The Three Stooges

Hey, fellas, nyuk nyuk nyuk! Why, I oughta… Soitenly. Oh, a wise guy, eh? Woo-woo-woo-woo!

I remember this one as a kid – my uncle was an old television show and movie fan, so whenever I went over, I had two choices to make in the basement where his NES was connected: Jaws or The Three Stooges. For some of you, this would have been Hell on Earth.

I learned to deal.

Today, he’d be the definition of a casual player: only buying into Nintendo because of the craze at the time. I suppose he thought if the movie or show was good, then the matching video game couldn’t be bad. Big mistake. Imagine buying only movie-based games. I know. It’s hard to even imagine. Three-breasted alien chicks do not equal a romping good time in Total Recall on the NES.

The story goes like this: Ma has thirty days to pay the orphanage’s rent to the evil I. Fleecem and repair the joint. The Stooges pop up and decide to help (“We’ll get the dough!” are their exact words), and it’s off to the races!

For all intents and purposes, The Three Stooges is a board game that scrolls through different odd job mini-games to collect the money for Ma. There’s a genre of these sort of board game-styled games on the Famicom, but for the NES, this is one of the few out there. Because there are only thirty days to pay the bank, each turn counts as a day, which, if you do the math, means thirty attempts to steal medical supplies from hospitals, hop over homeless people lying on the sidewalk, eat live shelled oyster soup, throw pies at the aristocracy, and walk off with large sums of money from street corners.

Activision, developer of the two Ghostbusters Nintendo games, had a little fun with their game properties in this opening movie that went a little something like this.

Curly: “Hey, fellas, we’re in the wrong game!”
Larry: “Hey, this looks like a kid’s game!”
Moe: “You imbeciles!” (slap)
Ray Parker Jr.: “Bustin’ makes me feel good!”

One of the draws to the game was the use of voice clips, which, as you can expect coming from an 8-bit sound source, are muffled to the point of The Exorcist audio tapes. If you’re brave enough, record the in-game voices and play them backwards to hear if there’s any Latin muttered in the noise.

I’ve particularly had vivid nightmares of the soup eating contest stage. Curly’s howls! Oh, God, Jesus, Curly’s howls! Like cries from a man on his deathbed whenever an oyster swallows a soup cracker! Relax, Curly. There will be other soup crackers.

I had high hopes that there’d be differences in the prototype, based on the neat Three Stooges label on the front cartridge.

Had even higher hopes after seeing the stickers on the PRG and CHR chips inside. The official release date of The Three Stooges was in September of 1989; these stickers have a February 23, 1989 date on them.

Unfortunately, I had a hard time noticing any changes. The game plays just as wonky as ever – no more, no less.

After dumping the game and running it through GoodNES, it is the same as a prototype dumped before, which means it is different from retail in very subtle ways.

Here’s fivesies! (slap) Now let’s scram!