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| | Publisher: Aspyr Media  Genre: Adventure & RPG | | Mac OS X: 10.3 Mac OS Classic: Not Supported
CPU: G4 @ 800 MHz RAM: 256 MB Hard Disk: 1024 MB DVD-ROM |
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"Are you ready kids? I can't hear you!"
"Aye-aye Captain!"
"Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?"
"Spongebob Squarepants!"Every kid older than five knows this song (and their parents, and most college kids). It's the theme song to Nickelodeon's hit animated series Spongebob Squarepants. As with most successful animated series nowadays, Spongebob made it to the big screen last year with the highly successful, and aptly named, Spongebob Squarepants: The Movie. In true Hollywood marketing fashion, the movie spawned video games for a number of console and computer systems. The main video game was a 3D platform game that got very high praise from the gaming media. When I came to this review I sort of assumed without doing any prior research that I would be playing a conversion of the platform game that was on the consoles and PC. I was surprised to find out that this was not an action game, but an adventure game in the vein of the old Sierra Online adventure games. To be honest, I was sort of let down initially. I had psyched myself up for some platform action, and there was none to be found on this DVD. Still, I settled in and tried my hand at some adventure, finding quite a bit of fun along the way. First off, I am a rather recent Spongebob convert. I know the characters now, and how they generally interact with each other. But I have never seen the movie, so I cannot comment on how well the game does or does not follow the movie's plot. The game itself seems to have a fairly solid plot, so I give kudos to the game developers for either developing it, or doing an excellent job of following the movie's plot.The main parts of the story are covered through either cutscenes or stills in a storybook. The cutscenes are done with the game-engine, and are differentiated from the interactive parts by switching to a letter-boxed scene. The storybook segments show stills from the movie (I assume) and utilize a narrator to move the game along. Having seen the TV series, I can say that the game does an excellent job of capturing the feel of the show. The background graphics are hand drawn and straight off the television screen. Fans of the show will be happy to see this. They will also be happy to hear that all of the voice actors from the show are present and accounted for in the game. Tom Kenny seems to have a legitimately good time being Spongebob, which really comes out in his vocal performance. From Spongebob's youthful optimism to his rapid-fire laughter, Spongebob is a character who is very easy to like. As I said, the backgrounds are hand drawn, not 3D or even panoramic like the later Myst games. Navigation consists of clicking off one side of the screen, and entering the next area from the opposite side of the next screen. This can throw you at times. The most noticeable instance of this is in Spongebob's neighborhood: when you see Patrick, Squidworth, and Spongebob's houses in one shot and choose a house to enter, you will start toward the house. The camera angle will change, and you'll have to click again on the house, in a different location on screen now, in order to actually enter it. As far as I can tell, though, this doesn't happen in too many areas, so it's a minor quibble at best.
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