REVIEW - Attack of the Killer Tomatoes (1991)

Genre(s): Action
Released: 1991
Available on: GB, NES
Developer(s): Imagineering
Publisher(s): THQ
Players: 1

I don't want to sound like some sort of old, artistic geezer who knows everything of even the most irrelevant history of popular culture, but I have to take you "younglings" to a little tour through time 'cause I'm guessing many of you are laughing your asses off at the very name of the game right now. You can read about all of this on Wikipedia, but I think I could summarize it all a bit better. In 1978, an independent screenwriter named Costa Dillon and writer/composer John De Bello created a b-movie that was ironically a parody of b-movies, called Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. The concept of the movie was simply so absurd that critics, of course, hated it, but it gained a cult following. Ten years after the movie's release, the writers decided to do a sequel - Return of the Killer Tomatoes, which was one of George Clooney's first movies. The movie sucked ass, it totally missed out on the spirit of the first one. Although two more sequels were made later, it was this first sequel that spawned an animated series simply entitled Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. This series was one of the greatest pains of my childhood; it aired on Saturday mornings, right in the middle of great cartoon marathons. I was brainwashed by it. The theme song chimed in my head for years, right up until I became a teenager. Yesterday, I found something worse than any Killer Tomato sequel ever made, something worse than the animated series ever was: a video game based on the animated series, created by some of the very same geniuses that gave us Home Alone and Home Alone 2: Lost in New York. AAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!

(I'm drawing a blank...)

Dr. Gangrene is threatening the world with the launch of the Doomsday Tomato. It's up to Chad Finletter and his friends to save the world from deep red destruction.

Looks like Bart vs. The Space Mutants, only a
whole lot worse.

I'm pretty sure the prologue will turn out the longest part of this review. Like the header of my choice implies, I'm simply at a loss of words with how bad this game is. It's so generic that this shouldn't even be called a review, this is more like some sort of brief insight on perhaps the worst game I have ever played, at the very least on the Nintendo Entertainment System. I truly hope I never have to witness such an abomination again. As if it weren't enough that it's based on one of the worst cartoons ever, Attack of the Killer Tomatoes has absolutely no value as a video game. Knowing who made it, the thought of trying to complete Home Alone 2 once more did cross my mind. It's simply so bad that I would gladly take on that crime against humanity again. I'd probably even enjoy it after utterly destroying my gray matter with this absolutely horrible bullshit.

The graphics aren't very nice considering that the game came out in '91, well after some true graphical breakthroughs on the 8-bit platform, but in a way, this abomination was visually somewhat ahead of its time. The lighting effects and the pseudo-3D were something you didn't see in every NES game back in the day. These graphical effects are the only elements in the whole game that save it from a straight line of 1.0's. The music is horrible, all the way from the awful theme song, which sounds even worse sequenced for the NES than it ever did on TV, to the original compositions by Mark van Hecke. Each step your character takes makes an annoying noise. What does that tell you of the quality of the sound effects?

If you're wondering where the game came from...

You control this little obnoxious bastard called Chad, jump on any tomatoes you see, watch them shatter into tiny bits of tomatoes and then watch as these tiny bits chew on your helpless, traction-less ass until you've lost a life. The controls are absolute hell, the game is cryptic as hell, and it's simply not fun to play, not one second. Once again I'll compare this game to the Home Alone games on the SNES and say that both of those games were fun, if only for five seconds - Attack of the Killer Tomatoes goes from bad to utterly non-playable in under a nanosecond. Once again, words can't describe how much I fucking hate this game. Still, I implore you to play it. Why? Because maybe one of you's crazy enough to go and kill the shit out of everyone who was a part of its development. I'll probably get sued for that comment, but I don't care - every decent person knows it should be them sitting on trial, for creating this Frankenstein's monster of a game. Hell, let's sue everyone who was ever part of the cartoon series' production. Two flies, and so on.

I'm not gonna say anything about the difficulty level. I simply cannot force myself to play the game enough to see how far I get in it. I know there are only four or five stages, but beating two is perfectly enough for me - it's an achievement in itself to bear the game that far. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes is, with utmost certainty, one of the worst games I've ever had to witness with my own eyes and thumbs. I pray that no game I'll review in the near future sinks as low.

Graphics : 5.8
Sound : 1.0
Playability : 1.0
Challenge : 1.0
Overall : 1.1

Trivia

GameRankings: 62.00% (GB)