Back in my day (and in addition to walking 15 miles to school in the snow and uphill), cartoons kicked major boot-ay. Transformers, Voltron, Thundercats, the Real Ghostbusters, GI Joe, He-Man, and Duck Tales were a major force and I gobbled each one of them up like I hadn't eaten for weeks. But I don't know what's up with the cartoons kids watch these days, in particular Cartoon Network's laughably awful Ed, Edd n Eddy. For reasons that escape me other than the children of today don't have any taste whatsoever, this show is quite popular and Midway, in its infinite wisdom, decided to develop a game based on it. Unfortunately, Ed, Edd, n Eddy: The Mis-Edventures is even worse than the cartoon series. That is, unless you're a huge fan. Otherwise it's just peachy keen.

Ed, Edd, n Eddy is a game about three extremely ugly kids who are running amok throughout their neighborhood, destroying property, terrorizing their friends, and cracking unfunny jokes. It's a fairly simplistic platformer that's greatest strength is the utilization of all three characters to solve various puzzles and complete challenges. Able to switch between the three boys on the fly, you can take advantage of their unique abilities and/or group them together to smash through doors or give someone a boost up to a ledge. That's basically the gist of things, and to top off the gameplay, the developers have gone to great lengths to make the product as accurate to the show as possible, so all of the voices sound the same and the character models are representative of their television counterparts. In fact, if you're a huge fan of the show this game will probably appeal to you.

But then there's the rest of us, and unfortunately, The Mis-Edventures is not only incredibly boring but just plain irksome. It's bad enough that everyone in this game has horribly annoying voices, but to make matters worse the actual game just isn't fun. I spent more time shaking animals off these boys' legs than I did actually playing, and when I was playing I often wanted to just fall asleep. It's not that the game doesn't feature decent objectives. Rather, it's just a bunch of stuff that I've seen before in a billion other platform games. Hunt for this item, hit all these switches, join forces ala Sonic Heroes. I've basically played this game numerous times and the majority of those titles are better than this one.

What I discovered is lots of little things annoy me. I don't like how the camera's difficult to move in tight places, I don't like how the game shows an icon for each character but doesn't tell me who's who, I hate that all three boys share the same life bar, and the transitioning between going in and outside of houses is just plain sloppy and disorientating. And of course on top of that the voices...wow...just stop the madness! One of them has the worst laugh that I have ever heard and it's repeated every few moments.

The gameplay is also broken in some areas. At one point I had to stun these squirrels with a stink bomb (which is harder than it should be), pick them up and toss them threw an open window. But when I lifted one up while standing in a pool I couldn't exit the pool, so I had to drop the squirrel and go find another one. It's stuff like that that shows that the developers just didn't examine all possible scenarios.

Then there's character art! I'm not blaming Midway for how everyone looks, but Ed, Edd n Eddy look like Dennis the Menace after he's been marinated in some corrosive substance. Like that poor mutated guy at the end of Robocop, someone needs to barrel into them with a sports car.

Am I being too harsh? Part of me feels like it only because fans of the show will more than likely enjoy this game much like I enjoyed Ren & Stimpy on the Genesis years ago. So let's break even and come to some shallow compromise. If you absolutely adore Ed, Edd n Eddy then go ahead and change my final score to a 2.5/5. Hell, make it a 4 if you have posters on your walls and sketch the characters in your math notebook. However, if you despise this series and lust for quality games as much as I do just stay away from this one. There are certainly better alternatives out there for the GameCube, and once you're done playing those, well...play them all again.

Our Final ScoreBad

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