how do you think the developers handle it?  Scale the cards up to fill the screen?  Have blank spaces at the top and bottom?  Nope!  The game still shows twenty cards, but if you try to pick from the top four or bottom four, the game buzzes angrily at you to let you know that you're in the wrong.  Yeah, that's definitely pretty educational!

On a personal note, I dabbled in amateur game design myself for a little while.  I was honestly pretty terrible at it, but even I managed to make a playable Memory game.  Do you know why?  Because Memory is one of the easiest games to program.  Seriously, when you're teaching people how to program games, it's usually the second game you teach, right after "guess a number".  There's a reason why it's such a common mini-game in other games you buy.  For fifty bucks in the nineties, you could buy Super Mario Bros. 3, with a card matching mini-game that's infinity better then this one, AND the entire game of Super Mario Bros. 3 to go with it!  Or, you could pay fifty bucks for an advertisement from Fisher Price.

Graphics & Animation: 0 (Awful)
This game looks terrible.  I had no idea it was possible to replicate CGA graphics on the NES, and I still have no idea why you would want to, but they sure pulled it off!

Music & Sounds: 0 (Awful)
All the music here public domain.  Yeah, unlike Color a Dinosaur, which had you coloring your dinosaurs mostly in silence, there's plenty of music here; you're constantly assaulted with super-loud renditions of Old MacDonald and Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.  And don't even get me started on the awful buzzing sound when you're wrong, or if you just do something the game doesn't like.

Controls & Level Design: 0 (Awful)
Before you're allowed to play, the game forces you to pick a name, even if you're playing by yourself.  You're given a grid of letters, and you pick letters to spell your name.  Now, in most games, hitting left when your cursor is on the left-most side would cause it to jump over to the right-hand side, and making a name of the maximum length would cause the cursor to jump automatically to "done".  Not only does this game not include these small but handy features, but it actually buzzes angrily at you when you try to do them!  There's even a couple of blank spaces the developers left there out of sloppiness, and you get buzzed for trying to pick them, too.  This is the kind of design and controls we're talking about; the game hasn't even started yet, and I'm ready to hurt somebody.

Story & Presentation: 0 (Awful)
This was originally a DOS game, and it's almost impressive how little work they clearly did to move it over to the NES.  It's not that DOS games are terrible by nature, it's just that they're technically inferior to what the NES can offer.  This should have been an upgrade, not a lateral move.

Length & Replayabilitiy: 0 (Awful)
This is the only category I considered giving the same a (single) point in.  Yes, it does have one and two players, play against the computer, and play against yourself, and there are three levels of difficulty, so clearly they put a little effort in, right?  That's until you actually try the different modes and see how little effort was put into each one of them.

Total: 0 (Lowest Possible Score)