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Games based
on movies, in general, have gotten a bad reputation over the years.
It used to be (and, to some degree, still is) that a game based on a
movie was rushed in order to coincide with a movie’s release, and
generally were just clones of other games that were already
available. These games were generally seen not to be entertaining,
but simply to make some more money by cashing in on the popular
license of the moment. Of late, however, some games based on movies,
like The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, have been quality games
in their own right, and at least as entertaining as the movie
itself.
That said, I’ve always enjoyed Pixar’s movies, and am looking
forward to seeing their latest release, Finding Nemo, when it comes
out in theaters. Upon seeing the video game version in the video
store prior to the movie’s release, I figured it would be a good
waste of time and help to get me psyched up for the movie. After
all, I thought, how bad can it be?
To answer the question, let me say this: If the movie’s quality is
anything like that of the game, I’ll be walking out of the theater
in the first fifteen minutes and demanding my money back.
The basic premise of the game (which, is really the premise of the
movie) is that Nemo is a small clownfish with a bad fin, so he has a
hard time swimming. As a result, his father, Marlin, is extremely
overprotective. On Nemo’s first day of school, he ends up
investigating a boat and is captured by a diver, who ends up selling
him to a pet shop. This sends Marlin on a quest to find his son, and
Nemo to escape from the dentist’s office fish tank in which he’s
found himself.
Not having seen the movie yet, I can’t really comment on how closely
the game follows the plot of the movie, but it seems to do a fairly
good job of it. The story is advanced via clips from the movie, and
the game gives you enough to work with that you never truly feel
lost or that you don’t know what’s going on. The storytelling is a
bit choppy, to be sure, but given that the designers probably made
the (legitimate) assumption that you’ve seen the movie before
playing the game, it’s hard to fault them for that.
Gameplay varies based on the level, but generally consists of three
main types of areas. The first is the standard side-scrolling
obstacle course, where you have to swim from point A to point B
while avoiding unfriendly sea creatures. The second is a type of
swimming scene where you have to either follow another character (by
swimming through golden rings that appear) or beat him/her in a
race. Finally, there are chase sequences where you have to dodge out
of the way of a predator as it tries to grab or eat you. The
designers do a decent job of mixing up the different types of areas,
but they just get old after a while. After the third or fourth chase
sequence, I was tired of them, especially since it seems awfully
arbitrary whether the predator catches you or not.
The game is also extremely unforgiving, to a degree that I haven’t
really seen since the days of Contra on the NES. One hit will often
send you to the big fishbowl in the sky, and it can be extremely
difficult to see what is dealing the killing blow at times,
especially since the game cuts to an overdramatic death scene upon
collision. I agonized for a quite a long time early on in a swimming
scene in a dark tunnel where the game would just keep cutting to a
scene of my fish gagging and wheezing, seemingly for no reason. As
it turns out, there was a spurt of black ink that was nearly
invisible against the dark blue scenery that was repeatedly killing
me. While there is no set number of lives, so you can start the same
section of the level as many times as you’d like, the game can be
maddeningly frustrating at times.
One other gameplay element that really irritated me was the use of
sliding puzzles as an obstacle to clear in certain levels. (To be
clear, a sliding puzzle is a square cut into smaller tiles with one
empty space, and the goal is to assemble a picture by sliding tiles
into the empty space.) As a mini-game, I don’t mind a sliding puzzle
quite so much. Even if it was in just one level, it would probably
annoy me a bit, but I’d get over it. The designers decided to use
sliding puzzles in four consecutive levels, and the novelty wore off
extremely fast. They were time-consuming and frustrating for me as a
grown adult, so I can only imagine how a young child would react to
not being able to clear a level because they couldn’t solve the
puzzle.
Speaking of things that irritated me about the game, the load times
for Finding Nemo are easily the longest I’ve experienced in any
GameCube game I’ve played to date. In fact, I don’t think I’ve seen
load times this long since the days of the old Commodore 64. I timed
one level’s load time, and it was over a minute and a half. While
that may not sound very long on paper, it’s an eternity when you’re
sitting in front of the screen waiting for the game to start. In
fact, the load times were so long that I initially thought that the
game had frozen my GameCube. In the time that it took the game to
load, I was able to walk to the kitchen, get my wife a soda and
return before the game finished. I don’t want to belabor the point,
but I can’t stress enough how inexcusable these load times are,
given that more complex GameCube games have been able to eliminate
load times altogether or at least keep them to ten seconds or less.
Control in Finding Nemo is kept simple, but the responsiveness of
the control leaves something to be desired. In general, the control
stick moves your fish around the screen, A serves to speed up your
movement, and B is your action button. Generally, “action” means
dash into things, but it can also be used in a context-sensitive
fashion to pick up rocks, swim through holes, or move tiles around
on the aforementioned accursed sliding puzzles. The control is
generally either too sensitive or not sensitive enough, with a tap
on the control stick either sending your fish swimming at top speed
or not moving him at all. Especially in sequences involving jumping
from object to object, it would have been easier (and, I’ll add,
more fun) to swim through molasses than to get the fish to move to
the object I wanted him to be on.
Graphically, there’s nothing wrong with Finding Nemo, but there’s
nothing spectacular, either. The fish are rendered to be
recognizable, and all the environments are cartoony and pleasant to
the eye. Some levels are extremely dark, however, so much so that
it’s nearly impossible to see anything. On one level, I understand
that this is intentional (since you’re being chased by a fish with a
light over its head), but it just adds unnecessary frustration to
the other levels. There is occasional slowdown in same areas as
well.
Sound is similarly unimpressive. There are some background music
tracks that are fun to listen to, but for the most part, music is on
too short of a loop and gets repetitive quickly. Sound effects are
also sparse and simplistic. It should be said that the lines of text
are all voice acted fairly well, but sounds drastically different
and not as high quality as does the voice acting in the film clips.
Overall, it’s very easy to pick on Finding Nemo, both because it’s a
kid’s game and based on a movie, but in this case, I think it’s
warranted. If Finding Nemo was just too easy and too simplistic,
then I could excuse it, because that’s what makes a good kid’s game.
However, there are just too many problems, both technical and
otherwise, with this game for me to simply overlook because Finding
Nemo is intended for children. Making a game intended for children
does not make poor game design OK. While children may indeed enjoy
parts of Finding Nemo, it is likely it will greatly frustrate them
in the long run, and frustration for frustration’s sake is simply no
fun. There are very few redeeming qualities about the video game
version of Finding Nemo, and it should be avoided accordingly.
Simply put, these fish have gone very, very bad.
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