Who Framed Roger Rabbit (NES) Playthrough
378A playthrough of LJN's 1989 license-based action-adventure game for the NES, Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
Following a year after the theatrical release of the 1988 smash hit film, Rare's NES adaptation of Who Framed Roger Rabbit reviewed well, and it was fairly popular in its time.
You play as Eddie Valiant (RIP Bob Hoskins), a private dick hired to look into the murder of Marvin Acme, the owner of Toontown. The goal is to clear the name of the wrongly accused toon Roger Rabbit and prevent Toontown from falling into the hands of Judge Doom. If he's going to pull off such a feat, Eddie will have to beat the streets to track down the pieces of Acme's will that have been scattered across Tinseltown.
The flow of the game is simple. Wandering the streets of 1940s Los Angeles, you speak to people and search buildings for items and clues as you attempt to evade Judge Doom’s weasels, speeding cars, and assorted wildlife. Items will sometimes be sitting out in the open, but the majority will be hidden in background objects that have to be searched.
The game will penalize you for blindly rummaging through people's belongings (notice how coming up empty handed sometimes adds to the "punchline" meter at the top of the screen?), so the key is to ask for help from the random people milling about. If they tell you to search the building, then there's an item to be found nearby. If they say the building is empty, then you can move on and not waste your time. For a good laugh, you might try punching a random woman in the face and then asking her for help.
How is "GO AWAY YOU HORRID MAN" not a meme yet?
After you've gathered enough supplies you can begin actively hunting for the four pieces of the will. If you can get into the Ink & Paint Club and give Jessica Rabbit a flower she can point you in the right direction, as can the woman with big hair if you give her a heart, and the snake if you give him a rattle.
You have to be careful, though, because everything in this city is trying to kill you. Cars, rats, anvils, and bird poo can all make quick work of Eddie, and Roger will easily fall prey to the weasels and vultures if you fail to keep him out of harm's way.
Once all four pieces of the will are safely in hand, you can finally head over to Judge Doom's warehouse for the final showdown.
The internet has loved to hate on this game for many years now, and that sucks, because it really doesn’t deserve its reputation. It does have a few issues - there's not a lot of variety to the gameplay and the controls are awkward - but the game isn't nearly to play as difficult as people make it out to be. The gameplay is straightforward and easy to grasp after a quick skim of the manual, and though death can feel cheap at times, most of the traps are easily spotted and avoided with some practice.
Nintendo Power liked it, too. It got a full four page spread in the June/July 1989 issue, and the ratings were very respectable - the 4 out of 5 they gave it for "theme and fun" placed it ahead of IronSword, Guerilla War, Bad Dudes, and RoboCop, all of which were reviewed in the same issue.
The game looks pretty nice. The main characters are all instantly recognizable, and even though the backgrounds can sometimes be a bit repetitive, their simple, heavy lines and bold colors serve the cartoony style well. David Wise's jazzy tunes are super catchy, too.
The controls take some getting used to, though. The timing of Eddie's punch is fairly counter-intuitive, and cycling through items and punchlines requires you to hold select button while tapping left and right on the d-pad - not ideal when you're being attacked.
Overall, Who Framed Roger Rabbit is light, silly, and fun, and the way the locations of items are randomized at the start of each game gives it a lot of replay value. It's not the most polished NES game out there, but it tries hard to capture the magic and charm of the film, and it almost succeeds.
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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