Searching through the kiddy channels (purely for the purposes of research, obviously) I found this CKND on the Cartoon Network. This game is a reasonable representation of that, and love it or HATE it, that’s probably all you need to know. If, like me you’ve never heard of them then I guess you’re one of the lucky ones, this set of characters look like some sort of evil amalgam of Peanuts, Magic Roundabout and Rugrats characters, without the humour, charm or appeal.
You play as your “favorite” Kids Next Door operative (they’re called Numbuh One, Numbuh Two etc.) through the 14 levels (yeah right, good luck with that!), each with a different style, using each of the Kids Next Door’s unique strengths and special skills to traverse the (it has to be said) highly generic platform levels. The game entails lots of jumping, shooting, moving platforms, laser gates, grappling hooks (like Batman’s bathook), picking up "Powuh Ups" (there should probably be a ™ after that) along the way in order to assemble a variety of weapons including the G.U.M.Z.O.O.K.A., the S.P.L.A.N.K.E.R., the S.C.A.M.P.P. and the F.R.A.P.P.E. (all clever acronyms taken directly from the television show of course). Most levels end with simple (but occasionally annoying) boss battles, and they all come with the handicap of one of the dopiest, most unfriendly game cameras I’ve had the misfortune to play with lately – the thing just refuses to give you a decent view (especially in tight corridors) and this soon becomes CKND’s most tiresome and annoying feature, and that’s really saying something if you’ve seen the characters or heard the way they speak and phrase things (best described as “Rug-Rednecks”)…
Battling such enemies as Stickybeard, Knightbrace, Common Cold, Gramma Stuffum, and the “hilarious” Toiletnator (you may poo yourself laughing at this guy!) I can see what the designers were trying to do, but the main problem is that it’s actually just not very funny, and the heroes and villains just don’t seem to appeal to anybody that I’ve spoken to, young or old.
Don’t know what else to say about the game really, its levels certainly vary; there are even some vertically scrolling shoot ‘em up sections, but the game just doesn’t play well enough to suit its target audience (or at least what I imagine it to be, it says 7+ on the box). It lacks visual appeal (strictly first gen-looking graphics throughout) and I’m sure kids will find it just as annoying and occasionally too difficult as I did, and parents forced to help the kids out will soon be driven mad, purely by the design of the whole CKND “thing”, which to put it bluntly, makes me fearful for the future of mankind when we have a generation of kids brought up on this sort of stuff, and brings out a strong desire to kill the original designers and writers. Dead. To death… And laugh at the poor sods at game developers High Voltage who got forced to code this generic rubbish when they surely have the talent to do something good. But hey, I’m sure people felt the same way about Scooby Doo and Andy Pandy – and I turned out AlRiGht!
This is awful, if true to the series – avoid it like a load of “numbuh tooh”.
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