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| Name: Tiny Toon Adventures: Cartoon Workshop Year: 1992 Publisher: Konami Developer: Novotrade Software Genre: Art/Creativity Hours Played: Half an Hour Beaten: N/A |
Tiny Toon Adventures was a cartoon created in 1990 by Steven Spelbierg's animation company (also responsible for Animaniacs and Pinky & The Brain). Since then, their has been over eighteen (!) different Tiny Toon video games, three of them for the NES. Today we're looking at the least conventional of the three, Tiny Toon Adventures: Cartoon Workshop.
As the name implies, Cartoon Workshop isn't a true video game; instead, players create their own cartoon starring the Tiny Toon characters. You pick either one or two characters (out of a total of six), a background, music and sound effects, and dialog. It sounds like a creative person's dream; the problem here is the game isn't too keen on letting you be creative. All the dialog must be picked from pre-scripted choices (even though it's text only; no sound bytes here). There's quite a few different animations for the different characters, but they all have a seemingly pre-determined purpose; there's an animation of Buster handing a valentine's card, one of Babs accepting a card, one of Buster squirting a water gun, and one of Babs being drenched and ripping up a card in anger. If you'd like to make a cartoon about Buster giving Babs a Valentine's Day, then squirting her and her getting mad about it, you're all set! If you'd like to make a cartoon about anything else, well... This wouldn't be so bad if there was a set of animations for each character to interact with the others (after all, there's only six chacaters), but it seems like it was intended for Buster to interact with Babs, Calamity to interact with Lil' Speedy, and Furball and Plucky to be by themselves. For a game all about creativity, it's hard to get super creative here.
The elephant in the room, however, is the lack of a save feature. That's right: the entire game is about creating cartoons to show your family and friends, but then when you turn the NES off, that cartoon you spent hours getting just right is gone forever. The manual includes instructions of how to feed your NES through your VCR so you can record your cartoons on VHS, but that really feels unnecessary; omitting this feature would be one thing if there was also a game or even an art studio included on the cartridge, but the only thing here is the cartoon creator. It feels like a slap in the face.
I had to laugh; the Wikipedia article for this game has a line complaining that the cartoons made here have a five minute time limit, "as opposed to the typical 28 minutes that Tiny Toon Adventures dedicated to their actual TV show". I promise you, none of your family or friends would be willing to sit through 28 minutes of anything this game could produce.
Graphics & Animation: 2 (Average)
The sprites here look exactly like the graphics you'd see in a regular Tiny Toons video game. Considering this is suppose to be about creating your own cartoons, you'd think the developers would have went with oversized sprites that took up more of the screen, the way an actual cartoon would look. As it is, it feels not like you're directing a cartoon so much as an opening sequence for a video game you'll never get to play.
Music & Sounds: 2 (Average)
The super-catchy theme song to Tiny Toon Adventures is present here in all it's glory! It plays on the opening screen, and you can also choose it as the background for your cartoons. The other songs you can pick from sound nothing like the ambient music played in the background of the actual cartoon show; they sound more like level music from a non-existent Tiny Toon game.
Controls & Level Design: 1 (Bad)
The menu system feels like a Windows 3.1 application - to the point that I actually looked up to see if this was a port (it's not). It feels like this was originally designed to be controlled with a mouse, but the NES pad does an okay job of getting you around. The bigger issue is not enough controls; using up and down to cycle through frames of animation is unintuitive, and there's no back button or new file if you want to start over; you just have to use the reset button.
Story & Presentation: 0 (Awful)
Honestly, what should have felt like a fun idea just kind of feels like a mess. The graphics feel like a cancelled NES game, the menus feel like a cancelled Windows 3.1 application. It never jells, and it feels more like you're designing a non-interactive video game then a cartoon.
Length & Replayabilitiy: 0 (Awful)
NES cartridges with a battery back-up (i.e. the ability to save your game) were more expensive to produce, and hence are rarely seen in games not produced by Nintendo. Still, this is clearly a game where the licencee should have made an exception. Not being able to save the cartoon you spent hours creating, when creating cartoons to show your friends is the entire point of the game, is a definite deal-breaker.
Total: 5 (Bad)
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