What I Missed
Apparently there were other changes to the game I failed to catch. First for the minor ones, Red Dragon's Castle and Prince Charming's Castle are renamed to the Blue Dragon's Castle and The Crown Prince's Castle. May I ask for the latter, why? This was well a time before Shrek 2. You could say it's for copyright reasons, so that's why they included a reference to Snow White and the Seven Dwarves in one of their added levels.
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| Busted. |
Anyhow, the structure behind each mission in Extra Large is mostly the same, just described differently. Though some have been altered, such as where you need to bring the skeletons because the original area is where you retrieve the magic armor. No skin off its tit, that makes the game a bit less difficult. In the Molasses Sewers, there's a time limit on one of the missions, the valve mission, which believe it or not makes sense. The limits themselves are generous and more time is given to you after every valve you hit, and if you lose, you just get booted back to your latest checkpoint.
There's also the stuff you find, namely a dragon flame after the Blue Dragon stage, which proves to be helpful when trying to break down the locked doors. One more thing that I should've brought up before the missions come around when you get to a certain point, and sometimes they need to be done in a certain order to get everything open. This is straightforward, but would you think to get hit by an enemy to start one of the missions? As for the verbatim missions, they're mostly optional, you just need to beat four of the six, but if you decide to sack up and do the others, you're rewarded with extra health.
Race Mode
You could switch between the story mode and this mode. In race mode, you have to complete the objectives in each world within a set time limit. I failed to bring this up when talking about the level mechanics, but once you beat a stage you're booted back to the map. Thanks to that, the race mode is fairly sensible. What's your reward for doing this? You get money you could use to pay for cheats.
Cheats
The XBOX version has the highest amounts of cheats. These amount to visual alterations which display the various layers, huh get it, of the graphics, as well as insight to how the game did deferred shading. Some of these are a money sink, namely one where everything turns 90% dark, almost as if they predicted the grittier appearance of the GameCube version. They also have slow and fast cheats, which exist solely for comedic purposes, as well as infinite gas and flame, an automatic gas cheat if you wanna channel your inner frat boy humor, low gravity, super strength, and invincibility, of course. There's seemingly a trap cheat, $ for Merlin. Best to save that one for last.
In the GameCube version, along with cutting the list of cheats in half, these are typically available after you complete the game. I take it the missions you complete double as currency.
The Dungeon
I brought up that the GameCube version has an out of bounds dungeon that you can't escape from unless you reset the game. But lo and behold, the XBOX has it too. While the GameCube version is set in, well, an actual GameCube.
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| Right here. |
The XBOX version sends you to an actual dungeon.
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| Right here. |
These could only be found if you wind up out of bounds, and you could only get out of bounds once you have the right cheats enabled. It's believed that these were test stages hidden within the game's code, but I have a much grander theory. DICE Canada knew what was up, they knew their game wasn't entirely polished, so to punish those exploiting the finer details, they set up an inescapable dungeon.
Overall
Now that I got a more thorough understanding of either game, I can conclude that Shrek Extra Large... lived up to the title, there certainly was a lot more to there than the XBOX version, I could forgive the downgraded graphics given that the GameCube is weaker hardware, but it's just not that remarkable.
Both versions aren't very good, but why do I keep going back to them? Aside from a hopefully dead meme, there's an alluring quality to these games. Its visuals are hard to ignore, you can't deny it's one of if not the first games to introduce the concept of deferred shadowing, and you can't deny Shrek's Treasure Hunt, Shrek Swamp Kart Racing and Shrek Fairy Tale Freakdown is worse.
What have I missed this time?
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