Approximate Release Month: April 1993
Genre: Action/platformer
Developer: Gray Matter
Publisher: THQ
No one could possibly expect Wayne’s World to be any good.
Those expectations are fully in line with reality. Wayne’s World is a bad game.
I have to give Wayne’s World credit, though: it’s a very playable kind of bad game. At no point did I have the barest inkling of anything approaching “fun,” but I’m positive I could sit down and power through this game in an afternoon given the game’s short, nine-stage duration and generous continue system. Wayne’s World relies a bit too heavily on causing damage to the player from off screen, but the glut of power ups everywhere and controls that are responsive enough for what little the game asks of the player mitigate that frustration.
The difficult part of getting through Wayne’s World would be combating the fatigue caused by repetitive graphics and level design. I would bet there’s two or three screens worth of unique art in the entire first three levels. I never got lost in the game’s levels but the repetition of the background and props makes it tough to keep my bearings while playing. Having less claustrophobic hallways and visual differentiation would have helped Wayne’s World not feel so aimless and thrown together.
The graphics that are here grew on me over time. They’re colorful, which is always a plus, and show more personality in the animation than I was expecting. In particular, the sprite for Mike Myers’ Wayne looks enough like the actor so he’s recognizable. Even the quality of the voice samples are better than most other attempts on the Super Nintendo thus far.
The story sequences before each level are embarrassing. I’ve never seen the movie Wayne’s World is ostensibly based on (and it’s been at least a decade since I’ve seen any Saturday Night Live skits), but if exchanges like the following are demonstrative of the humor in the film then I am going to look down on a lot of people who have told me this movie is funny and worth watching.
Wayne: Overall, I thought the bagpipes sucked haggis and that the kazoos were the dweebiest of my many adversaries!
Garth: Well, then, what took you so long to find me?
W: Because you’re a dweeb!
G: Yeah?? Well, you’re dweebesque!
W: You’re majorly dweebish!
G: You’re in-the-style-of-the-dweeb!
W: You’re a dweebathon!
G: You’re dweeblike!
W: You’re a dweebarama!
G: You have simulated dweeb-look!
W: You’re a dweeboid!
G: You’re dweeb-ed!
W: You’re a dweebtition!
G: You’re bedweebed! You’re dweeb squared!
W: You’re dweebtitious! You’re dweeb infinity!
G: You’re just dweeby.
W: Buds?
G: Buds.
That’s anti-humor. It’s probably silly to complain too much about something you can just skip by pressing start. I just couldn’t read any of it without shaking my head.
That’s probably the most qualitatively objectionable part about Wayne’s World. It’s a poor game and I can’t recommend it, but at least it’s playable underneath the layer of bad humor and a lack of variety. That’s a win, right?
Next time: Yarn’t you glad that Bubsy in Claws Encounters of the Furred Kind is up next?
This was pretty bad, but it was a hell of a lot better than the extra-shitty shitty NES Wayne’s World game.
And Wayne’s World was kind of funny, but only really in a weird hard to describe way that only lasted for four minutes (like most of the good SNL sketches.)