SESAME STREET SPORTS (GAME BOY COLOR)

“Can you tell me how to get to Sesame Street?” goes the theme song, and if today’s game is any indication you should probably try checking the bargain bins of your local videogame retailers at the turn of the millennium. It’s Bonsai Entertainment’s 2001 undeserving-of-the-plural-em-up Sesame Street Sports for the Game Boy Color!

Yes, it’s a Game Boy Color game based on a kid’s TV show. A terrible fate to befall any children’s franchise, and an especially cruel blow for something as universally beloved as Sesame Street. But maybe I’m too hasty in my judgement. Sure, games like Rugrats: Totally Angelica, Doug’s Big Game and The Tweenies: Doodles’ Bones have set a dreadful precedent, not to mention shaving years off my lifespan, but this is Sesame Street we’re talking about. Surely the muppet-based joie de vivre of Sesame Street is beyond the corroding influence of a zero-effort GBC cash-in? Well, yes and no, as well shall see.

Hitting start brings up a screen of Elmo and Big Bird, who seem to be commentators for the events ahead. At least, commentators is what they’d be if they ever commented on anything. Instead they resolutely maintain their silence, only offering the player their glassy-eyed stares. Big Bird in particular has the expression of someone who knows that neither he nor the player have any idea what they’re doing here, and he sympathises.

Time to pick a character, and all your favourites are here! Not my favourites, mind you. No Snuffleupagus, no Count von Count and worst of all no Oscar the Grouch. Given that I so often write about licensed Game Boy Color games, it should come as not surprise that I feel a kinship with a grumpy creature who surrounds himself with trash.
So, you’ve got Ernie, Telly, Cookie Monster, Grover, Zoe and Elmo to pick from. In keeping with the messages of free thinking and spontaneity espoused by Sesame Street, I’m going to break free of my usual insistence on beginning at the obvious starting point, which in this case is the top-left. Instead, I’ll be starting with Cookie Monster. Everyone loves Cookie Monster, right? Unless they run a biscuit museum, I suppose. Plus, that is a really great portrait of Cookie Monster, mostly because he looks completely mental.

The Sesame Street sports spectacular gets underway with Cookie Monster on a space hopper, a phrase I never thought I’d have cause to use but I’m glad that I do. Cookie Monster is taking part is a kind of bouncy steeplechase, and he must reach the end of the course as quickly as possible. To do this, you hold right on the d-pad and press either A or B to jump – bounce, I suppose – over obstacles.

This being a Cookie Monster game, there are of course cookies to collect. Magical, hovering cookies. Jump into them to collect them. You do actually seem to be collecting them, too, and the number at the top continues to rise as you grab them. That Cookie Monster doesn’t immediately devour them strikes me as being against the very essence of his character, but what do I know? I haven’t seen an episode of Sesame Street in decades. Maybe he’s learned some goddamn self control since then.

For a moment I thought that stall in the background was selling hundred-dollar hot dogs. The fact that I’m paying so much attention to the background should give you an idea of how engrossing the gameplay is. It’s easier to ignore as a “buy now” popup from WinRAR, frankly. In fact, I think it might be impossible to actually concentrate on, it’s so braindead. You move right and jump over things. Occasionally there’s a water fountain that propels you into the air so you can reach high-altitude cookies. It’s so simple a toddler could do it, which is presumably the point, but even most toddlers would quickly tire of it.

If your don’t fancy a hot dog, maybe you can hit this stall instead and buy yourself a Hotig. Delicious, mysterious Hotig, it’s good for what ails ya. How much does Hotig cost? JO, that’s how much. Wait, I’ve just remembered what “JO” is sometimes an abbreviation for. You can keep your damn Hotig, you sicko.

I collected 15 cookies and cleared the course in forty-six seconds, according to Big Bird and Elmo. Half of that time was spend grinding Cookie Monster up against obstacle to see if anything interesting would happen. It didn’t.

The sports odyssey continues as Ernie takes to the water in his bathtub. Not since the time of ancient Greece have sportsmen competed in the nude, but Ernie’s out to change that. Off he goes, down through the raging torrent, occasionally hauling his entire bathtub out of the river as he jumps to collect the rubber duckies scattered throughout. You might be thinking “that seems very similar to the previous stage,” but you’d be wrong. It is in fact identical to the previous stage, except with different graphics.

The most baffling thing about it is that you still have to hold right on the d-pad to move right, and the presumed current of the water has no effect on the movement of your bathtub. My only explanation for this is that the river is very shallow and Ernie has simply kicked his feet through the bottom of the tub so he can run, Flintstones-style, along the river bed.

On to Telly’s snow-themed sledding event. He’s wearing a woolly hat to protect himself from the cold, bless him. However, it’s not going to protect him from the landing after this jump, an acrobatic effort that the experts would described as having “gone tits up.”

I’m kidding, of course. You can’t hurt a muppet. They’re made of felt, for a start, and Telly will always land on his sled no matter how you hurl him. I did hurl him a fair bit, too. It seemed appropriate, given that he’s racing down a hill on a plastic tray… except he isn’t. Just like the other two stages, you have to manually move Telly to the right, despite the fact that he’s sitting in a sled atop an icy slope. At least with Ernie you could argue that maybe his bathtub is more of a boat and it’s equipped with an outboard motor or something, but Telly’s complete disregard for the force of gravity is impossible to justify. They could have made his stage a little different but no, it’s exactly the same. On the plus side, that snowman is fairly adorable.

It’s Grover’s turn now. He’s on a unicycle, teetering his way past the Fish Hut, which I assume is like a Pizza Hut but they only serve fish. Only serve fish as food, I mean. The Fish Hut is on land, so it's unlikely to sustain itself on a fish-only clientele. I’ve always had a soft spot for Grover, probably because as a kid I had a Grover soft toy. The arms of said toy were long enough for you to knot together so you could wear him like a cape, much as an ancient hunter might wear the pelt of a mighty beast he’d slain.

I see that misplaced apostrophe, Sesame Street Sports. That scuba hire business better be owned by someone called Kayak, otherwise I’m going to have to write a strongly-worded letter about this betrayal of the educational principles that Sesame Street stands for.

All the stages have a certain item – cookies, rubber ducks and in Grover’s case, balloons – that you can collect, although as far as I can tell there’s absolutely no reason to collect them and no punishment if you don’t meet some vague balloon quota. This makes it all the more confusing that in Grover’s stage, there’s a small boy with a bouquet of balloons standing around at the end of the stage. Grover can take all the child’s balloons and saunter away. Grover, you arse, you don’t even need those balloons.

Next up is Zoe’s dirt-bike track, and it’s probably the most boring of the lot. That was a hotly-contested category, let me tell you. It’s the same move-right-and-jump gameplay as all the others – loose, floaty jumps married to a complete lack of challenge – but with a blander background.

The final stage is Elmo’s rollerblading, musical-note-collecting extravaganza. The inquisitive little furball skates his way through a part of Sesame Street that’s in dire need of some pothole repairs. I can sympathise, Elmo. Some of the roads near my house would give the Mars Rover a real challenge.

I don’t think thrusting your groin at the potholes is going to help, Elmo.

Oh look, it’s the Twin Towers. This game was actually released a few weeks after 9/11, which is a little unfortunate for the developers. Still, it’s a Sesame Street game. I’m sure nobody took umbrage.
Let’s focus instead on the musical monkeys. Their organ constantly pumps out musical notes that Elmo can collect. As mentioned, Elmo has no reason to collect the notes, but maybe you’re really into racking up high scores and you have a lot of free time. The best thing about this organ is that it’s being operated by a monkey who has another, smaller monkey as his assistant. Having spent years watching his human captor operate the organ while forcing him to dance, the monkey could take no more and rebelled against his master. Given that chimps tend to go for the eyes and the testicles when they attack, it probably wasn’t a pretty sight. However, the monkey knew of nothing of life but the organ grinder’s trade, and so he enslaved a smaller monkey and become that which he most despised, setting in motion a dark and terrible cycle of events. I’d keep a close eye on Monkey Jr., if I were you.
Once you reach the end of Elmo’s stage, that’s every “event” completed. What’s your reward for mastering such varied disciplines as “bouncing right and jumping” and “floating right in a bathtub and jumping”?

Absolutely bugger all, that’s what. Not tallying up of your scores, no congratulatory messages, not even a heartfelt thank-you for somehow managing to stay awake for the entire game. It’s straight back to the character select screen for you, bucko. Repeated playthroughs and further investigation bore no fruit, so I have to assume that this really is all that Sesame Street Sports has to offer. It’s an astonishingly slight amount of gameplay, and the gameplay that is there is so boring that it borders on pre-surgery anaesthetic levels of sleep-inducing. It’s a game for kids, sure, but none of the developers seem to have much of an idea about what kids might want to play. When my nephew was three he was playing much more complex and engaging (and educational) game than this, and Sesame Street Sports would have bored him into discarding it after about five minutes. The nicest thing you can say about it is that the gameplay works as (presumably) intended and that some of the graphics, particularly the characters themselves, look fairly decent, but it’s still got that stink of cynical money-grabbing all over it. It's too much of a non-entity to really hate, though - unless you were some poor child who spent their pocket money to buy it. It is my sincere recommendation that you watch an episode of Sesame Street rather than playing Sesame Street Sports. You might even learn something, although if you’re short of time please note that watching a full episode of Sesame Street takes about four times as long as playing through this game.

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CASPER (GAME BOY)

Today, the philosophical implications of playing as a dead child sadly do little to distract from the gameplay in Casper for the Game Boy, created by Bonsai Entertainment and released in 1996.

That's Casper the Friendly Ghost, of course. I'm sure you all know who Casper is, even if you haven't consumed much media starring the ectoplasmic young lad. If you don't know who he is, Casper is a ghost who is friendly, in contrast to all the other ghosts who each have a personality roughly in line with every Post Office cashier I've ever had to deal with. This posits a universe where the way one becomes a ghost is not by having unfinished business or suffering a violent death but by simply being a proper dick, and Casper is a freakish anomaly that upsets this natural order. That's why all the other ghosts hate him.
Casper the Game Boy game is based loosely on the 1995 movie version of Casper, which I discussed during the article about Casper: Friends Around the World. It's the movie where Casper develops a faintly creepy stalkerish crush on Christina Ricci's character Kat, including a scene where he whispers "can I keep you?" at her as though she were a stray dog. Bill Pullman also falls into a sewer and dies, so it's got some comedy elements. I think the movie is where most British people's knowledge of Casper comes from - it's certainly where I know him from - so hopefully I'll understand what's going on in the game.

The game begins with one vaguely humanoid lump dragging another vaguely humanoid lump towards a spooky mansion. It'd be spookier if the outside wasn't decorated with giant love-hearts, mind you. I have to assume the décor is Casper's doing. Anyway, once you're inside the non-spectral humanoid lump disappears and Casper is presented with four doors, each of them leading to (and take a deep breath now for your upcoming groan) a different minigame. That's right, Casper is yet another Game Boy minigame collection, with the added bonus that the minigames are all ripped off from other games that already exist. I can hardly wait to get started.

Is "ooz" something that really deserves to be protected? It couldn't even be bothered to spell "ooze" properly, and if it cares so little about itself then why should I care about ooz? What has ooz ever done for me?

This is the first minigame, and Casper is off to a bad start in the same way that grabbing your newborn's umbilical cord and using them like a yo-yo is a bad start to parenthood., in that it's much less fun than you'd think it would be. The ooz is at the bottom of the screen and must be protected from the ghosts that fall down from the top of the screen. I think they're supposed to be Casper's uncles, Fatso, Stinky and Stretch, but their sprites are so ill-defined that they could easily be the results of someone filling their nose with cottage cheese and sneezing at the screen. If the ghosts touch the ooz, the ooz is damaged, and if there's too much damage the game is over. So, how does Casper stop the ghosts? By shooting them. You move a crosshair around and shoot the ghosts, thus making a mockery of the "friendly" part of Casper's name. It's hard to imagine a friendly ghost taking control of some ectoplasmic anti-aircraft cannon, but that must be what's happening here.

How does it play? Like a giant sack of arseholes. For starters, it's so visually boring that playing it for too long will cause the kind of hallucinations you get in a sensory deprivation tank, and that makes it hard to shoot the ghosts. Another thing that makes it hard to shoot the ghosts is the collision detection, which is astonishingly bad considering "is crosshair over target y/n" is all it has to figure out - but eighty percent of your shots will pass through the ghosts as if they were, well, ghosts. Eventually I figured out you can increase the odds of landing a hit by aiming somewhere around the ghost's "head," but even that isn't consistent. Oh, and you can't move the crosshair while you're firing and the ghosts move quite fast so if you fire and miss then you might as well give up, because that particular ghost has bested you and your ooz will suffer for it.

Having managed to drag myself through this miserable minigame, an experience which reminded me that the English language is sorely lacking in words that mean both "super boring" and "gratingly unpleasant," Casper was rewarded with some points and some ooz. This screen also says mentions that Casper has seven lives, which seems like a cruel thing to say to a dead person.

I'm trying to think of a way to describe the second minigame without mentioning Lode Runner, but I can't because it's just Lode Runner. The aim is to grab enough vials of ooz (the collectible you can see in the corners of the level) to open the exit while avoiding the other ghosts. See the crumbly-looking sections of floor? If you stand on those and press A, Casper uses his magic wand to disintegrate that section of floor. The non-friendly ghosts then all into these holes and are temporarily stunned and did I mention that this is Lode Runner? A lobotomised, low-effort Lode Runner, but still. Most of the stage is spent waiting around for the ghosts to fall into the holes so you can move past, which doesn't exactly make for a thrilling gameplay experience. The boredom I can just about stand - I'd just been thoroughly prepared by the previous minigame, after all - but my bigger problem is this: Casper has to use ladders to move up and down, and the rough sections of floor slow him down, despite being a flying, intangible glob of friendliness. How the hell is he even climbing that ladder? He doesn't have any feet! If you're going to make a game about a ghost, yeah, maybe make some kind of effort to have it be ghost-related? That'd be nice.

If you touch a ghost you lose a life, which results in this scene where one of Casper's uncles literally kicks him out of the house. If you ignore the fact that the sprites look like absolutely nothing at all, this is easily my favourite part of the game and I purposefully lost lives on more than one occasion just to see Casper getting punted into the night like a drunk at closing time.

The next game finally clinches it: the thing that killed Casper was boredom. A ghost (shocking, I know) drops books from the top of the screen with agonising slowness, and Casper must help the books into the helpfully-labelled book return slot. How can he do this?

By transforming into a paddle / trampoline and bouncing the books across the other screen in a shallow rip-off of the old Game & Watch title Fire. However dull you think that sounds, don't forget that this all plays out at a pace most glaciers would find aggravatingly lethargic. Oh, and the collision detection is shit in this game, too, with books frequently passing through the edge of the Casper-paddle. The only other twist is that sometimes collectable bottles of ooz appear but you can only grab them when you're in non-paddle form. If the game wasn't slower than molasses wearing cast-iron socks this might have made for a more engaging experience as you tried to dash between the books and the ooz. I'm not saying it would have been good, but I'd happily take "marginally less awful" at this point.

The final minigame of the four seems designed to remind me of all the shelves I've ever put up. Thanks for that, Casper. At first, I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing here, and all I could do was cycle through a variety of indecipherable sprites, but then I hit the select button.

Oh, I see, so I'm supposed to be setting up an elaborate Heath Robinson machine to... hang on, Kat? Was that supposed to be Christina Ricci?

Of the four colours available to you - a palette that includes black, I hasten to add - you went with white to depict Kat's hair. Good job, team. There's something incredibly depressing about this image, too, a certain dismal air that makes it hard to look at. I think it's her expression. I just cannot imagine what emotion would cause someone's face to look like that, besides the cold embrace of death.

I eventually got everything set up, no thanks to the in-game graphics. I mean, the game tried to tell me that's an egg-laying chicken when it is quite clearly a duck, and I never would have figured out what the "egg-cracker" was without being told - it looks like an "extreme '90s" version of one of those drinking birds. I got there in the end, though. Attach a rope to the chicken, pull the rope to startle it into laying an egg, the egg rolls down the ramps, gets opened by the egg opener and gracefully slides onto Kat's plate.

"Haahaa, I like egg, egg is nice food."

Once you've cleared the four games, Casper floats up some stairs and enters another room... where the same four games await, proving that Casper is trapped in some kind of purgatorial limbo and he's trying to drag us in with him.

There aren't any changes to the gameplay, either. The Lode Runner knock-off has an ever-so-slightly different layout, and the book-bouncing and shooting games are the same only you have to play them for longer before you're granted the mercy of the results screen.

At least the contraption-building game is a little different - this time you have to wake Casper up. I thought it'd be as simple as dropping the bowling ball onto his dumb, marshmallowy face - I would feel no remorse in doing this to someone who sleeps in a bed with their own name carved on their headboard, complete with trademark symbol. Your obsession with your personal brand has run amok, Casper! Sadly, just using the bowling ball doesn't work. I forget exactly what the correct set-up was, but looking at this screenshot it seems that a tiny chef's hat and a butterfly-catching net somehow combine to launch a rocket from atop a random collection of pixels. The rocket flies up, nudges the bowling ball, the ball rolls down the ramp and knocks the bucket of water on Casper's face. I still think my "bowling ball meets face" plan was better. It has brevity on its side, that's for damn sure.

Guess what happens when you've finished the minigames for a second time? If you said anything other than "you do them all a third time" then I'm envious of your hopeful, optimistic nature. Yes, you have to play them again, except now they're even longer. I'll spare you from having to see them again, instead using this time to tell you that the description of this item as an "ordinary nail" is making me suspicious that it's actually not ordinary at all.

Finally, something different is happening! Casper pushes Kat down a slope while ghosts try to fly into them, and you've got to avoid the obstacles by laboriously dragging the chair left or right. The ghosts are no threat at all and I think every one of them can be avoided by saying as far to the left of the screen as possible. The real danger comes from the rotating... things. You can just about make one out on the right of the above screenshot, it's the thing that looks like a bunch of squares with a broom attached to the end. They cover a huge portion of the screen as they travel, and if you're not in the right position when they appear then you've got almost no chance of avoiding them. At first this didn't seem to be a problem, and getting hit by them appeared to have no negative consequences. Then I noticed I lost a life every time they hit me, but the game didn't think this information was important enough to bother sharing with the player aside from having the life counter silently decrease.

Ah yes, the Lazuras Machine, a device capable of bringing the dead back to life. It's named, of course, after the biblical figure Lazuras, who was resurrected by Juses.

The graphics have finally achieved a high enough level of fidelity to confirm that Casper's uncles Stinky, Stretch and Fatso are present in the game. Their faces being part of the mechanism for controlling the Lazarus Machine goes without explanation, however. Surely it just needs a big lever that flips between "dead" and "not dead," right? Anyway, this is a simple memory game, where the ghost heads are activated in a certain order, which you must remember and replicate.

But I don't want to get ooz for Casper, he whined. I want Casper to go away.

In a desperate final attempt at padding, Casper makes you go through one more "Ooz Runner" before the game ends, making me wonder what I did wrong to deserve such punishment. It's not any different than the other Ooz Runner stages, either - it's all just standing around until the ghosts move into the right places, and playing it provides the same heady rush as waiting for a bus that's already ten minutes late.

Oh thank god, I made it to the end. It's difficult to tell, but the final scene shows Casper and Kat dancing while a choir sings behind them. I know it looks like Kat is trying to strangle Casper, but don't be silly. That's clearly not what's supposed to be happening. I mean, he's already dead. What you need is an exorcism, friend.

That's Casper, then, but there was nothing friendly about making me suffer through this. It's not just a bad game, it's multiple bad games, all lazily cobbled together from boring gameplay, wonky hit detection and graphics that are sometimes so bad that they hinder your ability to play the bloody game. It's all so incredibly dull, that's the thing. You could forgive a lack of quality to some extent if the game was even the slightest bit interesting, but everything included here had been done before and much, much better. The strange thing is, despite the gameplay being just as bad as Rugrats: Totally Angelica and both games being cynical licensed cash-ins, I don't hate Casper nearly as much as Totally Angelica. I'm not sure why that is, apart from the obvious explanation that Totally Angelica takes longer to play through. Casper doesn't have that faint whiff of sexism to it, either, and as bad as the graphics are at least they're not in the retina-searing colours of Rugrats. I suspect the real answer is that Casper is simply so tedious it's reduced my capacity to feel emotions, including hate. I might have to play God Hand for a while before the next article, so I can learn to love again.

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