I find this a weird nostalgia bait thing. Like… Kids cared a little bit about this back in the 80s, and it even got a really crap movie because of the success of the cards, but I dunno if all that many people really look back that fondly on Garbage Pail Kids, beyond it being a product of its time. However, I’m kinda into this concept of making new games for old systems, especially now if you make sure to, you know, make them available on modern platforms too. One of the best examples of this is Battle Kid, a game that was stuck on NES for a bit but is now available on Xbox and hopefully will come to more platforms.

So I figured I’d grab this on a sensible system so I got the PC version. It will come on an NES cartridge later if you like spending like 7 times more than the game costs to get a collectible version of it… Yeah, not a fan of that price point.

So let’s see if this is a good NES game or whatever!

Developer: Retrotainment Games
Publisher: iam8bit
Release date: October 25th, 2022
Platforms: Switch, PC, Xbone, PS4, NES (PC version reviewed)
Genre: Side-scrolling platformer

Review

The story takes place, I believe, after some actually pretty recent animation you can find on youtube (and the first episode of it is viewable in the non-NES versions of the game). Mad Mike wants some stale gum. One of the other characters (Brainy Brian I think) gives him an ingredient list, so he must travel through 6 levels alongside Luke Puke, Patty Putty and Leaky Lindsay to find those ingredients. That’s it, that’s the plot. There’s very little dialogue, only small conversations with some other characters like Greaser Greg (who I believe was one of the main characters in the shitty live action movie). The conversations try to have a bit of the “gross out” humor the brand is known for, I don’t think it particularly works. It’s a bit too tame.

Graphically, it’s fine, but boy does it have issues. I will say the character sprites other than Luke Puke look great, they have a cool style, they clearly had some fun animating Patty Putty. And the bosses are nice big things for the most part that are pretty great for NES hardware. But other than that, I find the levels unimaginative. I think the only really fitting levels for the brand are Tokyo and Mars, the others all look kinda generic. Even hell, with its hotel/apartment complex or whatever it is, was kinda boring visually. And even though the character sprites look good, other than Leaky Lindsay, their color palette is thoroughly unappealing, as is the color palette for most of the game. Looks a bit lifeless, and there’s certainly a major lack of the gross-out style the brand is known for. Yeah a few characters and enemies puke and stuff, but it’s just a pretty normal green projectile. Another issue I had in many levels is enemy projectiles being the same color as the background colors, so you can’t see enemies shooting you. That’s pretty awful. There’s aliens on Mars. They shoot laser guns at you, these thing, bright 1-pixel lines pretty much. On the planet surface, fine, you can see it. In the alien bases with bright green backgrounds, you can’t see the projectile. There’s a few other examples. The graphics certainly need work. Oh and the music’s pretty okay.

Gameplay… It’s a pretty simple, straightforward, linear side-scrolling platformer. It does have some interesting aspects to it. You have access to 4 playable characters: Mad Mike, Luke Puke, Patty Putty, Leaky Lindsay. You can switch between them on-the-fly by pressing select. They each function differently.

Mad Mike, Luke Puke and Leaky Lindsay all have the same basic jump (making some jumps a bit rough, but it is decently high and decently far, good enough for most jumps if you time them correctly) but they also have an attack. Patty Putty jumps much higher and further but has no attack button. There are platforms only she can reach. Instead she attacks by jumping on enemies, which the others can’t. Just falling on them off a platform doesn’t work, you have to jump and have this spinning animation going. Mad Mike has an axe and sword so he’s a melee attacker. He’s pretty useless for bosses, so he’s basically useful as a tank during levels so you can save as much health as you can for the other characters as you get to the boss. Luke Puke has the power to puke, which ends up being a slightly momentum-based down-arcing projectile. If you jump and move forward, it can go pretty far, but if you’re just standing around, it goes just right in front of you. Leaky Lindsay shoots snot from her nose. It’s a straight, limited range projectile. Very useful, but since you want to save her for boss battles.

The levels are pretty straightforward. The least straightforward one is Transylvania, as it has detours where you have to go press buttons to open gates and then backtrack to said gates. Otherwise, you run left to right, avoid obstacles, kill enemies (most die in 2-3 hits), until you reach the boss. There’s NPCs to trade cards with, minigames where you try to fish good stuff out of a toilet, and a flying minigame as Buggy Betty where you try to get a trash can to heal your team and get a card. 4 possible cards out of 39 have uses. Live Mike stuns enemies on screen, Buggy Betty lets you fly, Adam Bomb damages everything on screen and Brainy Brian allows you to revive a dead teammate. The boss battles are mostly pretty cool, and most of them are pretty exploitable by Patty Putty, surprisingly.

And that’s kind of about it. The levels are pretty long, but even then you’re looking at about an hour at most to finish all 6 of them. And when the 6 levels are done, that’s it, game over. No final boss or anything. Also not much difficulty. The one tough thing is that there’s not a lot of checkpoints, but once you find a checkpoint, then you can use one of your lives to respawn there when you lose all 4 characters (if you die before a checkpoint, you just have to restart the whole level). Not much to say about the non-NES releases in particular, there’s a few videos and things to watch that are also on youtube. I will say achievements didn’t work on the first day I got it, so I didn’t get some of the achievements I should have… not like achievements matter, but I guess it’s worth mentioning.

Overall

Judging this game against the overall NES library, I think this would land somewhere in the middle. It’s certainly not of the quality of DuckTales or Batman as far as licensed games go, but it’s also not at the level of, say, Back to the Future or Jaws either. Heck, might be lower middle, as I’d say it’s not even at the level of a Willow or a TMNT. Had it actually come out on the NES back then, it would be seen as not particularly good, but not particularly bad. It wouldn’t be part of anyone’s favorite NES games.

I was a bit disappointed by the end. I figured there’d be a final level or final boss after the 6 levels, but there wasn’t. And there’s not much to really go back into it for after beating it, unless you really want a run where you get all the cards I guess. The core gameplay is okay, but not really noteworthy either. It’s pretty mid. Also it’s way too easy, a game of the era would have been much tougher.

I’d not really recommend this one to a modern audience. If you’re really into Garbage Pail Kids somehow, sure, otherwise… I’m not sure who this was really for.