Garbage Pail Kids: Mad Mike and the Quest for Stale Gum

Short and sweet game with catchy tunes and a bunch of collectibles. Gameplay is entertaining where you can switch between characters with different attacks to suit your need. Boss fights are fun too.

What a great NES game for 2022! I love GPK, and love how I can switch between 4 different characters on the fly. Great music, great Easter Eggs, and very good gameplay. Graphics are very cool, especially the bosses. Sy Clops is amazing! Thanks for programming a great game!

GREAT GAME SUPER FUN!!! SUPPPPPER RETRO AT IT'S BEST!!!

It looks and plays just like an NES game....and it is one. So if you still own an NES, you can pick up the actual cartridge if you want. I don't know why you would want to, but it's an option. This game is just a platformer. Not much more to say about this. It's not bad.

I did play testing for this and played a ton on the original NES, love this game. Nostalgic and controls feel great.

This is a great NES game, and for such an affordable price, what else would you expect. This feels like a perfect throwback to a game my parents would have never let me rent from the video shop. My only thing I would love added, would be a speedrun mode to add an in game timer for quality of life of speedrunning it

This is more what an actual Garbage Pail Kids game would've been like had it came out in the 80s along with all of its flaws and frustrations rather than a modern take on a game from that era. It has a couple quality of life features like rewind which is really helpful if you just want to go through the game but the game itself bears all the warts of a mediocre NES game- poor level design, mostly bland gameplay, and too many hazards that aren't obvious. That said I didn't hate playing it but wouldn't really recommend outside of a deep sale, and even then only for those who are curious what a GPK game would've been like had one existed 40 years ago. 6/10

This was a nice surprise. The trailers I had seen didn't get my hopes up, but in the end while Garbage Pail Kids might not reach the heights of a 1st-party NES game or even Konami or Capcom's 8-bit output, I'd put it at the level of a good Ocean-developed game. The graphics aren't great and much of the spritework struggles to capture the GPK aesthetic, but there is a great variety of environments to get through with a lot of fun little details and creative set pieces (such as Hell's Kitchen, where at one point you traverse a giant grill where cockroaches, shoes and eyeballs are cooking). The GPK license goes beyond character sprites, as there is a "gross" theme that permeates throughout the entire game including in the environments and in the dialogue. Also included with the game are a couple of interesting promotional videos, including one where Christian Slater does the voice of Mad Mike (one of the game's playable characters). It's quite surreal that this game exists and was apparently given a lot of love in its creation. The controls are fairly solid and the jank is kept to a minimum (although you have to train yourself to jump before you reach the end of a platform as it has a misleading hitbox, and I found one spot where the game behaved very bizarrely, making it difficult to orient myself and navigate between two screens). You've got 4 playable characters you can swap between at any time, although you'll likely spend most of your time with the character who can fire snot projectiles. There are multiple difficulty levels and a well-implemented rewind feature that comes in very handy if you like that sort of thing (I sure do appreciate when it's an option). There's also a toilet-fishing mini-game (a great place to use that rewind feature), and an oddly deep trading card meta-game where you find GPK trading cards in trash cans and trade them with NPCs to try to fill out your collection (which includes paying attention to their hints about cards other NPCs are looking for). Really, I was not expecting this much effort and attention to detail. I am reminded of several NES games while playing this. In terms of sprite work and graphic presentation I'm reminded of the likes of Ghoul School and the Simpsons games. Thematically and stylistically it evokes Monster Party and Splatterhouse: Wanpaku Graffitti. Mechanically it feels similar to the Addams Family games. It manages to push my nostalgia buttons and make me feel like I've travelled back in time. If you like imperfect but charming 8-bit fare, you might like this. Recommended.

umm... great game.

The NES is alive and healthy even in the 2020s. If this released in 1989 instead of 2022, it would have been a smash hit. This is like Capcom/Konami levels of quality, and the respect it pays to the Garbage Pail Kids IP is incredible. This isn't just "Oh, this is popular! Give these characters a generic 80s cartoon adventure on the NES so kids buy it!" No, every detail is on point with the humor and tone of Garbage Pail Kids. They even incorporated card trading into the gameplay by making you collect cards (out of garbage cans and public toilets, of course) to trade them for cards that give powerups and special moves with various NPCs. Just because you see zoomers playing nothing but bad COD clones and not working, and gen alpha just tapping flashing colors and failing school does not mean gaming is dead, it only means the future of our species is dead. Hopefully I'll be dead too by the time the consequences of that manifest, but in the meantime, I look forward to playing more modern NES games.