History VideoGame / TheSimpsonsBartsNightmare

''Bart's Nightmare'' is a videogame based on ''Franchise/TheSimpsons'' and was released in 1992 for the [[UsefulNotes/SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem Super NES]] and UsefulNotes/SegaGenesis by Creator/{{Acclaim}}. It was developed by Sculptured Software, who also developed the follow-up ''Virtual Bart''.

* Bartzilla: Bart as a {{Notzilla}} rampages through the city before being shrunken down to climb a skyscraper and face [[KingKongCopy King Homer]] and [[Film/{{Mothra}} Momthra]]. Visited once with two levels, each with a page.

* ViolationOfCommonSense: Lisa will turn Bart into a frog if she gets him with her spell, and killing a flying saxophone always causes Lisa to appear shortly after. But if you get caught by Jimbo and his gang, the only way out is to kill a saxophone and call in Lisa, who inexplicably uses her magic on them instead of you this time.
* AWinnerIsYou: The ending is the same no matter how many pages you collect; the only thing that changes is the grade on the paper Bart holds up, and if it's high enough the family will smile at him as they look at it, when otherwise they'll scowl. Even if you collect all eight pages, the ending is the same, and getting all eight doesn't even guarantee Bart getting an A -- his grade is based on the player's final score, not how many pages they collected.

* AntiFrustrationFeatures: Ironic given the game's brutal difficulty otherwise, the Temple of Maggie and Bartzilla stages have this. The stages are divided into two parts, each with a page to get, but you play through the entire thing on your first trip. If you complete the first part and collect its page, then fail the second part, when you re-enter the stage from another page you can continue from the second part of the stage, and will still get credit for the first page if you game over.

* PowerupLetdown: In Windy World, if you jump over a basketball you get Bart's skateboard and as you ride it, you consistently gain Z's. But leaving aside the clunky jumping controls that make jumping the ball harder than it should, the skateboard makes you go pretty fast, making dodging enemies more difficult. And even if you don't hit an enemy, if you happen to even slightly touch anything as little as a ''crack in the pavement'' you'll lose the skateboard (but you won't be damaged).

* DamageSpongeBoss: The furnace at the end of the second Itchy & Scratchy level has a fairly simple pattern you'll get used to quickly, but it takes an ''ungodly'' ammount of damage to kill.

The game drops players into the HubWorld "Windy World", where Bart must evade various enemies and collect power-ups while searching for the pages of his homeworld blowing down the street. Bart's health is represented by a bar of Zs along the top of the screen; by blowing a bubblegum bubble into Zs he comes across, he can float them up to the top of the screen and catch them in the Z bar. By jumping into the homework pages when he finds one, Bart enters different worlds to retrieve his homework. The levels are:

* Bartman: A flying level where Bart as Bartman patrols the skies above Springfield fighting enemies with his trusty slingshot.

* Bart's Bloodstream: A WombLevel where a shrunken Bart fights off military germs in a bloodstream.

* GiantSpaceFleaFromNowhere: The final boss of the second Itchy and Scratchy level is... a furnace. It's ostensibly a reference to ''Film/HomeAlone'', but it still comes out of nowhere.

* BalefulPolymorph: Getting hit by Fairy Lisa's magic dust turns Bart into a frog. If you hit the flying sax while trapped by Jimbo's gang, she will appear and turn them into rats.

* OneHitKill: The Itchy and Scratchy world is full of one-hit deaths. All fire based attacks are instantly fatal to Bart, with the little boy crumbling to ashes.

* FakeDifficulty: In so many ways. The amount of GuideDangIt, LuckBasedMission, and TrialAndErrorGameplay, combined with clunky controls and hitboxes, make the game far more challenging than it ought to be.

** In several stages, enemies can attack you from off-screen, and in the Bartman stage they can do it vertically as well as horizontally. The second Bartzilla stage may have enemies ''chain'' their attacks if you're unlucky. The Itchy and Scratch stage not only has enemies that can attack from off-screen, but they'll deal a OneHitKO.

* GuideDangIt: The game opens with a title screen, Bart falling asleep, and then you're dumped into Windy World. If you don't know what to do from there, too bad. Further complicating it is that to enter the pages you need to actually ''jump'' into them, not just walk over them, so even if a player takes an interest in the pages blowing down the street, it's not unlikely they'll be unable to figure out what to do with it. Also, each level has its own gameplay style and control scheme entirely different from Windy World and each other.
** Scrolling the screen left or right seems fairly useless so most people wouldn't know that scrolling forward enough causes the statues in Maggie's temple to fire their only shot early.

* TrialAndErrorGameplay: The Temple of Maggie consists of stone columns where stepping on one makes another rise, and it's always the same ones. If a column falls too low, jumping on it kills you. Eventually you'll get to points where the entire line of columns ahead are at their lowest point, so it's time to randomly jump on other columns and see which one makes the path open up.

* UnwinnableByMistake: Only in the levels, fortunately; dying in them just takes you back to Windy World and you can try again later. Still...
** In the Bartzilla stage, the stage ends when the military shrink ray comes out and shrinks you. If you accidentally kill it (which is very possible since the stage trains you to shoot anything that moves), it'll never respawn and the stage will continue forever until Bart dies. In the second part of the level, you need to electrocute King Homer to win, but each time you use Bart's electrical shock, its duration lowers; eventually it'll last such a short time that it's almost impossible to get Homer with it.
** It's possible to box yourself in on a pillar in the Temple of Maggie stages where any move will end the level. But given that the pillars are connected in no particular pattern, you either have to be very unlucky to have this happen, or be trying to make it happen.

* AdaptationalVillainy: Considering this is from the first seasons of The Simpsons, it makes sense that in the Bartman levels you'd fight Sherri and Terry, who liked to annoy Bart, or Smithers, who was only known for being Burns' loyal toady. But even back then there was no reason for Bart to fight with Barney Gumble

* UniqueItems: There's exactly one Sleeping Bart item in the whole game, in the Bartman stage. It's only use is giving you one Z in windy world.