Fisher-Price: Perfect Fit

Name: Fisher Price: Perfect Fit
Year: 1990
Publisher: GameTek
Developer: Beam Software
Genre: Educational
Hours Played: Half an Hour
Beaten: Yes

Like all three NES Fisher-Price games, Perfect Fit began life as a DOS game.  The computer operating system that preceded Windows, DOS was primarily text-based, and while some (but not all) DOS games did have graphics, they tended to be crudely drawn, have a limited color palette, and more often then not they featured either no music, or a public domain soundtrack (i.e. classical music, children's songs, etc).  As was only natural, when the Nintendo Entertainment System gained popularity in the US, a lot of computer companies ported their previously DOS-only games to the NES.  Since the NES was technically superior, these conversions tended to be upgrades: better graphics, real music, etc.  Not so with Fisher Price: Perfect Fit.

The idea here is that the game gives you one picture at a time, and you have to match that picture to it's outline on a grid.  On easy, you literally just move the picture over it's outline and hit the button.  On the hardest setting, the picture might be backwards or upside down, and there's buttons that let you flip the picture to straighten it out.  That last bit would actually be pretty clever, except with some of the pictures it's a little too subtle; for instance, the only way to tell the Fisher-Price cassette tape is backwards is to look for the FP on the label.  Speaking of which, the Fisher-Price product placement makes a return here, but there's also letters and numbers to place, giving the game a modicum of educational value.

All in all, Perfect Fit is a pretty poor excuse for a game.  Some may question whether it's even worse then Fisher Price: I Can Remember; after all, Memory is a real game that people pay money for, and at least it has some arguable educational value.  To those remarks, I say this: number one, Perfect Fit isn't included as a free mini-game on hundreds of other video games, and number two: while I didn't enjoy playing Perfect Fit, I also didn't fall asleep.  That's faint praise, though; this is still easily one of the worst games on the NES.

Graphics & Animation: 0 (Awful)
Although several of my sources tell me this was originally a DOS game, MobyGames has it listed as NES only.  If that's true, they sure went through a lot of trouble to make this look like shoddy 80's PC shareware.

Music & Sounds: 0 (Awful)
PCs in the eighties only had one sound channel.  The NES had five.  Guess how many this game uses?  Feel like hearing public domain children's song blared at top speed one note at a time?  Then you're in luck!

Controls & Level Design: 1 (Bad)
The whole game is about lining up pictures over their shadows.  Well, you'd better make sure you've lined it up exactly, because if you're off by even a little bit, the game tells you you're wrong.  When you're aiming your game at very small children, this is inexcusable.

Story & Presentation: 0 (Awful)
The best thing I can say about this game is that they got rid of the annoying angry buzzer from I Can Remember.  Sure, navigating the menus is still unintuitive, but at least the game no longer punishes you for not being able to figure it out.

Length & Replayabilitiy: 1 (Bad)
Perfect Fit has a two player mode, a versus the computer mode, a solo mode, and three levels of difficulty.  If this was a five dollar shareware game for PC on the eighties (which I suspect it was), I'd actually be pretty impressed by it.  But as a fifty dollar game for the NES, this is just a mess.

Total: 2 (Awful)