Games That Time Forgot - Bart Vs The Juggernauts

There are certain rules that videogames must adhere to. For instance, all new games must be "a little bit Grand Theft Auto", all EA sports games must have imperceptibly small changes each year to warrant making a brand new game, and all games based on The Simpsons must suck ass.

Sometimes, though, a Simpsons game actually manages to be pretty good. And that was the case with Bart Vs The Juggernauts.

To understand Bart Vs The Juggernauts, you must first understand the weird cult of Gladiators. Gladiators (and it’s American cousin, American Gladiators) was a Saturday evening television entertainment show that took the premise of Roman gladiators, slapped it in a bit of spandex and made it run the wrong way up a supermarket travelator.

It starred a collection of over-buffed men and abnormally healthy women, who would regularly beat up members of the public who thought that they were fit. One of the Gladiators was called Wolf, a man of pensionable age with gypsy hair who growled like a wolf. In short, Gladiators was rubbish. hecklerspray is ashamed to admit that it owns autographs from two different Gladiators. None from Jet, though, which we’re a bit sad about.

Bart Vs The Juggernauts took this premise, and went about sending it up as well as a Gameboy game possibly could. For some reason Dr. Marvin Monroe had assembled a group of man-monsters that Bart Simpson had to beat in a variety of mini games.

There was Capt. Murdock’s Skateboard Bash and Crash - where Bart had to zoom down a ramp on a skateboard, avoiding what looked like slices of pizza (although we’re not sure - look, it was on the Gameboy) gaining enough speed to kick a Juggernaut off a podium.

Other games included Dr. Marvin Monroe’s Hop, Skip And Fry, which involved skipping around an electrified floor without either being electrocuted or beaten up by a Juggernaut; Moe’s Tavern Shove Fest was an odd man/boy sumo fight on top of a pool table; The Kwik-E-Mart Doggie Dodge featured Bart shoplifting from Apu’s store while avoiding savage dogs, and so on.

Bart Vs The Juggernauts was a success, but only a partial one. A save feature would have made us weep with joy for not having to play that stupid ramp game a million times. The game wasn’t wasn’t as funny as an episode of The Simpsons either; but then again, not many things are. And even if the game was hilarious, chances are it wouldn’t be by the 50th time you played it.

So it’ll never feature on anybody’s top ten list. But for what it was - a silly set of minigames that came out in the first tidal wave of - mostly shonky - Simpsons merchandise in the early nineties, it held up pretty well. That’s not to say we’ve ever completed it, though.

eBay has a few copies of Bart Vs The Juggernauts for sale for ridiculously low prices

[story by Stuart Heritage]