Garfield: Caught in the Act

Garfield: Caught in the Act is a 1995 side scrolling platform game developed and published by Sega for the Genesis and Game Gear. A Microsoft Windows version followed. It is based upon Jim Davis' comic strip cat, Garfield, and draws inspiration from Davis' 1984 book Garfield: His 9 Lives. Odie scares Garfield while they are watching television and they fall on the TV, breaking it. Both characters attempt to repair it before Jon Arbuckle catches them; however, the thrown spare parts become an electronic monster known as the Glitch, transporting Garfield into the TV, where he must defeat him in order to get out. Garfield: Caught in the Act was met with mixed reception from critics.

Garfield: Caught in the Act is a side scrolling platform game where players take control of the titular cat across levels of varying themes on the television in order to defeat an evil electronic being known as the Glitch and escape the TV. The levels, though linear in nature, are large and populated with obstacles, enemies and environmental hazards, inviting the player to traverse the stage by running, jumping, climbing, swinging, throwing objects or dodging enemies. Later levels become more maze like and exploratory, making the player take different routes to reach the end, where a boss must be fought to progress further. There are two types of bonus rounds, one of which resembles a Whac A Mole game. Each time the player defeats a boss, Garfield takes a commercial break where he rockets through the Television Wasteland, trying for an extra life or a continue.|width=23em|quoted=1

Plans for a Garfield game on Sega Genesis came into existence with the rise of licensed platform titles such as Disney's Aladdin by Virgin Games. Development on Garfield: Caught in the Act originally began with programmer Steven Lashower, who worked on the Sega 32X conversion of Star Wars Arcade, but internal development issues led to the project being restarted during Christmas 1994 and months of work being scrapped as a result, with Michael Fernie now serving as lead programmer instead alongside Ala Diaz and Pravin Wagh. Michael Fernie was a former Absolute Entertainment member who left the company and joined Sega to work on a 32X project titled Ratchet and Bolt but due to Sega interActive focusing on releasing Eternal Champions: Challenge from the Dark Side, his team and the project made no progress until he was transferred with the Star Wars Arcade staff and was asked to take over Garfield: Caught in the Act, which was facing a turbulent creation cycle. Garfield: Caught in the Act on Sega Genesis was developed by most of the same team that worked on Star Wars Arcade for the 32X at Sega interActive simultaneously with the Game Gear port by Novotrade International, with Michael Latham and Eric Quakenbush serving as producers of each version respectively. A port for the Sega 32X, called Garfield in TV Land, was planned but ultimately cancelled.

The Game Gear version of Garfield: Caught in the Act, developed by Novotrade International and published by Sega in North America and Europe, includes eight levels in total, two of which appear in the Lost Levels ("Bonehead the Barbarian" and "Slobbin Hood").

Critical reception for Garfield: Caught in the Act has been mixed. Reviewing the Genesis version, the four reviewers of Electronic Gaming Monthly praised the graphics and animation, but all but one of them felt these were outweighed by the loose controls and large number of mandatory hits. Sega Saturn Magazine (previously Sega Magazine) criticized the bland backgrounds and sluggish control and summarized that "Once you've overcome the novelty of eliciting any movement from the world's most notorious sleep junkie, you're left with a fairly unoriginal platformer".