Game:

Fun 'n Games (1993)

Duration: 10:49

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Developed by Leland Interactive Media and published by Tradewest it was released for the Sega Genesis in 1993. Apparently this game was also released for the SNES a year later but from what I can tell it's pretty rare.

The game is definitely a Mario Paint clone and coming out a year after Mario Paint it's hard to argue that it's not a complete rip-off. The game supports the Sega Mega Mouse as seen here on the Sega Genesis and just like Mario Paint offers many activities including games, music and art creation.

Going into it my first impressions are very poor. The music creation works well enough but it just isn't as fun (or nice sounding) as Mario Paint. The games are horrible to play with the mouse (but better with a controller) and the random character creation and paper doll dress-up activities are fun for about 30 seconds. There's no ability to create animations like in Mario Paint either. Overall it's just not as polished as the Nintendo original with its fun music and familiar Mario characters.

Things weren't looking to good for this copy-cat cartridge until I got into the core drawing and painting section of the game. This as with Mario Paint is the main attraction and now everything is starting to shine. The core drawing elements work much better than they do in Mario Paint. The tools are much faster to calculate paint fills, line, circle and other geometry based drawing.

With complex drawings in Mario Paint telling the fill tool to color in an area could take what feels like half a minute! You could sit there and literally watch it color line by line but here it's much quicker. I'm wondering if the raw speed advantage on the Genesis processor is to thank. Blast Processing to the rescue!

The large sprites are impressive and the two characters you create in the other activities can be used here. There's also way more stock scene drawings to work with. Like Mario paint there's built in "stamps" and a tool to make your own by the pixel.

The color pallet isn't exceptional but it's about the same as Mario Paint. This was always one thing that surprised me about Mario Paint. Given the more advanced PPU in the SNES you would expect hundreds of colors at your disposal but just like in this game you're limited to about 10 base colors + dithered fill colors.

So in the end this one turned out to be a pleasant surprise. Overall the music creation, boring activities, games that don't take advantage of the mouse and lack of animation just don't compare to the familiar fun of Mario Paint. But the core drawing and coloring section makes up for it. I'm going to say it... the core drawing and coloring section IMHO is better than Mario Paint. But I still don't think it's a better package overall.

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