Years ago my mom bought a portable DVD player for the car. I used to watch the Cat in the Hat movie constantly, it was primarily through there, hence why I brought it up.
Though people hate this movie with a burning passion because they're under the assumption Dr. Seuss is alive and giving shits, I don't see the problem. It's not like the original, but it's still enjoyable, and just to remind you, I was a kid at the time I watched it, and the designs didn't scare me at all. I'm not saying it out of spite, I watched this movie constantly and was not disturbed by the Things or the Cat in the Hat. Either at a young age I understood how well or poorly things can be translated to live-action, or people like to exaggerate.
As was the way with many movie adaptations, they would release a game to capitalize on the hype. Interesting fact, around the same year this came out, NewKidCo published three Cat in the Hat games for the Game Boy Advance, maybe they were diehard fans, or they were known for tripling, often quadrupling down on licenses.
The fact that Universal Studios, (cha ching, and distributors for this film, hence that plug), had their own publishing arm meant that it was in their grasp. The game was released for the PlayStation 2, Xbox, Windows and Game Boy Advance. As with many Game Boy Advance games, I have no idea how or when I got it. I do know it was associated with a camping trip I took aboard an old naval ship, where I slept in a bunk bed under a heavy guy.
The game was published by Vivendi Universal Games and developed by Digital Eclipse. Digital Eclipse are perhaps best known for their compilations and conversions of old games, they showed how powerful the Game Boy Color truly was, brought over Dungeons and Dragons pretty well, you couldn't go five feet without seeing their neat little logo.
But don't get me wrong, it's not always sunshine behind that moon. They were also behind a number of shovelware titles for the Game Boy Color (though Little Nicky's the best of them all), brought upon the current worst E.T. game, among NewKidCo.'s glut, handled the Game Boy Color port of Mortal Kombat 4 as well as the Game Boy Color port of Marble Madness, often considered to be one of the worst ports for that game, at least the Game Boy Advance version showed potential.
Vivendi Universal Games also had promise, they published great titles like Metal Arms and Crash Twinsanity, and also helmed some of the most objectively good licensed games ever, like 2003's Hulk, The Simpsons Hit and Run and the Chronicles of Riddick. But on the other hand, they also published Spyro: Enter the Dragonfly and one of the lesser Leisure Suit Larry games until they were outsucked about five years later.
The Game
The story seems to follow the original books, with imagery from the 2003 movie. I take it this was made earlier on. The Cat in the Hat arrives, chaos is unleashed and it warps the house into a surrealistic nightmare.
You play as the Cat in the Hat, going to four different areas, each comprising of two platforming stages, one swimming stages, and half of them have boss fights.
For the platforming stages, this leads you to a number of bizzare areas, such as the pipe system, a medicine cabinet, the fridge, and keep in mind these are decked out to suit the platformer aesthetic. They all play like this, collect a certain number of items, usually 165, and destroy all of the enemies in order to open up the exit, usually 16.
You can catch enemies in bubbles, do a slam attack and glide up small cyclones with your umbrella, but beware on those, they wear off after a few seconds. You have three temporary abilities, a slam enhancement that allows you to get an extra bounce with your slam attack, the ability to glide higher on cyclones and the chance to run faster to make wide jumps and avoid dripping hazards. For health you have slices of cake that replenish your health one piece at a time, and cupcakes for full heals. There are also thing icons that will unlock bonus stages, which I will discuss later on.
Enemies consist of a bipedal dog that than crane its head out, a bumblebee guy, a snail with a cannon, a stegosaurus that rams, a quadrupedal dog that functions like the stegosaurus, a green and purple monster that hurls projectiles at you and a flaming gopher... bear... face on a ball that's on fire, which will get such cold feet that it won't appear in any other level again.
There is a specific way to destroy the enemies, you will find yourself lost and furious if you don't do it this way. You need to trap the enemies in bubbles and slam down on them for it to count as a kill. I know it doesn't seem like much, but first timers may miss this and wind up getting stuck without knowing that they didn't dispose of the enemy properly. I'd assume the bubble is meant to protect against the physical attributes of most enemies.
The underwater stages have you go and try and save the talking goldfish, whatever his name is, and these take forever. You have a long way to go, attacking catfishes, green whales, puffer pig fish, crabs, seals?, but I'll give it this, unlike that Barbie game JonTron talked about, it has enemies which include the loss of oxygen.
There are two boss fights, and they're mostly bogus. The first one has you fight a giant living toaster, but all you gotta do is get it to move far enough to the left that its plug gets pulled. The other is a stuffed moose that actually puts up quite a fight. This one threw me off as a kid, but what you gotta do is hit it after it disorients itself after it drops down. I like how you can revisit boss stages, even if the bosses don't respawn, give you a chance to contemplate your dirty deed.
There's also a row of bonus stages, if you collect the thing icons, but they amount to the same thing. It's a driving game where you try to capture one of the things, or Thing 1, as it's the only one referred to by name. The only thing that changes is the scenery, greenery, the suburbs, the city then the city at night. Now sure the movie had low real estate on locations, and having the Things in the house would not make sense for a mission like this.
It can get annoying if you don't know what to do. You need to know to hold down the "A" button in order to drive fast. You have the option to use an extending hand to grab the thing from a distance but you can otherwise run him over.
And that's about it... I just summed up the entire game right there. There's a section on the top left that went entirely unused. It seems like something that would be opened if you complete the game 100%, but nothing happens, it's dead space. Heck, you don't even see Thing 2 in this.
I'm willing to believe this game was unfinished or rushed. The basic framework of each level would be enough, but the lack of that many bosses, at the very least having one for each floor, nor a true end beyond a small cutscene. You can complete this game in less than an hour if you know what you're doing. I don't know what they intended with that unused section, unless it was just to stare at an immovable door as you contemplate whether or not all of that effort was worth it.
At the very least the graphics were good and the music was decent.
This game had been considered an example of why licensed games get a bad rep, and this was taken from an excerpt from a review focusing on the Game Boy Advance version. Let's see, basic stages, basic gameplay, the fact this could've been rushed, I can't really argue with that now can I?
Final Thoughts
I loved the movie as a kid, and honestly I still like it now. It was fun to watch... and that's about it. The game, I honestly can't be nice about it, even if I grew up with it. It may be the first potentially rushed game I ever encountered as a kid. Let's be grateful that this didn't destroy Vivendi Universal and Digital Eclipse's reputations.
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