The Nicktoons Handheld Crossover Saga

remember licensed games i sure do taking a cartoon from an existing piece of media such as television movies or books and turning it into a video game was a popular trend for a long time i mean who doesn't want to play as barry b benson where you gotta run around to hive and hijack cars while doing odd jobs like it's grand theft auto it practically prints money sadly however with video games becoming more and more expensive to produce and not to mention expectations for sad games being higher and higher it's resulted in licensed games to be a bit of a dying art form sure we'll get one occasionally like nick all-star brawl or multiverses or peppa pig the video game but nowhere near to the extent as they used to which sucks for me because if you took a look at my game collection you'd be disgusted at how many of these are based on a tv show movie i've got all-time classics like garfield 2 madagascar and you can forget disney channel all stars starring all your favorite characters from zack and cody hannah montana wizards of weebly place and camp rock 2 the final jam wait why do i own this point is as a kid if it wasn't mario sonic or a licensed game i wasn't interested i recall once my dad took me to a game store and told me that i could get whichever game i wanted and my immediate choice was mr bean on the ds yeah he forced me to get a crush of the titans instead but you know what's better than a licensed game based off one tv show i bought a licensed game based off a bunch of tv shows all slammed together into one epic crossover we're currently living in the age of crossovers nobody wants to watch a movie with spiderman now unless stewie griffin is going to join him and with a multiverse so ripe for franchises combining it always reminds me of my absolute favorite crossovers of all time the nicktoons games sure jimmy timmy power hour is one of the best specials of a kid's cartoon ever but you know who's missing here spongebob and danny phantom and that's where the nicktoons games come in starting all the way back with nicktoons racing in 2000 this is a series that combines a ton of nickelodeon franchises together to take part in whatever genre the dark board lands on basketball sure why not i wish i could dunk a fighting game [ __ ] make six of them baseball only if they're motion tracked my personal favorites however would have to be the saga of platformers that released from 2005 to 2008 pairing up different heroes from throughout the nickelodeon universes to take down a common evil which i like to call as spongebob and friends saga because that's what they're called in europe and allows them to stand out among this other bunch of games not to mention by the last entry nick lost all confidence in anything that wasn't spongebob i just titled the thing spongebob squarepants featuring nicktoons nice i'm glad you let them tag along now i've already made a video about these four games all released on the ps2 and eventually the wii but did you know that i actually missed a bunch of them yeah something i completely glossed over in that video was that each of these entries had handheld ports with the first three being released on the gameboy advance in ds with the last just getting a ds version and calling them ports isn't even accurate because they're entirely different games sometimes taking on completely different genres compared to their console iterations and now while the console versions may have received such glowing reviews as it's friggin spongebob we're not wrong i rarely see anybody talk about these seven games so considering i'm one of the rare few people on planet earth to play these four religiously i figured why not give the handheld versions a shot i mean hey the console ports weren't anything to ride home and bite the best one in that bunch was just all right so i'm definitely curious to see if i can manage to call any of these good guess there's only one way to find out so let's finally complete this series of games by taking a look at the hand-held nicktoons saga but first manskeep.com you guys all know mansky binary with their amazing men's grooming products such as the lawnmower 4.0 body trimmer but did you also know that they now have this ultra smooth package which they've graciously sent me this product which sold out in less than three months back in 2021 contains an easy three-step sheathing system to help you buff protect and smooth your most sensitive areas with confidence they've got the crop exfoliator which helps reduce ingrown hairs while shaving the cropped gel which helps you see while sheathing and the new crop sheaver with three precision blades with wide lubricating strips and a pivoting head for the best shave at any angle so be sure to go to manscape.com to get 20 off plus free international shipping and be sure to check out their new ultra smooth package and thanks to manskey for sponsoring this video [Music] this uh this isn't the best first impression this color combination of white and green is just ugly and i guess this game confirms that timmy turner is indeed a ghost like dany considering jimmy and spongebob have drop shadows but not him rip timothy r.i.p the story of unite in the gba is basically the exact same as the console version which to me was always the best story out of any of these games jimmy finds out that professor calamunis has teamed up with the villains from various universes plankton mr crocker and vlad which was always so funny to me like clearly there's some discrepancy between these guys and so to put a stop to them jimmy uses the power of crusty pngs to transport spongebob squarepants danny phantom and timmy turner over to him so they can all team up and put a stop to the syndicate so just how are they gonna do this by tediously going to each character's world and closing ghost portals and collecting chips that's all you do in this game yes i said game cry about it seriously they were getting really desperate with available pngs they could use in these cut scenes one of them is literally just a crop dyed image of plankton from the actual episode with the lever removed i mean yeah i guess it's not as bad as the spongebob movie game how are we gonna get back to bikini bottom i can take you there the [ __ ] is that also i know it's dumb to make fun of the writing of a game boy advanced game but some of the character exchanges here are just so weird it makes me wonder why they even bothered to include some of this vlad's channeling ectoplasm to the doomsday device we need to close the ghost portal what about those ghost animal thingies i don't believe in ghosts thanks for the input jimmy oscar-worthy dialogue right here the whole gimmick here is that you're running around a big open stage looking for four chips to collect and three ghost portals to destroy it took me forever to even realize this though when i first came up to the portal i shot at it for ages without it breaking so i figured i had to go and do it later on and just ran away only to later figure out that you have to shoot at these things for an obscene amount of time for them to break the hit detection on them is terrible most of the time your weapon just shoots right through the thing and speaking of weapons you can play as all four nicktoons here each with their own unique moves and abilities and by that i mean they can do move and ability one each dany can shoot ghost lasers and go through walls jimmy can freeze enemies with his rag on and go upwards on his jetpack timmy can shoot magic and go upwards in a balloon and spongebob can squash under tight ceilings and shoot water the balancing here is all out of whack i almost never played as spongebob and danny because of their moves being so situational and i'd say that jimmy is worth playing as if it weren't for the fact that timmy is just a better version of him in every way they have the exact same upwards ability but not only does timmy's attack go all around him for the best range but it also kills enemies in one hit instead of simply freezing them for a couple seconds and because the enemy will most likely run into you while you're using the attack you'll more often than not immediately get the health upgrade that they drop negating the damage hey i mean i like timmy turner as much as the next guy but you didn't need to make him so bloody overpowered i often find myself not giving [ __ ] about whatever was in my way and i just ran through all the obstacles because running out of health with this kid was impossible developers i have to say that for objectivity but thank you the biggest issue of all is however is that with so many character specific moments and levels you'd hope that there'd be some kind of way to manually switch through all of the heroes but no that would make sense instead you can choose only two and any time you want to switch you have to travel all the way to one of these pods that they're very stingy with the placements of now this wouldn't entirely be a problem except both characters have to be present in order to switch now this wouldn't entirely be a problem except your partner character doesn't follow you most of the time and you have to switch to them to run to the pod too basically having to run around to seem to rein twice now this wouldn't entirely be a problem except certain characters are unable to traverse through certain segments and therefore cannot get to the pod meaning now you have to switch back to the one at the pod and run all the way back to the other guy to try and find another one you can both reach now this wouldn't entirely be a problem no weird that's a huge [ __ ] problem this gameplay is so goddamn tedious and every level is like that there is no variation on what you're doing which means each one of them suffers from the same design flaws and it would have been such an easy fix just make it so you can switch characters with only one needing to be there but then that could simply be exploited to get other characters in areas that were never meant for but if that's the case and to work around it you need to implement this kind of system that sort of points out a big flaw with the way you've built your video game who knows though maybe the bosses shall fare better i literally beat vlad by standing still and pressing the attack button the second boss against plankton ended up being way harder to the point where he actually died and that's where i realized that upon dying you just respawned in the exact same place with no consequence in regards to presentation the only real plus i can give it is that the backgrounds look nice and are emulated well from the original shows and some of the enemies can be neat call backs such as plankton's cousins in the chum bucket but other than that that for some reason chose to use this really ugly pre-rendered style for the character models well they're done in 3d and then translated dying into sprites and it simply doesn't work i don't see why they didn't just use traditional sprite work here the character models are awful jimmy has these long dumb monkey arms and danny why did they go with such realistic proportions he looks gross i'm sorry this game [ __ ] sucks i got to timmy's house not to call it quits it was so unbelievably boring sorry butch the console version of unite surely wasn't the best thing in the world but i not have some new find respect for it at least in every level i was doing something different here it's the same routine again and again with a different code of paint no wonder this version is mostly forgotten we're not off to a good start here are we but hey we're not right for the kind yet on unite it still has a chance to redeem itself could the ds version be any better or is the unite series gonna bat zero for three let's find out yeah look at the box art you know what i'm just now noticing timmy and jimmy are holding the exact same gun despite to me not even using a weapon in this game uh anyways i actually played this game as a kid it's one of the two on this list that i had prior experience with i'll be it very minor when i was in spain one year with my family we find one of those weird bootleg game stores where they were selling those 795 games in one cartridges with me and my sisters all getting one what sucks however is that not all of them contain the same collection of games and while i was stuck with [ __ ] bloody nintendogs or some [ __ ] they got neptune's unite on theirs so i only have very brief memories of playing it when they let me borrow it and i recall not even being able to beat the first level see when i was younger and playing video games especially on handhelds i couldn't get very far into most of them because of this problem i have called not wanting to read tutorials then i'd run around for hours not knowing what to do and give up i think this disease has an official name um let me look uh oh yeah aaron hansen syndrome nicktoons unite on the nintendo ds has the exact same story as the gb airport and by exact same i mean the exact same cmpng seem text seem [ __ ] font how'd that happen oh that makes sense see both of these versions of unite were developed by climax the same developers that's why the previous game used 3d models i guess to save time they just reused to the character models they made for the ds port in the gbl one well hey at least we now got to see them up close and personal why is it so hard for them to get jimmy neutron the one character that originated from a 3d show right in 3d well at least donny doesn't look as bad first thing you can obviously tell about this port is that it's three-dimensional now that wasn't all too common for ds games at the time you know given its weaker hardware and lack of a directional pad but let's see how it holds up i guess since we've already discussed it we can start with the presentation and quite honestly doesn't look bad for a ds game the game basically locks you into a small area connected by doors but it never felt all too restricting they did a good job at still making it feel like a big open world and it's cool that they represent all the areas from their respective shows that you'd want to see such as casper high and vlad's castle or bikini bottom and kelp forest although you can definitely see their struggle in trying to make some of these places connect like for some reason patrick has a metal room under his rock that's covered in lava that leads to the krusty krab i don't remember that in the show and like i said before the character models ain't too bad aside from jimmy's scrunched up fiest my favorite detail would have to be spongebob's drop shadow which is just a [ __ ] rectangle it's really funny to me for some reason but how about the gameplay how does it compare to other 3d platformers on the ds such as i don't know crash of the titans i mentioned it earlier i actually like that game i don't know why i'm making fun of it well in theory it's very similar to the handheld version each character has a couple moves that you can use to traverse through levels and thankfully they've done a better job at making most of them feel useful most of them at least i can switch to any of the four at a given time i guess although i supposed to balance it out it would only make sense for timmy to be the worst most situational character here compared to the gbm version where he was a god jimmy has a shrinker he can use to very slowly shrink enemies and the much more handy feature of a double jump spongebob can use his underwear to glide and blow bubbles donnie can shoot ghost blasts and wall jump and timmy well timmy has a dash apparently but honestly i didn't notice any difference in his speed compared to the others and he can also disguise himself in a burst to sneak past enemies yeah you get that in the show all the time there are also character specific items you can retrieve which fills a gauge on the right side of the screen which gives you an extra move to use when tapping the symbol on the touchscreen which by the way [ __ ] makes it near impossible to play this on an emulator such as donny phasing through walls jimmy using his jetpack to reach greater heights and spongebob using a bubble to reach greater heights wait a minute i never found out what timmy's did though you'll find out why in a bit and of course being a nintendo ds game they gotta make some use out of that stylus so we have a variety of mini games you can play such as circling jellyfish and swiping ghosts into a portal it's not fun but hey it's padding well this is good and well except for the parts that aren't but where they're really [ __ ] up here was to control i understand it's gotta be hard to make a 3d platformer that uses a directional pad but if that's what you want to do then you've got to make sure the other aspects don't get in the way with that so you can manually rotate the camera around with the l r button but a lot of the time the camera will like try to follow you which can [ __ ] up your landing not to mention every time you jump the camera pans upwards so you can't see the platforms anywhere yeah that's a handy feature i sure would hate to know where i'm going right now i spent 30 [ __ ] minutes running around one room in the first level trying to do one mission just because every time i'd get to the top the game wouldn't register my jump when i'd fall to my death fun there's a lot of neat ideas here but when you [ __ ] up something as fundamental as the controls then that's sort of a big issue it never got as bad for me as it did that one time they start to focus on wireless vertical movement later on thankfully but there were times where i'd miss a jump or slip through a crack on the floor and they're not generous with the checkpoints so you're doing the same gameplay look over and over again and it wasn't even fun to begin with it is cool however that a lot of the music here is reused from the gba version it's neat getting to hear how the same songs would come out each system [Music] finally we have the boss fights and surprise prize they also suck for the vlad one i could literally just stand in place and jump when a projectile was coming towards me and win easily you have to shoot the right one and not a clone but there's no indication as to which is which so you just stand around shooting each one that comes by hoping it's the right one and they don't even play a victory animation or anything it just awkwardly cuts back to text the plankton one though okay so what you do is you shoot him with your bubbles while he's riding a giant mecca jellyfish however he sucks you down into this small arena and you have to defeat more robot jellyfish in the hopes that one will randomly drop some bubble soap so you can make your way back up with each hit slightly decreasing the size of the robot cool sounds simple enough but i just kept hitting the [ __ ] and he wouldn't go down vlad only took three attacks but this guy had like 30. or so i thought now i have to assume the game bugged out or something and forgot to inform plankton that he had died because he had the iron will and just kept going his jellyfish got so small he couldn't even see it and he was still putting up a fight and then i guess because the game didn't know how to make it any smaller it just started growing again but upside down i don't think this is meant to happen it ended up getting so big that i couldn't get out of the arena without it hurting me so i promptly turned the game off and vowed never to touch it again nicktoons unite on the ds isn't the worst thing in the world i'd still say the gba version is way worse but it's for certain nowhere near good the gameplay is mostly monotonous and brain dead you're just running around and killing the same enemies over and over again and when it's not drab and boring it's infuriating because of the controls that feel like they're fighting against you but yeah you know what's the best part of all this we're all done with unite now we can finally move on to volcano island for gb and yes if you remember my last video you know it's probably my favorite out of the four so i'm hoping the handheld versions follow suit [Music] dude look how [ __ ] pissed patrick is on the title screen this man's hard for blood instead of having all the heroes team up against their respective villains volcano island features the neptunes being summoned to volcano island from this wise old crab whose island is at stake due to the monster the magu being unleashed and so spongebob donnie timmy and france have to put a stop to him [ __ ] lazy ass jimmy this game just kind of drops you in too at least in the console version we get to see the crowd summon spongebob and donnie to the island here we just have it open with timmy falling and asking where everyone is i guess that's what manuals were for i suppose let's just uh check and see what we have to oh wait the game didn't shift me in time first of all can i just take a minute to appreciate that this is a screenshot from an official game those were the days gotta set opening on timmy turner had me completely on board but in the biggest [ __ ] teas of the century we immediately shipped to spongebob and have to rescue donny then timmy like two worlds in i gotta say the sprite work for this game is amazing i was really surprised by high quality it was the characters are all super stylized to fit into one uniform aesthetic instead of trying to replicate the style of each individual show which works way better for a handheld game like this wait a minute [ __ ] well this isn't going to help with the comparisons now a big issue with unite was that all the characters were way too [ __ ] big on the screen which made it hard to see upcoming obstacles but here everything is made nice and clear the character's moves are all betrayed well to the player like how dany's ghost form has an actual transition this time instead of a jarring change in model r timmy squashes and stretches when pulling on a grapple or doing his sonic jump they all have fun little idol animations too the presentation here is top notch there's so much personality i love that when you go inside a level none of the characters fit in the little transporter and therefore each have a unique squished pose stuff like that really gives your game a certain charm to it that's hard to replicate but you can tell whoever worked on the visuals here really put a lot of time and effort into it a criticism i have with the visuals however is something that the console version also suffers from and that's that when your whole game's gimmick is that it takes place on an island it limits a lot of your locales and you can see this reflected in the worlds we have here we have beach level jungle level fossil level and who could forget desert level that also has fossils it can just be a tad see me at times and i wish there were a bit more variety thankfully though what the game lacks in unique levels it more than makes up for with the gameplay volcano island is a standard enough platformer much like unite you can switch between four characters spongebob donny timmy and patrick who all have one to two moves each that they can perform to help you get through a level giving each character around one move may seem limited but it works entirely in its favor see they had this really neat idea that climax may have never heard of called letting you play as whoever you want whenever you want simply pressing a button cycles through your roster on the fly because they can each perform one special action it could be seen as something similar to the arsenal you get in a mega man game where you choose whichever can get you through the scenario the best spongebob is used for who could have guessed blowing bubbles except instead of solely being used for an attack the longer you hold down the button the further its reach with it floating up in the sky at the end which can be used to activate certain switches then later on gaining a tunneling move patrick can use cannons and glide around using gusts of wind to reach higher places and stick to walls dany's ghost ability is the best that's ever been used instead of simply phasing through walls you transform back and forth to make certain blocks visible and timmy well to me for some reason just turns into ryze star all of these moves make it really fun traversing through levels as at times you gotta get fairly good at switching between characters on the fly to use whatever one is needed and they make some good challenging segments out of this and if that's too easy for you they've also integrated a ranking system of some kind you can collect five golden hearts in a level think of it like red star rings and sonic but unlike those they also act as a health bar so if you get hit you lose one so basically to get the best rank on every stage you need to find and collect each heart without losing a life which can get pretty hard at times they even unlock you some secret levels for after the mean campaign which is a cool reward that's the gist of the gameplay it's pretty simple but it works entirely to its benefit each level is short and sweet and there's only 16 to beat for the final boss but i don't mind that at all like i said short and sweet speaking of bosses though we could have definitely used more of those there's only the magu at the very end and even then could it really even be considered one you're just running to the goal trying not to get hit by the projectiles he's throwing at you the playstation 2 version didn't have a ton of fights but the ones that did have at least stood out such as a giant sand monster and plank king the hub world i also felt wasn't necessary i get the idea behind it not to mention locking off worlds naturally behind abilities you don't have yet is cool it's much more immersive than a big locked symbol or something but the layout for this is all over the place i spent more time in between worlds trying to find the next one that i did in some of the stages you know what else rules about this game though the music some of them i could take or leave like the more atmospheric ones but a majority of these tracks are great super bouncy and catchy i love them the guy who can post the themes made a few youtube videos where he goes over them and even shows some unreleased songs to never meet it in so definitely go check that out if you want to finish this one first like the video subscribe battle for volcano island on the game boy advance was a breath of fresh air an actual good game for once i'd probably put it above the ps2 version because of how much more polished it is compared to that even if my nostalgia wants me to say it can't be topped but with a short campaign of around two hours i'd recommend checking this one out if it interests you i think you'd be surprised how fun it is with its short but engaging stages and wonderful presentation here's the question though could the upgrade and hardware possibly top it i mean this is the nintendo ds we're talking about here which was known for its many many quality titles such as it's not even in here [Music] the menu screen here is so lazy it's just a stock png of spongebob with the nik splat put over top of blank white background this here has given you night to run for its money battle for volcano island when the ds thankfully has the same story as the gba version so there's not much else to go over here our heroes are summoned to stop the magu yada yada yada most glaring difference you could probably tell compared to united is that we're back to 2d gameplay instead of 3d which is only for the better i might prefer 3d games over 2d but even i have to admit trying to make a good 3d game on the ds is harden up as it is never mind on the probable shoestring budget these had also unlike the previous version we have some more characters here you can't play as any of them but they are here such as patrick featuring these god-awful sprites yeah you can't play as him this time sadly as well as tucker from danny phantom there's probably more that i'm not mentioning but as you're going to soon see this one couldn't keep my attention for very long also jimmy is here too like not on some projector thingy he's physically on the island son of [ __ ] doesn't want to help see i was right he is lazy first thing i noticed here is how much worse this sprite work is compared to the other one it's not bad or anything but there's way less personality the only thing it has over the gbr version is that the backgrounds are way more detailed and colorful but i'd expect that from a version on a higher powered console i don't know just like look at timmy here compared to timmy from the other game and tell me what you think is more expressive if you want expressive though you'd better look over at the cutscene sprites these things are abysmal spongebob squarepants more like spinge rob cube shorts because this [ __ ] looks bootlegged to hell it's all like weird imitations of whatever style the character originates from but whoever designed these mustn't have been getting paid enough because they look dreadful just look at timmy's hand or cosmo and wanda they didn't even try with dany he's always doing his stuck hands down by his side pose and oh my god jimmy what the [ __ ] did that do to you it's so weird too because i can tell exactly what they were referencing here and it's those weird jimmy neutron comic books from the early 2000s i will give it this the animations are all pretty good i love the spin they do when they're switching places and they add a detail that when you fall from a large height your character shivers in shock you know i'd probably like this a lot more if it didn't stop me in place for five seconds but that's neither here nor there we're dropped into the first level where we're met with a plant with a dog's head i'm just gonna i'm just gonna be moving on i ran around this first level for like half an hour having no [ __ ] clue what i was meant to do i got all the way to the end where the character stopped at this door and we're like we need to get three crystals to open the door which i ran around killing every enemy i could one of them was barned to hold the crystal right well no what i later found out was that you have to [ __ ] walk up to the dog plant creature and touch him with the stylus and sometimes just sometimes they'll give you a crystal it's fun this doesn't change throughout the game either in the second world you have to give monkey plants a banana in the hopes of getting a crystal but most of the time they'll just send out an attack that's neat now this doesn't seem too bad until you remember that only one of the ds screens has a touchpad meaning that you have to focus on verticality and make sure that you get the thing in the bottom half of the screen so you can touch it and after a while it just gets tedious each and every level it's the same song and dance and because of the limited level variety seen here it even more so causes the whole thing to blend together in my mind as one big mess well maybe you'd think having three playable characters instead of four might condense it a tad allow them to make sure each of them are fully fleshed out and fun to play you'd think the controls here just feel off platforming is especially hard the jumps feel so delayed and your characters are so heavy which can get very annoying in a game very reliant on vertical platforming to reach the goal spongebob can once again blow bubbles and glide dany can punch being the strongest and timmy can double jump but has this weak ass vacuum attack if you want my unbiased opinion just play as timmy until another hero is called upon his double jump makes the controls somewhat bearable dany doesn't even go ghost with his regular abilities here isn't that like isn't that like his [ __ ] gimmick in between stages there are these crappy mini games where you can stand over the shadow of the fruit dropping and collect it avoiding spikes and snakes i genuinely don't know what this is for i don't think it goes towards anything there's also a boss after every world at least and hey they're not the worst thing in the world the blank guy even naruto runs these were probably the best part of the game honestly the music is also just all right it's not the best but not the worst it fits the levels while playing them but i have no interest in listening to the [ __ ] outside of the game there are amazingly five stages here where you're just doing the same thing over and over again the third world has a dolphin plan that makes it different right i got to level three and called it quits i got everything i needed with this one maybe the game gets like infinitely better for its final three stages but it didn't keep my interest enough for me to get there i don't know how the game boy advance version managed to be 10 times better here but i guess it's just because that one knew what it was and said it's gold way back just aiming to be a basic get to the gold platformer whereas here the very concept of needing to mindlessly walk around touching monkeys is flawed from the core not to mention that one gave you incentive to switching characters and made each of them fun to play in their own right well this one rarely has any character specific gimmicks other than see it all ledge muse timmy see a big gap you spongebob and danny's here too i guess so with its shitty repetitive boring gameplay and poor controls volcano island is going second on the list so far it really says something about unite doesn't it so overall volcano island's two handheld entries ended up being a mixed bag one very good game and one that's just not even worth mentioning so i'm curious to see if we're going to manage to find one that did the impossible and made two good versions for portable consoles sad to say it seems like we've only gotten one chance left let's hope it's a good one [Music] if you remember my review from webec when you'd know that attacking the toy box was my second favorite out of the bunch despite being incredibly short only having around seven levels with one being the tutorial and two crappy mech stages and hell not a single boss even though it advertised these cool [ __ ] robot designs of the main characters on its box i still find it to be a fun time mainly due to its surprisingly challenging stages that tested your reflexes yet never became frustrating with the forgiving checkpoints in infinite lives so let's see just what the gba version has to offer with it being our last look at the system for the video as attacking the toy box released pretty lead into its lifespan it's another 2d platformer here you'd think with three of them by now that would have perfected it the plot is surprise surprise the exact same as its console counterpart with professor calamitous yes i'll get to that wanting to win the biggest genius award and so he's harnessing energy from all the different neptune worlds in order to prove this okay so first of all why the [ __ ] are they using stock art of his goddamn jimmy timmy power hour 2 design the first game had managed to use three screenshots well enough i guess it's so he could easily be placed beside this fine fell that's just a guy we then see our five heroes locked up in a cell i mean they all seem pretty happy about it except for timmy but cosmond wanted to only have the energy to release one of them which you can choose guess who i picked now this is a neat idea allowing the player to choose which character they want to start with spongebob timmy jimmy danier tech oh yeah this is around when tack was getting his own show the games he first started were such a big hit that i can only assume nickelodeon thought he was going to be the new big thing and so started throwing him in with all the other nicktoons to help advertise his show was cancelled 26 episodes later graphics wise this game confused me the character sprites look like they're trying to imitate the ones seen back on the good version of volcano island which is a good thing but the animations look way more cheap they're nowhere near as expressive as last time not to mention that we now have playable characters like jimmy who just just looked bad every unique asset made for this game though was really ugly the enemies look like they're done in an entirely different art style the robots look like they've just taken the 3d model and tried to make it a sprite by tracing over which clashes a ton with your hero the even bigger issue however is that they're so goddamned meaning they take up so much screen room that makes them hard to avoid but i guess that's about why this game plays like [ __ ] and not that it looks like [ __ ] so i'll save my criticism the locations also look boring as [ __ ] fairy world has never looked so colorless and when your game mostly takes place within a factory it leads to worse location variety than volcano island i don't know how the [ __ ] that was even possible so yeah presentation here mixed bag but see the structure is actually something that i think is really cool and something that i wish they had done in the console version in that game other than bikini bottom amity park and fairy world all the levels take place within a toy factory although they do offer some kind of differentiation at times such as baby toys or space toys but here how each level works is that each factory is in a different character's world so you start on the outside in poopoo nunu that that's tax time's dumb name by the way our fairy world or the ghost zone and after a bit you fall into the toy factory for the second half that's not a bad idea i wish all the factories didn't look the same but i can't expect everything issue is i spent ages running around the first level not knowing where to go i'd see a bunch of stuff that cosmo and wanda would in for me that i can't get to and so i run around forever only to find out that timmy's special ability is turning into a frog so he can get under certain low ceilings yeah that sure screams timmy turner all the characters have one move that can do timmy's aforementioned frog jimmy can hack platforms to make them turn to other directions danny goes ghosts tech can climb and spongebob i know i never find out what spongebob did i actually thought this was a really cool concept it means that every time you'd go through a stage you find yourself needing to take different routes here and there encouraging extra playthroughs it'd be better if the game were fun to play though again like i said before all the enemies are way too big timmy's main attack takes like three seconds of build up to actually go through so by that time cosmo and want to hurt them they've already smacked me around although the game is so generous with checkpoints then there are no lives so i find myself doing the exact same thing as unite where i just barrel through everything not giving a [ __ ] because i know that i'd probably reach the next checkpoint before dying there's no challenge here other than the shitty controls oh look it's angelica all right bye there are segments where you can drive in mex which i thought was going to be rad but it only further exemplifies that mindset of not giving a [ __ ] because these things are so powerful it has infinite ammo is way stronger than your regular moves and has a [ __ ] ton of health this becomes even worse during the boss fights where you face off against one of the characters robot double gangers this is all i wanted as a kid how cool is this gonna be with the mac you can just sit in place and attack it over and over again if you lose said mech it simply respawns back where you find it kinda underwhelming not gonna lie after each fight you get a key which can be used to unlock another hero from their cage naturally my first two were timmy and jimmy waffles pride aside so alright cool we beat fairy world time to take on the second boss to see if it's any more challenging what the [ __ ] do i really have to beat each level over and over again with each new character i unlock is this really gonna get to a point where i have to replay levels five times in a row that is [ __ ] abysmal that is such lazy padding you may be wondering why this is an issue considering each character gets some kind of unique pathway but they still have to play the exact same intro and outro segment and the fundamental controls are still the same it just changes the way you get to the end also it's just like nice to see a change of scenery at some points i don't want to play through the seam level potentially five times don't care what pathway i take imagine you're playing sonic 3 and knuckles and you beat angel island act 1 then it teleports you back to the start like great now i beat the level as knuckles at that point just give each nicktoon their own campaign that you can pick at the start of the game instead of this [ __ ] volcano island has shown us that a short but good game is miles better than a long but boring one so yeah that's why i never find out what spongebob did i got so bored that i had to give up neat locales are cool and all but when i'm expected to play through them over and over again it starts to get old i don't even know why they made this one considering nobody gave a [ __ ] about the gba anymore by 2007. i can imagine that's why this one may have come out the way it did everybody was way more focused on the ds so who knows maybe that version will be better i can only hope attack of the toybots on the ds actually has a slightly different plot this time different plot same awful jimmy sprite after spongebob and patrick sneak into a toy factory that just opened up in bikini bottom patrick winds up getting kidnapped and so donny timmy jimmy and tack all jumped on to help him get his fram back and take down the factories which like the others are being run by calamitous the sprite work in the cutscenes might be the worst so far tak looks so [ __ ] ugly and timmy has this weird like bump in his teeth how can you [ __ ] up the most iconic part of his design first thing you probably notice here is that for once we don't have a platformer 2d or 3d instead attacking the toybot3ds is a pseudo-3d beat-em-up it's quite simple you run into a room the game gives you a wave of robots to defeat and then you move on the gameplay sadly isn't the most interesting each character has one attack do it three times for a stronger one and hold in the button to do a super move that's all you can do there's no kind of combos or fun way of stringing together fun unique moves specific to the character which is a little disappointing although i suppose switching up your character pairing each stage could possibly make things more interesting i stuck with timmy the whole time predictably each character also has a special team move they can perform as well but really it's just a screen nuke with a certain animation for each player the game can be a little repetitive at times pretty early in it's gonna start asking you to defeat like 100 enemies per weave and each level only has like one mini boss each which aren't that difficult for some more variety they also let you get into mech at certain points but really it's just as overpowered as the game boy advanced version they turn through hordes of enemies so easily it feels unfair there are segments where they give you these short little tasks to do using the ds stylus but they're not fun in the slightest it's basic [ __ ] like pull down the lever to crush your metal cube or use this korean magnet to pick up a block with really shitty head detection or spin around this little thing to get the platform to match up and then it's like really [ __ ] precise though it took me ages to get this at this point i was ready to call it quits on stage one what's the point if it's just gonna be this exact same thing the whole way through but upon beating the first level i was presented with this mini game where you ride around in the mech trying to get nuts and bolts while trying to get to the end and that's where i started to get invested see during the stages when you defeat an enemy you get the exact same nuts and bolts i never knew what these were for i had collected hundreds of these and supposedly they weren't going towards anything until i got here turns out these are used as fuel for driving with them constantly going down and when you hit a crit you lose a bunch at once so you have to reach the end level without running out an after said driving level you're faced with a boss fight against yet another robot doppelganger except these are from a first person perspective and feel much more like a rival fight than a boss which works out a lot better it looks like [ __ ] punch eyed all you have to do is shoot at them with your bullets left for weak ones and write for stronger ones but it takes longer to charge up while avoiding their attacks towards you for a while i was confused as to where my health was the robot is in the top left corner where mine is nowhere to be seen but that's when i realized that your screws also act as your health bar during a boss whether you're losing a bunch after being hurt this is where everything clicked such a simple way of combining all of these disparate missions together with something as integral as a collectible meter does wonders and unifying them all it makes it so that there's not a challenge and something else to consider while playing through the regular stages it almost removes that repetitiveness as now i actively want to defeat the enemies and collect all the stuff so that i go into the boss knowing i have the best chance of beating it i'm surprised how much this improves the game what else improves the game after each deed you unlock a new necktune to play as and not just from the already represented franchises either there are new ones here too on top of the normal five characters in your roster you can also select mr blick from cat scratch manny revere from el tigre jenny from my life as a teenage robot and zim from invader zim and if you collect all the extra character portraits in their racing levels you can also unlock gir they even have sponge gar and evil danny's secret playable characters you get through cheat codes that's cool there's a lot of meat to this game surprisingly despite in the outside appearing to just be a simple beat-em-up not to mention the presentation here is top-notch timmy's brian pants aside all the sprite work here is great the moves are telegraphed well and i love that all the locations are using 3d models creates this super stylized environment where the players stick out a bunch compared to the world really the only thing i could want done better is having some more enemy variety you're fighting the same bots constantly here just with a different coat of paint if you're going to make me fight 50 million enemies i'd love to at the very least see some new ones every once in a while the music is also the best out of the bunch we've seen so far it's so [ __ ] catchy i love a majority of the tracks here they're so funky i was surprised why this game managed to turn me around from wanting to only play it for around half an hour because i assumed it had no substance to almost beating the whole thing and i definitely find myself wanting to go back and finish it at some point soon it was a lot of fun so with superb presentation simple but fun gameplay and an engaging way of unifying all the different thought we'd gamepl i don't know what it is but anytime i see a console game get a handheld poor my automatic assumption is that it'll be worse maybe it's a result of me growing up with a martin of crappy death games like yeah that but with the console versions not even being very good i didn't have much hope for a single one of these things but so far i've gotta say i'm pleasantly surprised so i suppose there's only one more to go let's hope they got it with a bang coming out in 2008 the game boy advance was mostly dead in the water at this point so i take it they only felt it was worthy coming out in the ds which was still going extremely strong speaking of dead in the water these neptune's games in general i can only assume that attack of the toybots didn't sell as well as they'd hoped and so tried their best to have globs of doom perform better dropping nicktoons from the mean title and advertising it is more of a spongebob video game since this is the last game we're looking at you can assume it did not turn out as well as that hoped i actually remember my friend owning this version of the game for his ds and every time i tried to play it i had no idea what the [ __ ] to do and put it down and i thought it sucked doesn't give me much hope in globs of doom all the heroes are summoned back to volcano island to investigate the mysterious orange goo falling from the sky and turning people into monsters the whole gimmick here however is that not only do you play as the heroes but their respective villains too we've got spongebob and plankton danny and teknis jimmy and beautiful gorgeous sim and dab tack and tax villain i've invited a team wow jimmy you han selected who you wanted to come and didn't pick timmy what a [ __ ] for a ds game the presentation here is actually pretty good once again combining sprites with 3d locations which is a style i can't get enough of all the locations are based on the characters worlds too which allows them to be varied and stand apart now the gameplay is where it starts to be very different globs of doom is once again a 2d platformer except what makes this one stand out is that you're playing as two fixed characters on a level who you can freely switch between whenever you want although when you do switch the other one doesn't go away or even follow you so your mission is to try and get both characters to the end that sounds awful and believe you me i was thinking the same thing but the more i played it the more i realized that i really really liked this game each character has one special ability that can do i won't go over all of them because there's so many characters but for example spongebob can create a platform that goes upwards using a bubble techniques can glide dany can walk through walls and plankton can ride on rockets and much like the gba version of volcano island you have to know where and when to use their moves to get them further in the level it's a lot slower piece to the game compared to that though i'd almost call it a puzzle platformer because there are a lot of times where you have to stop and think for a minute to figure out how you're not only going to get to the end of the level but make sure your teammate gets there too this results in a lot of stop and go game play where you run around just one character looking for a button so the other can get through their segment and vice versa but i didn't mind the slower piece at all because i find it fun to figure out these problems and when you do you're like oh yeah i feel smart for besting this baby game just let me have this you're even given a helpful map on the bottom of the screen that helps you see where you and your teammate is and what obstacles are around them i'd much rather take that than the level being obscenely tall with so much empty space the bosses suck though you're just mindlessly attacking them when their weak spot is open and avoiding their easily avoidable attacks it's brainless i don't really have much to say here honestly this is just a solid little 2d puzzle platformer much better than the console version at the very least that one sucked i'm surprised i don't see anyone talk about this one as much but i could see myself coming back to it every once in a while when i want to relive the glory dads of neck crossover games you're all right all star brawl but the lack of timmy games that's what's doing yeah and don't give me that excuse of timmy not being allowed in games because of contracting issues if you haven't noticed yet throughout this entire video timmy has been in one or two of these things but that's it we're finally done looking at every game in this saga excluding like [ __ ] freeze frame frenzy or whatever it's called you take pictures there that's my review i wasn't expecting to say this but some of these games were actually pretty good i'm stunned with how mediocre the playstation ports were i was only expecting these to be worse but entries like attacking the toybots for diaz globs of doom and the gb volcano island were genuinely good times that i'd be more than happy to try out again at some point if i were to give these games some kind of ranking from morse to best it'd probably go something like this unite for the game boy advance attack of the toy box game boy advance unite on the ds volcano island on the ds globes of doom attack of the toybot's ds and finally the winner volcano island on the gameboy advance it really is a shame that we don't see these things being made in the skill it used to be like i lamented at the end of my last video though it's harder for them to do now considering what franchises have they got to work with since then it's actually gotten worse with no teenage mutant ninja turtle show running it's literally just spongebob and lincoln lied i guess baby shark too hello i think if nick all-star brawl's initial hype can show us anything it's that a lot of these older characters still have huge fan bases who are more than willing to buy a product starring them so i wouldn't see an issue with nick maybe trying their hand at another crossover platformer at some point in the future even better if they could actually make it good if not however i'll still be able to appreciate this selection of games even the bad ones because the idea is just so cool to me that these four franchises were able to cross over with each other on the yearly for nearly half a decade i think maybe we took that for granted but yeah what are you gonna do okay i had finished the video and all but did you know that nick made a series called the portal chases on the youtube channel about the characters going to different nick properties starring [ __ ] spongebob lincoln lied ronnie anne from the cleveland show lincoln lied and [ __ ] like henry deanger from a live action sitcom that was turned into a crappy animated dance schneider [ __ ] feet lover they had episodes where it's spongebob teaming up with danny and jimmy and they're still left out timmy turner why do they hit this kid so much what do you do m [Music] [Applause]

Channel: LS Mark

Views: 570,490

Keywords: LS Mark, LS Mark Nick, LS Mark Nicktoons, LS Mark Nick Crossover, The Nicktoons Crossover Saga, The Handheld Nicktoons Crossover Saga, Spongebob, Spongebob Squarepants, Timmy Turner, Fairly OddParents, Jimmy Neutron, Danny Phantom, Nicktoons Unite, Nicktoons Battle for Volcano Island, Nicktoons Attack of the Toybots, Nicktoons Globs of Doom, Nicktoons Games, Nicktoons Crossover, Nickelodeon Crossover Games, LS Mark Review

Id: KwQQ0KyG1ww

Length: 47min 10sec (2830 seconds)

Published: Sat May 28 2022