The Smurfs (Game Boy) Playthrough - NintendoComplete

A playthrough of Infogrames' 1998 license-based platforming game for the Nintendo Game Boy, The Smurfs.

The Smurfs for the Game Boy is an extremely high-quality platformer that closely resembles its NES counterpart, and is the only Smurfs game from the 1990s to receive an official US release. The game was originally released in Europe in 1994 and was finally brought to America a full four years later.

But in the case of The Smurfs, certainly better late than never. It plays like the classic 2D hop-and-bop, Mario-style platformers (that by 1998 were become fewer and fewer), but it adds quite a bit of variety to the formula with several different "vehicles," from logs to birds, to tackle the stages with. The controls are spot-on, no matter which style stage you're playing, and while it's short, The Smurfs provides a reasonable challenge. There's nothing hair pulling here, but it will certainly kill you a fair few times before you see it through.

The graphics and sound really do nicely by the license, too. Everything looks surprisingly close to what you'd expect from a Smurfs game, the backgrounds all display a pretty impressive level of detail, and the sprites are big on the Game Boy screen, meaning that system's notoriously blurry LCD screen won't completely obscure your view when the pace picks up. The soundtrack really deserves special mention, too. The always brilliant Alberto Jose Gonzalez (who composed tons of music for BitManagers, most notably the mindblowing Metal Masters' music) works his magic once again with his signature sound, and it sounds even better than the already excellent NES version's soundtrack. The Game Boy, let alone a Smurfs game, shouldn't sound this good, but Gonzalez knew how to take the Game Boy hardware well beyond its logical limits, and did so many times.

I loved the cartoon as a kid, and I really loved this game when it came out, too. It felt exactly right - It felt like a Smurfs game, and it was great. Playing it again now that I'm much older, I still feel the same way. It's a classic title that shows just how little great gameplay ages, no matter the hardware it's running on.

*Recorded with the Retroarch DMG shader for that classic green-screen look!
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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