ACME Animation Factory

Hi Everyone, I'm back after a few years...

ACME Animation Factory

ACME Animation Factory
1994
Probe Software Ltd./Sun Corporation of America
Genre: Art and Graphics/Educational



Today I played ACME Animation Factory, a game which fits in unenviable niche of "Mario Paint Clone" but where as Mario Paint was fun, this game clearly was created just with profit in mind. Here's a bit from the Wikipedia article:

"In ACME Animation Factory, the player is given a series of tools to create their own animated cartoons."

Sooo basically, it's Mario Paint, but with Looney Tunes characters and a clunkier interface. This is the first game that I've tested which uses the SNES Mouse accessory, which I'm glad to report is supported by my emulator.

Moving on to gameplay, the first thing that I did was to check out the music creator, because it was one of the few sections that I could reliably figure out what it would be. None of the sections of this game are labelled with text, so you have to just kind of figure out what's going on based on pictograms, I assume that this was to make it easier for younger players, but it just ended up causing a bit of confusion.

As you can see it has a somewhat similar interface to the music creator in Mario Paint, except that the nots are just circles rather than different shapes depending on the "instrument" this presented a bit of a problem to me as I am colorblind (more on that later) so I had trouble telling the difference between the green and yellow as well as blue and purple circles. The other odd thing is that it has a 3/4 time signature by default instead of the more common 4/4. Perhaps waltzes are more wacky and cartoonish?

Next I went to the drawing section of the game.

Please forgive anything that is grossly miscolored in that image, like I said, I'm colorblind so I have trouble with that. I did actually have a bit of childish fun sitting around for 10 minutes coloring this image though. There are multiple different scenes that can be chosen which is an advantage as they feature popular Looney Tunes characters. It also allows you start with a blank page and use simple Microsoft Paint style drawing tools.

Here's one masterpiece that I came up with. I was going to write something funnier with the Text  Tool, but it was a royal pain to use as you had to select each letter individually from a horizontal list (which would only show about 5 letters at a time). Next I went back to the main menu and selected an icon that looked like a Gameboy. What would this be? Some type of Gameboy linkup where you could print your masterpieces using the Gameboy Printer accessory, or even where you could use the Gameboy Camera accessory to import photos that you take into the game to be animated? What an exciting an innovative feature that would have been.

It just brought up a matching game.

I guess the matching game was alright as least because it had the added difficulty of those broken boxes, if you click on one of those you get a strike and three strikes means you're out. So yeah, fun.

After a full 45 seconds or so of the excitement of the matching game, I was bored, so I decided to check out animation.

Here's the animation screen, it was bland and the controls didn't feel good, I don't know, I'm sick of this review and I was really sick of this game by this point. The audio made no real impression on me one way or the other. The End.


2/10