Brace Yourself: The 'Home Improvement' Video Game Isn’t Very Good
A shitty memento to a shitty show starring a shitty guy
Someday soon I will stop playing and writing about bad licensed games from the ‘90s. Today is not that day.
1994’s Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit!, based on the long-running ABC sitcom, is an insulting game. And I don’t mean it insults your intelligence with an incomprehensible plot, although it does. What I mean is — if you were one of the two dozen people who bought this game when it came out and consulted the instruction manual, either out of curiosity or because you’d booted it up and couldn’t tell what the hell was going on, you were treated with an insult.
If you look closely, it even looks like they wrote some actual directions and still slapped their 1990-core gag on top of it. Real men might not need instructions, but real gamers (plenty of whom were children) could’ve used the help navigating your weird game, man.
It’s one of those “discover there’s a fucking run button halfway through it” type of affairs. Home Improvement star Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor discovers a lot of weapons throughout this stupid game: nail guns, chainsaws, a grappling hook — and not even a hint of how to use them.
I’ll admit, the bit is thematically on point with Home Improvement’s braindead comedy and the way Real Men™ shouldn’t need directions. But, as I recall, the other part of that bit was always Tim getting electrocuted or knocked the fuck out. I would like to stand a fighting chance here, video game. Please tell me how you work.
Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! opens during an episode of Tool Time, the show-within-a-show hosted by Tim and his eternally insulted co-host, Al Borland. For some reason, Tim’s three kids are with him, just sort of hanging around the set. Probably as an excuse to get teenage heartthrob Johnathan Taylor Thomas in the game.
The game’s plot is tedious, and every single cutscene is the same static shot of the studio. During the taping, Tim reveals that Binford (Tool Time’s sponsor) provided some special tools, and he tells the studio audience to hang tight while he goes and grabs them. Then he returns and tells the studio audience that he cannot find them. Then he tells the studio audience that he has located a note that tells him to go look for the special tools.
Al correctly decodes this as an invitation to go look elsewhere on the studio lot for the tools. The audience sits there and watches on closed-circuit television as Tim goes from lot to lot, kicking ass and looking for answers (and leaving his kids with Al).
Tim visits four different “productions” while looking for his special tools, using his other tools (which seem pretty good!) along the way. The first level has Tim venturing to the nearby set of Dinosaur Safari.
I found the Power Tool Pursuit’s level design to be surprisingly inspired. Equipment like cameras and lights adorn the under-construction sets, but as you get deeper into the levels, the dinosaurs and deadly bugs are very, very real. It’s absurd, of course, but if this game were realistic, Tim would’ve found the tools backstage and he’d be home fighting with his wife by now.
Unfortunately, the pretense of other productions is short-lived — and soon Al is just like, “Tim! You should go check out the Temple of Tools!” and Tim is like, “Oh shit that’s right thank you!”
WHAT THE HELL IS THE TEMPLE OF TOOLS BOYS?
Also, at the end, Tim goes to space just for the fuck of it.
Sadly, the game doesn’t know what to do with its clever art design. The gameplay consists of tracking down a series of treasure chests that make more noise as you get closer to them1. It’s far more tedious than fun. Additionally, unfair enemies and confusing layouts undo a lot of clever details and cool weapons.
It’s disappointing that the absurdity of the levels isn’t mined for comedy. Something as simple as Tim remarking how other shows on the network get a much bigger budget than Tool Time would’ve gone a long way. Not to mention all the jokes he could’ve cracked about the mummies and tiny UFO’s he was fighting.
As far as the game’s source material, I’m begrudgingly pretty familiar with it. It was a standard issue sitcom from the ‘90s — i.e., a network hired a successful stand-up comedian, in this case Allen, to develop a show loosely based on their act. Home Improvement chronicled a hardware-obsessed family man/local TV host from Michigan2.
It wasn’t hilarious, but it was an adequate sitcom that stood out among the parade of absolute dreck the networks were putting on at the time. Kind of like Friends. These shows didn’t blow my mind, or even make me laugh very much, but they were competently produced and ran circles around shit like The Single Guy and Veronica’s Closet.
The Super Nintendo was home to some pretty great platformers, and a whole bunch of downright awful ones. Despite its attempts at innovation, Home Improvement: Power Tool Pursuit! falls squarely into the latter. Games from this era tended to have large levels that were more like an airplane hangar filled with platforms than the linear types pioneered by Super Mario Bros. Of course it sounds more ideal to have different directions to travel instead of a direct line from left to right, but these games and levels often struggled to guide the player or justify their extra space. It was just bloated game design, big messy levels that left players unclear how to navigate them. I suspect this was a good way to turn a game that should last an hour into one that takes three or four hours instead. I think they included tiny bugs that most of your weapons won’t even hit for the same reason. I had a chainsaw that shot Contra bullshit out of it, but I still got eaten alive by those things.
The game leaves a lot on the table. Between-level mini-games would’ve been fun. Al Borland could've been featured as either a Luigi-type second player, or a Rush-like helper to step in when things get tricky. And not even a glimpse of Wilson, the wise next-door neighbor who helps Tim out of a jam in every episode? Nope, just a few hours of Tim Allen shooting nails at dinosaurs and bugs. This would’ve made more sense as a Flintstones game.
I was going to close this write-up with some words about Tim Allen and his history of being an asshole, and how reports are still coming out to this day about what an asshole he is. But then I thought it might be needlessly cynical. This is my little DIY newsletter, I call the shots, and instead, I will close by focusing on something positive.
RetroAchievements. It’s a simple premise. These lovely people and their community have dedicated themselves to putting achievements, like those that are featured in modern games, in all of the classic games you could think of, as well as a bunch of obscure ones. It might seem arbitrary, but it breathes new life into old games in ways I could’ve never imagined. Now you can Platinum Kirby’s Adventure on the NES3 or give yourself even more to do in Need for Speed Underground 2 on the PlayStation 2. It’s incredible. I’m not even an expert on this stuff, I just used my RetroAchievements login on a few of the emulators on my Steam Deck.
Not only has it breathed new life into old games, adding new motivations for playthroughs of my favorites, but it also showcases the creativity and sense of humor of those talented people who have programmed them. The other day I saw a 9/11 reference in the Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas set4. Sony would never.
So in closing, rather than knock Tim Allen some more, I encourage you to check out RetroAchievements if you’re doing any retro gaming on your computer or Steam Deck. I hope you find a set as exciting as the one I did for this underwhelming Home Improvement game, made by the user BigWeedSmokerMan. You’re doing the lord’s work, BWSM!
Fortnite would rip this mechanic off years later.
As stated, I never cared much for Home Improvement, but as a child, I always appreciated the show’s insistence on including as many references to my home state of Michigan’s schools and companies as possible, usually by way of a T-shirt worn by Allen. I almost went to a little university in Owosso, Michigan called Baker College, and while touring their campus I noticed a large framed picture of Tim Allen wearing a Baker College shirt on prominent display. Some colleges adorn their halls with famous alumni and sports rivalries. Some just blow up screenshots from sitcoms. I didn’t attend, and while the Home Improvement picture wasn’t the deciding factor, I’m not sure it tipped the scales in Baker’s favor very much.
The Switch doesn’t offer achievements, which means that these days systems from the ‘80s have more to offer the Trophy Hunters of the world than the third-best-selling console of all time!
It was “Jet Fuel Can’t Melt Steel Beams,” which awards RetroAchievements users 25 points for getting a gold medal on every Flight School test.
RetroAchievements is such a great idea. There's a madman making wifi-enabled cards for 80s computers that allow them to connect to something called "FujiNet," and they're similarly hacking old shooters like Buck Rogers to allow global leaderboards on games that didn't even used to have a battery backup to save your high score. It's delightful.