Scooby Doo

Face it. When you were a little kid, you probably saw a Scooby Doo episode at some point. Being as Scooby Doo could essentially be considered Hanna Barabara's most famous cartoon, this isnt a hard assumption to make, considering HB's established fame. Of course, give any TV show or movie aimed at kids time, and you'll have a video game about it.

Now, this isnt those newfangled 3D Scooby Doo games that are worse than shoving live wires in your eyes. This isnt an action game where you go collecting things from high places, like a platformer. This isnt a movie game where you recreate parts of the movie. No, its original stuff with its own twist, created to be completely new to gamers. Though, I can't really verify this- I don't really remember shows I watched when I was 7.

Anyway, hunting through my box of my old Nintendo games, I found this- Scooby Doo for the SNES. I got this a loong time ago, so I figured it was time to pick up this old game and give it a spin. After all, all of the SNES games I have I really enjoy, so I figure if I liked this one, I probably had some reason.



Think a puzzle/adventure game mixed with a very shoddy platformer and you get Scooby Doo. This game tries very hard to be a standard platformer, but the more you play it, the more you realize that this game fails at that horribly. If you want to play a platformer on the SNES, I would recommend you go pick up ANY Mario game over this, but this game excels at something else.

This game's collecting and adventuring mechanics are top-notch. While I get teary eyed for any game with a decent collect-and-use system like Monkey Island, this game has an actual system that I enjoy to use. Instead of forcing you to go through preset levels, like many TV/Movie games before it, this game lays out an actual case to go through, with items to collect and investigate, doors to unlock, enemies to throw fish at (Don't ask me), and monsters to thwart. The levels, while short compared to a literal 2D Platformer, are very interesting, and parts of them will leave even an older gamer stumped for a bit, be it because of a puzzle or be it because "How can I jump that far?".

Of course, there's another problem with this game: Its too hard. You have three lives, with a fear bar. If your fear bar goes full, or if you fall off a cliff or the like, you lose a life. This wouldnt be such a problem, but the Fear bar likes to rise on the most mundane things. For example, if you got stuck on a rat for more than two seconds, instant death. Its because it seems to re-calculate the fear increase every time you move on the thing, and it overlaps you, so getting "Off" it seems to fill up half your bar. Of course, this can be avoided, but it takes a good amount of time to get used to playing "Keep-away" with every single d***ed thing that moves.



The graphics and sound arent so hot. While the graphics arent bad, I wouldnt necessarilly be singing any praises any time soon. And, for the sound, don't get me started- it sounds like they tried sounds from the TV show, but very grainy and/or sounding like they came out of a synthesizer (They probably did).

Overall, as to the quality of this game, this game feels like it would be about really-popular-Flash-animation-game quality today. Its simplistic, somewhat buggy, needlessly difficult, and childish, but I enjoyed myself. If you can find this game to rent, go rent it- but stay away from buying it, as it is very short and easily memorizeable.

3 star(s) out of 5

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