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Nickelodeon GUTS review

Game: Nickelodeon GUTS
Platform: SNES
Genre: Casual (Party)
Developer: Viacom New Media

Reader review by goldenvortex

November 11, 2004

When I was a kid, I loved Nickelodeon. It was full of great cartoons like “Rocko’s Modern life” and “ Ren and Stimpy” which were damn funny then and probably are still funny now. Nick GUTS, on the other hand was crap, it always was crap and it will never be anything but crap. The reason why Nick decided to make a rubbish show into a game astounds me. They should have left it as a show but to cash in on more dough, they created a monster. GUTS was about teams of kids playing menial mini-games so they could gain points and at the end the winners would probably get the prize of their dreams. It’s like Fun House, without Pat and the mullet.

The game is a painful enactment of the GUTS show, with five events available for you to play. This may sound like fun at first but when you discover that all three of the five events are pretty much the same as each other, the excitement is brutally murdered. The first two modes are race levels where you have to complete an obstacle course in a certain amount of time. You get more than enough time to do the task but the actual course is so full of flaws that it takes almost twice as long to do it. For example, you have to jump off a platform onto a pole hanging from the roof, it’s absurdly far away for you to reach so you have to keep jumping of different parts of the platform to get your distance right. If you fall off, you plummet down and have to do the frustrating jump again.

The obstacle course is filled with poles for you to climb, water to wade through, that mysteriously shoots up and hits you and it has also got a large amount of drops. You only get a small health bar so when you drop down (notice my word choice, “when”) you’ll end up losing a chunk of it. You can get checkpoints throughout the course and you’ll need them, you’ll be farting around , falling off edges, trying to grab onto poles so much that you’ll end up replaying the same area over and over. The reasons for all of these mistakes and falls are the combination of the irresponsive controls and the bad positioning obstacles. The kid can’t jump that far but he can perform wonderful back flips to show off and he can run at astounding speed, with these combined you’ll be leaping all over the place, trying to grab on to something.

The next three games follow a similar pattern as one another but with a few minor tweaks to the event, making it just a little bit different. Basically, our child is strapped up in a bungee getup, with harness and helmet. Then with the bungee elastic, he must leap up into the air and drop a basketball into a hoop which is placed high on the wall. The other two involve you jumping up to the net and hitting it with a stick or throwing a small ball into the net, like a soccer goal. The control of this game is awful, there is a meter that you have to charge by holding the action button, the longer the button is held, the higher the kid will jump. After this, you’ll go soaring into the air and in order to score a point you’ll have to press the action button rapidly. When you bounce back, the chances are that the kid will fall over when he lands on the ground, wasting your time and getting you frustrated. Don’t worry about running out of time though, you get a lot and you’ll be so sick of the game that you won’t play it all of the way through.

You play a whole GUTS show with a friend but when you are alone, training mode is the only option. This was a bad idea, I think most players would want to play through a whole GUTS event show instead of just picking random events but you get no chance at that. You can choose from one of the five mini-games and play it for a few minutes and that’s it. You can’t compete against other opponents so you have little incentive to play basic games without any competition.

GUTS looks below average for a SNES game, the graphics are blurry and barely any detail has been put into any characters during gameplay. The backgrounds are dull, in the first games it’s just a picture of a crowd cheering that remains in a frozen state throughout the entire game. Plainly, the background on the jumping level has a few people cheering and one of those is actually alive, he claps his hands non-stop. The sprite of the kid you play is the same, no matter which kids you choose, unless you choose the black kid then the sprite is black, funnily enough. Apart from this, the sprite is the same as before and the only change that occurs is if the kid changes colour, which a palette swap of the kid. The graphics are bland, blurry and average, for a SNES game it’s a disappointment.

Have you got the GUTS? I thought I did but I felt like that I needed more GUTS to help me to play the game for longer. The games have little variety and the objectives you have to pull off are just seemingly pointless and amazingly dull. After playing for half an hour, you would have managed to play through most of the game and then leave it at that. The controls are horribly stiff, the events are mediocre and the graphics are too plain. If you have GUTS then my heart bleeds for you but if you don’t have the GUTS, then just be thankful.

Rating: 2/10

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