I stumbled across this many years after it's Playstation release. I feel like I saw it come out, and ignored it in favor of Playstation 2 games (Seeing as how this was ported to Playstation at the very end of the Playstation's formidable years). So I was quite surprised when I found this game, and decided to impulse buy it, because I absolutely love The Three Stooges.
Now I want to find the people who ported this, and throw them in a dumpster. When playing this game on Playstation, a pretty advanced system, you will instantly begin thinking "Jesus, this looks like a bargain bin NES game!" And not only does it look like someone hastily scribbled 4 color creations that kind of look like Moe, Larry and Curly - if you squint or wear someone else's glasses - into Microsoft Paint and exclaimed "DONE!", it sounds like the worst thing you could ever imagine possible.
The only thing from the show you'll recognize are the horribly pixelated bitmap images ripped directly from the TV screen, such as Curly trying to get an oyster out of the stew and having it spit at him.
The sound is particularly atrocious. This is one of those games where the mean banker constantly laughs at you in the monotone NES computerized laugh that was used in 600 Nintendo games in the 1980's. We get it, you're the mean banker, and you're proud of your jerkiness, no need to rub it in. When you aren't listening to the banker cackle at you relentlessly, you're forced to hear clips from The Three Stooges that are so jarring that you will drop the controller. They sound exactly like someone held a cassette voice recorder up to an airing of The Stooges, and tried to catch as many clips as they could on tape, including the white noise in the room surrounding them. I'm all for using the real voices of Moe, Larry and Curly, but in this case, you'll think they are communicating from the grave via a Sanyo Cassette Tape Recorder - circa 1983.
The worst part has to be the gameplay, hands down. I didn't have the manual when I played this, and I seriously don't think it would help. The gameplay is an obvious precursor to Wario Ware (Startingly so at times), where instructions pop on the screen for literally 2 seconds, giving you zero chance to comprehend them, then immediately throwing you into a game with no idea what buttons you are supposed to use. Games vary from such amazing tasks as throwing pies and avoiding getting hit by pies, and - for reasons beyond my understanding - running down a sidewalk avoiding dogs and cinderblocks while a boxing match is completing rounds on the top half of your screen. I honestly have no idea what drug these people were taking when they created this.
If it isn't painfully obvious, let it be known that the Playstation version might as well have shipped in a cardboard NES box, because it's an 8-bit game with absolutely no gameplay and no creativity whatsoever. It amazes me that a license like The Three Stooges could be executed this badly. Anyone in the universe could do a better job at creating a game than CINEMAWARE did.
