Were starting in on another
generation of Scooby fans, and with our campy canine showing up on the big screen, a video
game was clearly the next logical step. It was as inevitable as the Scooby snacks and
lunch-pails. But as I sat down to play Night of 100 Frights, two things became obvious.
First, this game was conceived with lots of love by pretty big fans. Second, the
application of those ideas fell short by a nose (and wagging tail). The premise is standard cartoon fare:
Daphnes friend Holly has called in the gang to help find her missing uncle, a
crazy inventor who owns, you guest it, a creepy castle called the Mystic Manor. The gang
is quickly scattered by the evil Mastermind, and its up to Scooby to use all his
wits (and some ingenious inventions he finds along the way) to find his friends and save
the day. Its twelve "levels" of what I might call platformer
"light" that play out in the environments of Mystic Manor, Smugglers Cove,
and the Haunted Grounds/Hedge Mazes along with a playground to practice your skills in and
a Monster Gallery where you can view the actual monsters that appear on the monster tokens
you collect in the game.
Besides monster
tokens, you also pick up keys (which allow you to open up new doors), Scooby Snacks and
foods like ice cream cones, sandwiches, cake, and mutton which increase your
"courage" (basically your life points). The inventors gadgets that you
must find are exceptionally cool, ranging from an umbrella (which lets you float longer on
jumps), boots (to help you across sticky or slick surfaces), springs (for extra jump), a
football helmet (for crunching your way through obstacles), and other things like soap,
bubble gum, a plunger, shovel, and armor. Probably the cutest, though, are the lampshade
and bunny slippers (to hide and sneak). The game provides magnifying glass icons along the
way that provide hints for the player, and the magic bus icons for save points. You can
also open warp ports for greater ease of movement back to places youve been before,
which is handy because the game requires you to find objects in new areas and return to
old "haunts" to use them to progress further. To top it all off, Night of 100
Frights provides a laugh track, and although it sounds occasionally with no clear
provocation, thats just like the cartoon as well.
If this game could
rest on its "cuteness/nostalgia quotient" alone, it would be a great offshoot of
the franchise. I mean, getting to play Scoobyhow cool is that! However, there are
some gameplay glitches that take this game down a few pegs on the groovy scale. The first
big faux pas is that Night of 100 Frights only pretends to be a full 3D title. There are
quiet a few environments that play like side scrollers, and this causes a myriad of
problems. The most obvious is rooms that you enter that must have one wall set up as
semi-transparent because you are not really "in" a room in the three dimensional
sense. This is obnoxious, to say the least. Second, Scooby is required to do stunts and
jumps from platforms, rubber tires, and chandeliers, and with the lack of true 3D
rendering, this becomes more difficult to perform correctly, pushing portions of this game
into the "dumb-luck" rather than skill category. Finally, this lack causes there
to be no control or switch of camera. We are stuck with a third person floating
perspective that, although it allows us to see all of the Scoobs cool moves,
doesnt allow us to look at important portions of the environment or to get a better
perspective on some of the gauntlets we need to fight our way through. And the
cameras perspective switch, if it does happen, is slow and annoying. Theres
nothing worse than having Scooby run blindly towards the screen and having no idea
whats coming up next or when it might be revealed to you (or pounce on you, if it
includes an enemy). Any game that wants to call itself 3D should have a 360 degree pan
function and fully formed environments. Otherwise, dont tease us.
The aforementioned
element is the most critical problem with the game, and believe me, thats enough.
Some small annoyances also include character prompts that are repeated way too often,
collision problems within the environments, and the lack of consistency in ledges (etc.)
where its a crapshoot whether or not you fall to your doom, with no rhyme or reason.
Luckily this game allows you start over as many times as you want, setting you back to the
beginning of the subsection of level that you started (and the game is divided into very
small increments, so thats a pretty kid-friendly feature). Anything else that a
player might find annoying is usually something involving the original cartoonesque nature
of the game, and if thats the case, you probably wouldnt have picked up the
title to begin with.
On the positive
side, there is quite a bit of fun to be had just discovering those cheesy elements that
the designers included. Thats where the love for the game abounds. The soundtrack is
also a great mix of spooky background and campy cartoon mayhem music (if those are good
descriptors for sound). The character voices are all original and the feel of the cartoon
has been preserved perfectly. The environments have some great potential. Springing off
beds and swinging from chandeliers is a great concept, even though we dont get to
interact with them as fully as I would have liked. The graphics provide perfect cartoon
replicas, giving us neither more nor less than the original. Scooby, of course, is the
main draw for any player, and his antics provided me with belly laughs and "oh
hes so cute" moments.
If youre a
Scooby fan of old, or if youre just cutting your teeth on the phenomenon, this game
is probably worth the rental. Prepare yourself for some frustration, but the trip down
memory lane might be worth it in the end. Night of 100 Frights is fun for young kids as
long as theyre not the type to get overly frustrated by the camera. The cheesy
mayhem is a lot of fun. I would suggest renting this game to find out if your kids really
take to the premise and dont mind the glitches (young ones arent quite as
jaded as I amcomes with the job). As an adult, however, playing this game once was
enough for me, and I didnt feel too bad when it came time to turn off the power and
go to bed at night. Unless youre a "collector" once through is all you
really need.