Garfield's Nightmare
Score: 77% ESRB: Early Childhood Publisher: The Game Factory Developer: Shin'en Media: Cartridge/1 Players: 1 Genre: Platformer (2D)
Graphics & Sound: The sights and sounds in Garfield's Nightmare are bright and colorful. Background areas in the four nightmare worlds you'll visit all look really good, from the gloomy castle, to the lava-spewing volcano area, to the sometimes stormy cloud area, all the way to the snowy winterland. Garfield looks good and your various enemies are nicely rendered as well. You'll meet up with spiders, ghosts, mushrooms, crows, lightning bolt-throwing clouds, spiked vines, evil snowmen and lots in between. As far as sounds go, the music that plays in the background stays there, where it should, but is appropriate to the area. In other words, expect spookiness in the castle, etc. As far as sound effects, there's not much here. There's an effect for Garfield butt-stomping something or someone, and a few effects for him collecting his goodies, etc. Basically, sound-wise, it's not particularly deep. The interface is simple enough. You'll collect donuts, coins, extra Garfield lives and pizza, and they are all displayed on the lower the screen. On the upper part is where you'll actually watch and play the game.
Gameplay: So, the gameplay... Well, Garfield's Nightmare is a 2-D platformer whereby Garfield has overeaten before bed and has become trapped in a nightmare world. Four worlds, actually. He smashed his alarm clock in the real world and can't wake up, so the player must work their way through each of these nightmare worlds, defeating baddies and a boss and collecting a piece of the ruined alarm clock to eventually wake Garfield up. The formula is very basic. You troll through really pretty worlds stomping on bad guys or avoiding them altogether, collecting pizza, donuts and coins along the way. By collecting 100 donuts, you are granted an extra life. Your pizza slices, of which you can carry up to three, indicate how much life you have. Run out of pizza and lose a life. Your Garfield's represent your "continues" and you get three of those. Collecting coins opens up the "sleepwalk door" which is a bonus level that can only be accessed when you have enough coins, which you find along the way or obtain by stomping bad guys. You'll be doing lots of jumping, mostly. Sometimes, you'll have to backtrack to find a button to activate a platform. Other times may have you pushing or pulling a box to step up to an unreachable area. But mostly, you'll be walking and jumping, trying to reach a checkpoint, then finally the end of the level, of which there are generally five in each world. There are also Mini-Games that are unlockable when you beat the boss of an area. They consist of Spider Phobia, collecting coins while avoiding spiders, Tap a Pet, a whack-a-mole type game and Midnight Morsel, where you catch falling donuts but avoid bombs. To be honest, I didn't get much enjoyment out of these mini-games and found them somewhat tedious.
Difficulty: I found the main difficulty in Garfield's Nightmare to be the lack of desire I had to further progress in the game. It was just somewhat dull. While I did die a lot by falling off edges into acid or lava, or getting hit by the same enemy again and again, I can't really say it's a difficult game. There are lots of partially hidden or harder to get to areas that yield rewards such as coins or donuts, and the person that is really hardcore and has to get every single goodie in a level will find a good bit to hunt for. However, I am usually that person and after dying numerous times while trying to get the extras, I found it easier just to make steady progress through the level, rather than to hunt around for the extras.
Game Mechanics: Strangely, you'll only use your stylus to boot up and begin the game. After that, it's all done with the D-pad and buttons. (L) and (R) will look up and down in the level to help you ascertain whether it's safe to jump or not. (A) is for jumping, (B) is for a stomp attack and (Y) allows you to pull boxes. That's pretty much it. Now, you will use your stylus when playing the mini-games, which I found strange since there was no use for the stylus in the main game. But anyway... The camera was pretty decent and never really seemed to leave you in a lurch, plus with the ability to check out what was above and below you, there weren't those cheap hits that can sneak up sometimes. Garfield's Nightmare is a pretty game and an average platformer, but mostly, it's just kind of boring. I never really felt the impetus to proceed with the level because I wanted to and was excited about what was coming up next. It was more because I needed to so I could get through the game. Maybe big Garfield fans would really dig this game, but since Garfield is the only thing from his license that shows up in the game, what you really have is a very basic platformer with Garfield slapped on as the main character. Once again, it's not a bad game, just very average. They try and throw some humor in the mix by naming the bosses weird twists on famous people like Patrick Sweaty instead of Swayze, but it just never really grabbed me.
-Psibabe, GameVortex Communications AKA Ashley Perkins
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