Bart Simpson has the poor misfortune to have been featured in a number of... let us say, less than stellar video games over the years, a decent chunk of which landed on the Nintendo Game Boy.  1UP's Retro Gaming Blog has taken a look at four of the Bartman's greatest gray-and-greenish offenses, pegging gameplay genres from traditional platforming to extreme sports to miniature golf and even fairy tale reinterpretation.

The first portable Simpsons game is a little better than the series' first console game, though not by much. Camp Deadly drops the limited adventure elements of Bart Vs. the Space Mutants in exchange for some much simpler platforming with vastly improved controls--Bart's surprisingly nimble for a pudgy ten year-old. The simple jumping and shooting is nothing to write home about, but Camp Deadly would have at least been a semi-competent early Game Boy game if not for the interminable waves of enemies it constantly throws at you. Here was see a common problem with Game Boy titles: the developers were clearly designing Camp Deadly with a big-screen mindset. Enemies teleport in from the edge of the screen and, given how little space there is to actually maneuver, you sometimes have less than a second to react. Perhaps the only memorable fact about this game is that The Simpsons episode "Kamp Krusty" shared a lot of similarities with Camp Deadly's plot (escaping from an evil summer camp), though this show didn't air until more than a year after the game's release. That's kinda sad, because Mr. Black makes for a much more convincing video game villain than "Ironfist Burns."

After being burned by a rentals of the pitiful Bart vs The Space Mutants and Bart vs The World for the Nintendo Entertainment System, I stayed far away from The Simpsons video games during the 8-bit era and managed to miss all of these titles.  After seeing them recapped here, I still feel that I made the right decision.