Far too often, after rewatching a favorite movie from my youth in the 1980s and early 1990s, I get a compulsion to also play the tie-in video game that accompanied it at the time. This is often a mistake, as most of them are terrible games. I was especially nervous to revisit the 1989 Nintendo Entertainment System adaptation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, perhaps for good reason.
Despite its reputation as another lousy license-based NES cash-in, I somehow had fond memories of playing the Roger Rabbit game for hours on end many years ago. I vaguely recalled it at least reasonably capturing the spirit of the movie. Trying it again now, decades later, I wonder how my younger self wasted so much time with this.
| Title: | Who Framed Roger Rabbit |
| Year of Release: | 1989 |
| Publisher: | LJN |
| Gaming Platform: | NES |
A great many NES games were known for being frustratingly difficult. Sometimes that was intentional, to make the gameplay challenging and addictive. Other times, however, it was simply the result of poor design and game mechanics. Playing it now, Roger Rabbit falls toward the “infuriating” end of that spectrum.
As a publisher, LJN cranked out a lot of movie-based games for Nintendo in the late 1980s and early ’90s, most of them lazy, low-effort affairs. LJN’s Back to the Future was a particularly awful NES game that had seemingly little to do with the original film. I’ll give Who Framed Roger Rabbit credit for being more ambitious than that. I feel like the underlying developers at Rare wanted and actually tried to make a good game out of this. Sadly, the execution leaves something to be desired.
The story starts with the player taking control of Eddie Valiant, a hard-boiled detective in a fantastical version of 1940s Los Angeles. His client, the wacky ‘toon Roger Rabbit, tags along wherever he goes, but doesn’t actually serve any purpose in the gameplay. He mostly just runs back and forth around the screen, and in the few instances where Eddie has to fight bad guys (embodied by Judge Doom’s weasel henchmen), Roger will leap up and hang onto something at the top of the screen to stay out of the way until the tussle is over.
In order to solve the title mystery, Eddie and Roger must traverse the city of Los Angeles collecting clues and useful items hidden in various buildings – plus some found in caves located in the weird mountain range that (just like real Los Angeles!) surrounds and isolates the town. Eventually, you can gain access through the tunnel that leads to the Toontown district, where you do the same but in a more colorful environment.
The game map is fairly expansive by NES standards, with a great number of buildings to search. When traveling through the city, you’re given an overhead view of the streets and buildings. When you enter a building, the game switches to a side-scrolling view with a little bit of up and down movement. Once you find a whistle, you can hail Benny the Cab to drive you around from location to location faster.
From time to time, you’ll be chased by weasels. If they catch you in the overhead map view, you can easily escape by choosing the correct punchline to a joke they ask, which will cause the weasels to laugh hysterically and release you. However, if a weasel finds you while at a building in side-scroll mode, you have to fight him off by punching him repeatedly, the controls for which are needlessly awkward.
There are a lot of buildings in town, and most of them look basically the same as one another, varying only slightly by shape. This makes it difficult to keep track of where you’ve been. Moreover, the items you’re looking for will appear in different randomized locations every time you play the game, so it’s not possible to memorize where to find them, forcing you to search every building. Many buildings are empty and have nothing useful at all. To expedite this process slightly, you can ask strangers you find at the buildings for help, and they will often tell you whether the building is worth searching or not. (Questions of how they know what you’re looking for, and why they’re so willing to let you rummage through their apartments and offices, are not addressed.)
The game never clearly explains how many items you need, nor what you’re supposed to do with them. Some are pretty obvious, like using a flashlight in the caves. Others require more creative thinking, such as distracting a mean cat with a fish bone, or wearing spring-shoes to hop over a pit in the ground. Over time, you should assemble the four pieces of Marvin Acme’s missing Will and use it during your final face-off with the evil Judge Doom.
Searching the entire city and finding everything you need can be tedious business, not helped at all by the irritatingly repetitive musical score. But what makes the game truly aggravating is how easily and often Eddie gets killed. Outside of buildings, flower pots will fall on his head and rats or other animals will run up and bump him. One touch from anything results in instant death. Both happen frequently and are hard to avoid. You can also get run over by cars in the street (Roger will recover, but Eddie will not) or get defeated when fighting weasels.
You get four lives per game, and only two continues. Once you burn through all those lives (and you definitely will), the only way to play further without losing your entire inventory is to write down a long alphanumeric save code and enter it to start the counter over.
By the time you finally get to the end, Judge Doom is nearly impossible to beat in a fight, and can take what feels like hours to do so. Even by NES standards, this boss battle is torturous.
Aside from the blandness of the buildings, the game’s 8-bit graphics are reasonably appealing. I quite like the character sprites for Eddie and Roger. The story also makes enough references to the plot and characters from the movie to function adequately as fan-service. You can find Jessica Rabbit at the Ink & Paint Club, and Eddie’s girlfriend Dolores helps out with a clue if you give her a heart.
The bit about escaping weasels by telling jokes is fun, and some of the solutions to using your items are clever. Unfortunately, the game is just so damned long and repetitive and frustrating that the biggest challenge will be getting through the whole thing without tossing your controller at the screen and giving up in a rage fit.
The Video File Blog 
Rare certainly went on to bigger and better. Donkey Kong Country 1/2/3, GoldenEye, Jet Force Gemini, Perfect Dark, Banjo-Kazooie/Tooie, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, Diddy Kong Racing … weird they dropped the ball here.
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