The New Addams Family Series (Game Boy Color) Playthrough
150A playthrough of Microid's 2002 license-based graphic adventure game for the Game Boy Color, The New Addams Family Series.
The Addams Family franchise saw a big revival in the early 1990s with the release of two popular movies and a Hanna-Barbera cartoon series, but within a few short years the Addams' newfound relevance had faded.
There was another attempt made to resuscitate the brand in 1998 with a new sitcom, The New Addams Family Series, but since it only lasted a single season, I'm guessing it wasn't a huge success. I had no idea the show even existed until stumbled across this game several years later.
The game was a Europe-only release that came out four years after the show debuted, and it's a point-and-click style adventure game that takes place in and around the family's creepy, kooky mansion.
The story vaguely resembles the plot of the 1991 movie, but this time the lawyer shows up on the Addams' doorstep to tell them that a developer has plans to bulldoze the house to make way for an amusement park, so Pugsley and Wednesday take it upon themselves to search for the documents that prove the family's ownership of the property.
The game tasks you with solving a linear chain of puzzles that involve picking up stuff and using it on other stuff in order to get new, different stuff. Most of the time it's by-the-numbers, and it seems safe to assume that this game was meant for kids since the easy puzzles are clearly signposted and several poorly conceived action sequences have been shoehorned in to pad things out.
The English version also suffers from a lackluster translation that lacks any wit or personality. That's quite an accomplishment for an Addams Family game.
If you're looking for a licensed-based adventure game on the Game Boy Color, you'd be much better served by the excellent Scooby Doo! Classic Creepy Capers (https://youtu.be/ui9GPyahvFI).
So if The New Addams Family Series game wasn't worth checking out for its gameplay, why bother talking about it twenty years after the fact?
Well, because it looks amazing. The Game Boy Color was never known to be a graphics powerhouse, but you'd never know that from the way this looks. It's one of the best looking games on the system, beating out even the super impressive Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare (https://youtu.be/naFfHPm38LQ) in its use of color. Everything is sharp and clean and undithered, so I'm guessing that its doing something fancy like swapping color palettes on a per-scaline basis to break the system's usual limit of 56 colors on-screen at once.
And there we go. The New Addams Family Series is a thoroughly mediocre and dull game, but the graphics are at least enough to warrant taking a brief gander.
*Recorded with a Retroarch shader to mimic the look of the original hardware.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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