Home Improvement

Hey it’s Home Improvement! … And it’s in 16-Bit for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System! What could possibly be better? Well actually a whole lotta things considering how much this game blows…

This game starts out with the Home Improvement gang doing an episode. When Tim goes to go get his special tool bag, he notices the tools aren’t in there! He blames Al for making some sick joke out of this, but Al says it’s not him! Tim happened to have found a note regarding his precious tools and it gives Tim a clue that the tools could be in the set production for some dinosaur show. Tim races to the set and starts his adventure on trying to find his tools. No matter how many different sets Tim will have to go on, he is determined to obtain his precious tools again, even if it means shooting some wild animal with his fully loaded nail gun!

This game is played in the action-platform style where you control Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor through various sets of onscreen television shows. You get to use a variety of tools like an automatic nail gun, a grappling hook gun of some type, a jackhammer, and an axe. This is probably the only somewhat decent thing about this game, being able to use all of these tools and all. The control kind of has that soapy feel to it, you know, like on the ice levels of good platform games only ALL the time? The first thing noticed when Home Improvement is loaded is a nice logo for “Absolute” - one of the crappiest game companies in existence and notorious for “Space Shuttle Project” for the NES. So as soon as you see the logo for this company, you are guaranteed to be playing a bad video game.

The graphics in this game are common cheesy graphics you see in all poorly made SNES games. Where as the sprites are pixilated, realistic pictures are imported in the game, and everything tends to just have a smudgy look. The graphics aren’t completely bad though because the backgrounds can look okay. Other than what I have said, this game doesn’t look like a 1995 Squaresoft game or anything like that.

Uggh, music in this game is pretty bad and the sounds totally have bad SNES game sound to it. The SNES can make very good use with its sound chip, but bad games like this one do not use the potential at all.

Overall you can see this game pretty much sucks. However it’s not something you shouldn’t try, because it really just be played at least once. The reason being that it’s so hilariously cheesy. I guarantee the opening scene will manage to get some sort of chuckle out of you.

-Keranu, March 4th, 2005 11:22pm USA Central Time