![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() As a reviewer, one sees children’s games made a mockery of by sheer laziness with alarming frequency, resulting in a product that’s not fun for anyone of any age. Satisfyingly, it’s also not so easy as to be patronising. The Spongebob Squarepants Movie is fairly easy-going most of the time, which is fair enough for a game aimed at the younger end of the market. Collectable “macho” weights serve to up the characters’ abilities, and collecting ice-cream tokens, which are hidden around the levels as parts of separate challenges, allows Spongebob and Patrick to learn new moves and progress to new levels. The platform sections are fairly straightforward – the player can switch between Patrick and Spongebob at different points, and each of them has different abilities (and different mildly amusing soundbites). A simple level-based structure leads us through the events of the movie via different platform and racing levels, the latter of which see Spongebob and his cerebrally challenged friend Patrick skidding down mountains and across abysses in a bathtub or driving around Bikini Bottom in a giant sandwich. ![]() The Spongebob Squarepants Movie is solid enough. But is there a strong enough game framework to support the license adequately? In sticking reasonably closely to the events of the recent Spongebob film, to which I recently went under the pretence of taking my six-year-old nephew, it manages to avoid the sort of horrendous massacring of the source material to which games of this variety are often subject. This is a game clearly aimed at the younger and less discerning end of that Squarepants-appreciative spectrum, but that does not detract from the entertainment value of its subject matter. The fact that it came 28th in Channel 4’s recent ‘100 Greatest Cartoons’ production suggests that many other people would agree with me – pre-adolescent or otherwise. As an avid watcher of satellite television cartoon channels, I would class it (along with Fairly Odd Parents, Invader Zim and Samurai Jack) as one of the best non-adult specific cartoons ever made. Kids today just don’t realise how lucky they are growing up with such surreal cartoon fineries as Spongebob Squarepants. ![]()
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