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| I'll admit it: I spend a lot less time watching Nickelodeon then back when I was a little ankle biter worshiping You Can't Do That On Television. When I need a toon to brighten my day, I typically dial in to Cartoon Network. So considering that I'm not a great big fan of any of the new Nicktoons (although I surely had my Rugrats phase a while back, and SpongeBob sometimes holds a surrealistic trance over me), I guess I'm glad for my lack of devotion to these shows. Because if I did love these Nick shows, it would be doubly painful to play through their consistently awful videogame versions. Features: Featuring some of your favorite Nicktoon characters Easy, speedy racing fun Only for Game Boy Color Nicktoons Racing is just another in a long, long, long line of Nickelodeon licensed games to splat and splutter like green slime all over my head. This is the first Nick game by Majesco and Hasbro Interactive for the Game Boy Color, but just like so many other who have tried to capture the magic of Nickelodeon in a game, this game is all over the map in difficulty and quality, and it just isn't fun to play for anybody of any age. Nick games must be cursed! The big problem that these Nickelodeon-licensee developers make -- in fact, most child's game creators -- is that they just don't grasp how kids play games. Children old enough to handle a controller aren't stupid to get confused by the letter "G", and they aren't so foolish that they'll stick with a game with frustrating gameplay. A videogame for kids has to strike a balance between providing a good, healthy challenge (without hammering home some educational agenda, although a game can certainly teach if it's clever) and still encouraging and easy to play. That's the scientific approach to children's game development. Read between the lines and you'll see that all I'm saying is that the games need to be fun. Instead, Pipe Dream interactive went for something different and quirky with Nicktoons Racing that makes the game terribly frustrating and out of control. The cars are thick and bulky, almost half as wide as the track itself, so this game isn't really a racer -- it's a pinball sim, with the cars careening left and right around the course against the walls. Passing is near impossible with the extra-wide boats these figures drive. Sometimes you can win simply by holding down the A button and hugging the rails -- other times, you can't even steer to win when you're trying. And to make matters much worse in an already tightly-spun mess, many of the tracks have branching paths that players can easily slip down the wrong direction. Whee, how fun it is to get lost in a big crummy racetrack and not be able to turn around and retrace my path because the car's too fat to U-turn... Not a lot can be done with a Game Boy Color racer -- the system is so underpowered that even Pole Position would be an undertaking -- but even under those restrictions, some developers have thrived. In all of those instances, the key has been to keeping it simple and doing what can be done really well. But the developers on this game may have shot too low -- there's hardly even a circuit mode to play through, so most of the races just run one on the next without a feeling of progress. Of course, there's a 24-digit passcode (yes, 24 digits!) to save your non-existent progress -- it's kind of a prerequisite for bad kids games to have outrageous password systems. Also, the weapons in the game are pretty useless -- they're all passive everybody-slows-down moves instead of fun rockets and boosts -- and even if they were good, they would only be fun in a 2-player linked game, which this game can't do. Again, whee... At least the game supports a fast racing engine, and even though the cars flicker on the track, kids won't care much about those little technical glitches. What they will care about big-time is the ugly, unrecognizable character sprites. The Nicktoons took an awfully hard hit from the Game Boy's four-color sprite limit, as they're all washed out and colorless. There's no animation to try to help liven the game -- there aren't even big stills of the characters in the win screen to show you which Nicktoon won. If the characters weren't on the box, kids would hardly recognize that this is even supposed to be a Nickelodeon game. Ambiguously ugly kart racer -- sounds like fun, eh? |
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