Is Frantic Flea Worth Playing Today? - SNESdrunk
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- Опубликовано: 6 ноя 2023
- Please do not ever play this game
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Arguably the finest flea based platformer available on the SNES that year.
This guy is spitting facts.
Terios quiet he told you not to even mention it YOu imb.....
Definitely a worthy rival to Worm Odyssey despite that game's revolutionary implementation of rumble features.
EVER
Debatable
Fun fact. We had this game on my home and my mom really liked it. She could sit for hours playing it and slowly advancing through it. I found it awful but she had fun with it, even finished it multiple times.
I mean yeah, I could see that. its kinda the equivalent of modern rage games. if your mind is suited for things like that, it being captivating could be understandable tbh
For the positive side, the graphics doesn't look too bad. I mean it has some sort of character and style, so I give them that.
I've found that, more often than not, games that LOOK amazing but are otherwise pretty awful or at beat have weird controls and gameplay tend to be ported European Amiga games or at least developed by Europeans who cut their teeth on the Amiga. Like, their game design experience is limited to "dripping water = harmful" and are just really annoying games that are focused more on the looks versus the actual gameplay... I don't know why so many games were ported from the Amiga to the SNES (and sometimes Genesis), but here we are.
I agree the graphics and animation are definitely serviceable. It is really a shame that the engine and sound didn’t live up to what it could’ve been. It almost seems like it could be earthworm Jim meets flicky
@@nickfifteen I have theorized for a while that the game's developer is from either Finland or Germany, so hearing someone say it feels European in the sense of focusing more on looks than gameplay is funny for that reason.
Ngl when I say Dunkey mention this in his video I thought “Huh, I wonder if he watched SNES Drunk’s review.”
Only to see SNES Drunk featured at the end.
Same. I saw him mention frantic flea and was like "hmmm, does Dunkey watch SNESDrunk ?" The end confirmed it.
I had the exact same experience. I was like holy shit my man SNES Drunk getting some recognition!
I was so ready for you to say 'this is a game you should avoid any way you can'
I owned this game as a kid. I really wanted an N64, which had just came out, and my mom had said "We'll see what we can do," as moms tend to say even when they are the matriarch of a poor family with miniscule chance to afford a brand new gaming console. School had let out right around Christmas time - it may have been the last day before Christmas break - and while I normally rode the bus home, my parents picked me up from school, telling me in that most sly of ways that they "Had a surprise for me." I bounced around all giddy in the backseat, my mind already settled that I had a brand new N64 waiting for me, and could hardly contain my excitement as we ran errands in town for the next hour or so. Then, just before going home, my mom stopped by a family friend's house, went outside, and brought out my gift: the family friend was giving me Frantic Flea - box, manual, and all - for the low, low price of free. No Super Mario 64, or Pilotwings, or Wave Race for me that year, but I did get to "enjoy" the funky tunes of Frantic Flea that Christmas. I think I also got that Yogi Bear game for the SNES that same year. Bless my parents. They tried.
I share a similar story. With my mom, I went to the local electronics store. Tony hawks pro skater 2 had just come out. We couldn‘t afford the full price of the new game so I went home with an inline skating game made by some no name company.
I miss my mom..
This story makes me happy and sad at the same time. Happy that your parents tried to get you a nice gift for Xmas but sad that I know how you felt as a kid but know how your parents must feel like if they knew you were disappointed and they couldn’t get you what you wanted. 😢
Sounds like "we have great Nintendo games at home".
More or less how i got a Ps1 back in 2004
Yeah , yogi Bear, snesdrunk hasnt reviewed it yet, good idea.
'Mom, can we get Earthworm Jim?'
'We have Earthworm Jim at home.'
Earthworm Jim at home:
Earthworm Jim if it was bought in Lidl
Lmao 🤣
"Mom that's not an earthworm?"
'Use your imagination 💀"
You had a mom and a home!?! 😮
@@me8751 luxury!
You know it's that obscure and terrible that even the AVGN hasn't made an episode on it yet.
The best AVGN episodes are when he's reviewing terrible games that AREN'T obscure, because they're more relatable for those that suffered alongside him.
Don't worry, now SNESdrunk has made a video about this game, AVGN will soon plagiarise it to "create" his own video about it. Because all James Rolfe and his team does these days is steal other people's work because he's too lazy to write his own reviews.
I feel this game captures what it's it's really like to have fleas.
As someone fighting fleas on animals right now, this is an offensive game. I don't want to collect flea babies; I want to end them. Thank you for braving this itchy mess.
Have you try tried diatomaceous earth?
Keep up the good fight.
Maybe that's the actual message of the game, to get you to hate the little fleas because they keep escaping you all the time and jumping around frantically avoinding you, and then, as you said, "want to end them". All just a marketed ploy to make gamers everywhere detest fleas and take better care of the envinronment they use while partaking in their favored gaming activity. A ruse if you will, orchestrated by the big pesticide companies to lead us into a mighty future devoid of these odious creatures, a bright light cast into a mildly itchless tomorrow.
Just maybe.
I have not yet.. daily vacuuming and more aggressive flea drop schedule has been making an impact. It is a war of attrition lol @@M33f3r
My house got *infested* with fleas a few years ago. They were EVERYWHERE!
Search for this video, it helped me a lot: *How to Get Rid of Fleas Fast Cheap and Easy. See Links / Info in Description* 👇🏻
I gotta say the visuals look nice at least. Definitely has that 90's Saturday morning cartoon sort of aesthetic going for it. The sprite work has a nice visual style and lots of bright bold colors. I dig it.
For a SNES game released in 1996, they are terrible.
@@sjake8308 and a table its a table, but that was not his point.
Big problem with a lot of platformers is that the camera lags behind, so less of the screen is shown in front of the character, which leads to having less time to react to enemies!
One positive: The artwork is nice? The sprites are animated well. That's all I got.
Yep, I like the graphics too
I agree. This game had that "SNES look", but I must admit I'd never heard of it until now.
One positive: The game can be turned off! 😆
In this SNES-flea-platformer world, you're either a Plok or you're a Frantic Flea
Now imagine finding Frantic Flea at a flea market
To be fair it was obviously early in the SNES lifespan, coming soon after Sonic where developers were still learning how to make a fast-paced platf... 1996?! Western gamers had Playstations by then!
Even if it’s crap I enjoy seeing obscure games like this.
The boxart looks nice at least
This is exactly the kind of game I love looking at. Who else would ever even talk about this unless they picked it by pure chance?
This is the type of game i'd love to see a remaster/ fan patch for.
The concept, music and artstyle are fun and unique.
If they'd just fix:
- The run speed
- The jumping
- The enemy speed
- The enemy health (lower it)
- The attack range
This game could be quite fun I think
Find the dev(s) and do an interview? I'd donate to hear why they made the game the way that they did. And what if anything they would've done differently.
Imagine if they were really defensive and told SD to "git gud".
And then went on to Say that Dark Souls was inspired by this game.
It was made almost 30 years ago - even if you could get in contact with a member of the dev team, most of the main team likely is not in the industry anymore, retired, or moved on to other projects and have forgotten what their plans were for a 90's era flea based SNES platformer. In terms of the information you want, Frantic Flea was featured in in an article in Electronic Gaming Monthly No. 81 where the Creative Director, Andy Whitehurst (whose last game he is credited on - or at least I can find - was the 2007 Mercury Meltdown on the Wii, so he likely retired from the industry - he is also very likely AJW which would be his initials who is credited as the main guy for the game in the credits) explained the team's approach was "What we were trying to show is that despite 16-bit graphical limitations you can actually make a video game look like a cartoon. We wanted [Frantic Flea] to look like a '50s or '60s Warner Bros. cartoon and to have the same zany feel, almost Dr. Seuss-like which nobody has tried before in a video game." I get the sense that the idea was style over substance - I think they knew they weren't making the next Super Mario World and instead opted to make the game stand-out by having it look like a Saturday morning cartoon.
@@nt-fo9pt I applaud the research you put into your response.
No one today was is going to admit to creating this game.
The answer is probably that they were asked by a publisher to make an game like Earthworm Jim, except they weren't given much time or many resources. The '80s and '90s are littered with games that came out like this for these reasons.
I feel like this could be a decent game with just a restoration patch. Tweak the controls, stop the fleas from spreading out when hit, fix the momentum issues.
Totally. The game looks nice. It just plays horrible, apparently.
Who has the time to do that for a game nobodys heard of.
@@Shooter-hu1he you can never know where a passion project may come from.
Maybe someone from the original dev team, or somebody who wants the game he dreamt it would be instead of the one he played...
I for one I'm glad I got to play some obscure snes rpgs back in the day thanks to the effort of fan translators.
Hey if they do I'm all for giving it ago but given that it was the studios only game I doubt it would happen.@@drillerdev4624
Imagine what it’d be like if this was the first video game you ever played. You’d probably never play a game again because you’d think all games were this bad
The first game I played was X-Men on NES, so I can somewhat relate. Thankfully we booted up Super Mario Bros. after that.
Well, i had many bad Games on the C64 and i think the Super Nintendo saved my Love for Video Games.
Btw. Castlevania on the Gameboy was my first of the Series, i haven't played another until 2018, because i thought they are all just as bad.
Doesn't work with Fortnite or LoL, so a doubtful take.
If it was the first game someone ever played, they'd have no frame of reference so they'd probably be excited for the technology alone (like all of us who grew up with really bad graphics and gameplay). If this hypothetical person was aware of other games before playing this, they'd also probably know that games are better. Yes... I thought about this waayyyyy too much...
Guy who's only played frantic flea playing another game for the first time: "hmmm getting a lot of frantic clea vibes from this"
I've never heard drunk this irritated before. I want to give him a hug and remind him of all the good things in the world
I was expecting him to burst into "WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!"
Remind him of amazing games like Shaq Fu, Bubsy, Big Rigs, Superman 64, and Sonic 3D Blast
I think I remember this was on at least one list of “Worst SNES games”
There is one other good thing to say about Frantic Flea: the art style has that Ahh! Real Monsters/Boogerman/Pizza Tower look to it. Like, if somebody gave the Flea a few more moves and remastered the sprites for this game, they could do a sprite swap mod that turns Pizza Tower into a good Frantic Flea game. You could even swap baby fleas in for the sentient pizza toppings.
Loved the random Dr. Seuss rhyming bit
One thing I can say I like is the artwork on the box, it gives the vibe of a 90s cartoon or a Sunday paper comic strip
Total length of video: 330 secs.
Total length of "SNES Drunk": 2.5 secs.
.76% of the video was spent listening to "SNES Drunk".
Every time that flea character does that spinning move throughout the gameplay video, it looks like it’s ripping off the Tazmanian Devil from Looney Tunes.
Theres always been something about snes games with this type of graphics that screams "I suck, dont play me"
It's the videogame equivalent of a Yugo covered in bondo with 4 Sale spray painted on the windshield.
I’ll be honest. I don’t hate the graphics. They’re animated ok and it looks like a cartoon from the era
@@noaht2005 I'm with you. It's like, if this game has one thing going for it, it's that the art style is at least consistent.
@@hotpileofgarbage it’s not one of those amiga-esque games where every asset looks like it’s from a different game
Well, it's obvious that this game doesn't have the best graphics on the SNES, but I admit that I really like the artistic visuals, it's very cartoony, very simplistic and colorful, typical of the cartoons of that era.
“I keep expecting some drunk guy to start shouting about sports.”
Very meta.
It’s meta and also a song by Viagra Boys, it’s called “Sports” it’s fucking awesome lol
@@imgermainthat was the song that made me know I would love the band. It’s not my favorite on their first album (that would go to Shrimp Shack), but Sports is hilarious.
0:23 Dunkey did think this was an ultra rare hidden gem
Dunkey is a little bitch that cries when his shit take has backlash.
I always click your videos, not because I care or know anything about frantic fleas or whatever, but because I know in each video I'll find at least one little thing that makes me laugh. In this one it was "is carpal tunnel worth getting today?"
Old school monster hunters and souls players be like
Me at first "well it looks somewhat okay for an early SNES game. . ."
SNES Drunk: "It came out in 1996"
OH GOOD LORD.
Awesome you mention Viagra Boys! I knew one of the band members, before he past away. A friend and colleague at the time. I used to sell him my old smartphones really cheap. It wasnt until a few years later I understood that he was one of the members of Viagra Boys.
That was awesome seeing you on Dunkey’s channel. I was wondering when he mentioned this vid.
Hey SNES Drunk, if you're looking for another SNES game you haven't covered yet, try super dani. It's an odd title based on some french mascot, I think, but I remember it being quite good. Would be cool to see it on your channel!
Dani is a _yogurt_ mascot.
Dani is a _yogurt_ mascot.
@bootblacking hahaha yes, right!
Surprised to hear about this, my uncle found it at a pawn shop and dropped it off one day. Played it like 2 times and then it sat forever.
The art style is actually really cool, it’s a shame it doesn’t play well.
The sprite art looks really pretty good!
🤘🤘🤘 love your channel my man! The Dr Seus joke was hilarious 😅
I remember getting this on discount at EB games in 1998. I instantly regretted it
I have to manually search for your videos...the damn algorithm just decided I don't want to binge snesdrunk vids while I get ready for work
Those gravity pads looked like a clever mechanic.
"Apparently [baby fleas] would rather just die than continue on and I don't blame them."
I physically choked and had to pause.
Nice, thanks for taking one for the team.
I rented this game once. You were a bit kind on your review.
3:45 they broke him
I still remember reading the preview of this in UK SNES mag Super Play, looked promising. Their subsequent review was as equally scathing as this video.
I remember getting this at a garage sale in the late 90s. The lady at the sale kept calling it "FRANITE FLEA" for some reason. I can still hear it in my head. That's the only thing I remember about the game so my 8 or 9 year old self obviously hated it too 😂
Love the shout out to Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball!
Nice I like how you threw that Chargers folly in there.
I remember reading the name in a list but i think it was an ad for new releases on a club Nintendo magazine, i probably still have it just gotta dig it up
Not only did no one post a FAQ or walkthrough, it sounds like even game testers didn't play this thing.
There were six, allegedly. One was the programmer, though.
The art is really good. It looks like they wanted to make something like Earthworm Jim. They just failed miserably at the controls and level design.
The way the little fleas also do the spin attack when the big one does it is kinda cute, I guess.
Very surprised with the graphics and art, seems really good.
Everything else is bad, but it looks great.
You got the dunkey bump!
I will give this awful game credit: it looks like a 90's Nickelodeon cartoon, but that's probably the only other praise it is going to get.
I did play this game a bit, it's exactly as I remember it. It was at my grandparents house for whatever reason, somehow even though I was crazy about games back then I didn't even bother beating the first level of this one
Oh man. Can't wait for an AVGN episode on this.
Guess I should go ahead and start hoarding copies, just in in case he makes the price of them spike a bajillion dollars.
suggest it to mike and we'll probably get an episode
I remember begging my parents to buy this game for Christmas, after seeing some screenshots in a magazine. That artstyle still looks awesome to me. 🤷
Art is cool, yep.
thank you for taking the hit for us. You are appreciated!!
I used to get carpal tunnel killer instinct for the Nintendo 64 saber wolf was my favorite character
The game got a pretty big spread in Nintendo Power. The art style is actually fantastic and looks great on a CRT where the bold colors blend into each other. Actually playing it is a pain in the ass though.
Would the one thing that’s good about this game be the graphics? I like how hand drawn they look, they have a look similar to Nick toons from the 90s. Except for the backgrounds being mostly plain but still fits the art style somewhat.
The graphics reminds me of the Aaah! Real Monsters game
Lol I never expected a Viagra Boys reference in one of your videos.
do you keep track of what % of SNES games you've covered so far?
Frantic Flea is definitely the Frantic Flea of video games.
Great harmonies on this one.
Can't help but laugh at all these variants on Sonic at the time where the devs didn't understand why it worked. The higher horizontal resolution on MD would've helped a bit but probably not enough
This is more like poundshop Earthworn Jim with the main attack borrowed from Taz Mania.
Taz is a good comparison, sure. But those games also seemed inspired by Sonic@@sjake8308
That INTRO today!
I do recall seeing it at the rental store... but with a thick layer of dust on top.
Haha you got me with the Seuss😂
this was one of those games that would always be in stock at Blockbuster
oh this is surreal, we rented this when i was little. i havent seen this game since then and started to wonder if maybe i just imagined it. anyway, i remember it sucking even back then, lol.
I was literally playing Bill Lambeers combat basketball on my anbernic when I heard the comment at 4:00
I really enjoy your videos, even on the bad games.
I do dig the look of the game. No horizontal or vertical lines allowed!
Omg, I think you just told me the title of a game I played a long time ago and have been searching for forever now lol.
At least it's art style is good lol
Can't believe Frantic Flea made it into Dunky's latest video. SNESdrunk is a savant
0:26 ayy lmao of course you would say that in November
I remember seeing an ad for it in Super Play and becoming interested because of the cartoon graphics, never thought it was that bad.
Hope they can speerun this on the Gdq section for anwful games xD
i love the graphics tho it looks like they forgot to draw the backgrounds XD
never heard of this one before. i was happy about that...
Big "Sunday School" Earthworm Jim vibes
Drunk's roast sesh at the end was more brutal and relentless than the Lanky Kong segment of the Dk64 rap.
DKC3 Hangtime MKU3 MARIO RPG ALPHA2 all came out 1996. It was actually a very good SEGA Genesis year as well
Ik u normally arent this harsh but im glad you were this time bc it was HILARIOUS 10/10 ep lmao
Oooh, nice harmony today!
I’ve went threw the wiki page for “All SNES games” so many times 😂
The Ryan Leaf reference cracked me up. 😂
OMG Viagra Boys is one of the best modern bands! So good you mentioned them.
Thank you for your service.
Frantic Flea! *A true hidden gem* lol
Thanks for covering things and bringing awareness to the community 👍
Friends of mine have a retro gaming podcast. I randomly saw this game listed in an old magazine or something and said they should play it for an episode. They spent most of the episode cursing my name 😂
Patiently waiting for that Biometal video. I know you hate the background for level one, maybe a skip code exists?
BioMetal's a bit rough around the edges, but at it's core it's a pretty decent shoot 'em up. It's not for the faint of heart, though. I'd also recommend playing the Japanese version because the original soundtrack is much better than the awful one in the US version.
"At least the bass is nice"
*me hearing the bass*
*Instant PTSD from suddenly remembering i actually tried this game once on emulator and it was painful*