The Grinch

"The Missions Are Fun But Can't Make Up For The Game's Many Problems"

Dr. Seuss is a man who is well known for his popular children's books that are also enjoyed by many adults. He has produced many quality books that range from the likes of The Cat in the Hat, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and Do You Like Green Eggs and Ham?. Although, one of the best known characters that Dr. Seuss ever created is The Grinch.

The Grinch has gone from book to TV movie and has even made it to the big screen in the Christmas season of 2001. The Grinch is widely recognized and is practically a symbol of Christmas, as no Christmas season would be complete without the viewing of a Grinch special. Therefore, with such a popular character, Konami and Universal Interactive Studios, the makers of the video game, must have wondered, ''How can we lose?'' Well, The Grinch sure is a great idea for a video game, but I hope his reputation isn't damaged too badly by this average, average game.

Everyone knows the story of The Grinch. The Grinch sits on top of Mount Crumpit and schemes every year about how he can ruin Christmas for the citizens of Whoville. The Grinch takes the same plot developed by Dr. Seuss and places it in the game. This time around, though, the developers have introduced a new concept to the story. In the game, the Grinch has many blueprints that he uses to ruin the Whovillians' Christmas, but while he's scheming, he knocks over some boxes that contain the blueprints and they are blown off the mountain by a gust of wind. The story leaves you with your mission of collecting your blueprints and ruining Christmas. The story really isn't too bad. It takes the classic tale from the old Dr. Seuss' version and adds a new element to it. However, the only story you get in the game is from the first few minutes in the introduction to it. I found myself wanting more of the story from this new concept of The Grinch told, but it never seemed to happen.

The gameplay from this story leaves me torn. It has a range of ''Man, this is awesome'' to ''This is the most tedious thing I've ever had to suffer through.'' The Grinch starts off by introducing you to the four worlds that you'll encounter. The worlds consist of Whoville, Who Forest, Who Dump, and Who Lake. I suppose some originality on these names was out of the question. Anyway, you start off by being allowed to access only the first world, Whoville. Upon entering it, you receive a quick introduction to it from the narrator and receive your missions for that level. Some of the missions are taken right out of the movie version, such as, painting funny drawings on the mayor's posters.

Other types of missions have you going around flattening snowmen, throwing rotten eggs into local houses, and advancing the Christmas Clock, which tells how many days left until Christmas. While you're doing all these missions, you're collecting other things that help you on your quest: tools to help you complete some missions, stone hearts to give you more health, and the blueprints which are required to beat some missions.

While you are performing all of these missions, you must avoid the dangers that local residents pose and other random things trying to kill you. Some of these vicious brutalitists include a Whovillian child who gets the strange obsession to chase you and hug you to death every time you come into view, little punks that shoot snowballs at you, and even the Whoville police force that shoot and freeze you to the spot. The Grinch's health, obviously, depletes from these interactions with the friendly neighbors, and the only way to do heal The Grinch is to complete missions, kill yourself to start with full health back at the beginning of the level, or destroy presents.

Destroying presents is, by far, the worst aspect of the gameplay. The presents are randomly scattered around the worlds that you terrorize and some are nearly impossible to find. The amount that you are supposed to collect to completely beat the game is ridiculously high, a total of 3000, and requires hours of tedious searching, re-searching, and re-searching. This is a cheap way to boost the replay value of the game and the guy who came up with this at Konami should be brutally trampled by a herd of rabid jackals. The only rewards you get from all this hard work besides beating the game to ''100%'' are a few mini games.

The mini games in The Grinch are no fun and you get no reward for completing them. The only thing you get from these mini games is being put in an insane asylum for going crazy when you realize the only thing you get from your hard work are boring, absolutely no fun, mini games. By the way, I'm been typing this review in my padded room for the past few hours. The game developers should have nixed the whole present feature altogether or at least give the players some half decent rewards that make the work worth it. Apparently, that wasn't the plan of our ''friends'' at Konami and Universal.

A more positive aspect of the game are the blueprints. I really enjoyed seeing the creation of The Grinch's diagrams and we really enjoyed putting them to good use. After collecting the blueprint you piece them together forming the blueprint before it was separated and actually make that particular machine. The machines are great fun to use and never got boring with things like the rotten egg shooter, the slime launcher, and the grinch copter. This is definitely a great point in the game and everyone will enjoy using the gadgets.

Well, the presents certainly are the least fun part of the game, but, again, the missions are enjoyable and save this game from being a terrible disaster. I never got tired of doing nearly all of the missions and looked forward to the next ones. You are even shown a quick movie of what your mission completion did to the Whovillians and it is usually a good laugh at seeing the reactions of them. I did enjoy playing through most of The Grinch, but wish that the game could have been a little bit longer to satisfy me. The whole thing can be beaten in about six or so hours, if you don't complete every mission or collect all the presents in the game.

The controls are, for the most part, done very well. The Grinch responds well to all the commands and every thing is easy to access and get used to. However, there is one problem with the controlling of The Grinch in the game, swinging. The Grinch has the ability to grab onto various things like poles sticking out of the wall or tree branches. When you grab onto a branch you go enter a battle between you and the controller. You, almost always, have to swing to other branches or poles to access the area you're after, but the distance is impossible to judge from where to swing on the pole. The grinch will let go of the pole at three different places when trying to flip off and you never can tell where the place is that you need to flip off. This leads to guessing of which position is best causing fall after fall and when you finally get to the next one, you have to start the sequence over causing more falls after falls. Not to mention, The Grinch doesn't respond very well to your commands of ''let go'' and leads to even more falling whether you knew the correct position or not. The controls could have definitely used some fine-tuning, but apart from the swinging, you'll have no trouble with them.

The graphics of this game are a mix of good and bad. The Grinch's body, head, arms, and legs, are 3-D, but his hands and hair are flat 2-D. This is very bad looking and the same thing happens in the short videos after mission completions with the Whovillians. The developers should have taken the extra time and made everything 3-D instead of this display that consumers were given. The textures range greatly. The buildings you see are great looking, as well as various grounds, like the one in the Dump are very nice looking. However, some textures are an embarrassment to the developers, like the ground around a pipe that is spouting smoke is supposed to represent an area of filth and smog. Instead, the area is a jagged circle of a bland shade of gray color that is inside a jagged black circle. There are other textures in the game that are just like this, but this is the one that always comes to mind. The graphics certainly are appealing in certain ways, but will leaving you disgusted in others.

The audio in this game is, just like everything else, a combination of stunning and pathetic. The narrator's voice is very well done and is probably the highlight of all the audio. Unfortunately, he is heard rarely, usually at the beginning of worlds and after certain missions. The Grinch also has a decent voice when he talks in the mission completion movies and has humorous dialogue taking some of the sayings right out of the 2001 movie. I'm not complaining about that, though, it was very well done. Then there's the bad side. The Grinch has exactly the same sound clip when he comes back to life from drowning or something similar and has one way of saying ''Ouch!'' with a few, very minor, variances. This is very monotonous and will make the player crave some different sound clips for the same actions. The ones you are presented with are well done, but they do get old, and pretty quickly at that.

The Grinch is a legendary character created from a masterful author. Unfortunately, this game didn't give The Grinch the justice he deserved and falls well short of ever becoming a ''classic'' or even a Christmas classic. This is a very good concept, combining well loved a character and story into a video game, but was never taken to a level of greatness. The only thing that makes this game a worthwhile purchase are the missions you get to play. I recommend Grinch fans and adventure fans give it a look, but don't expect to be put in a stupor by its greatness.

The only thing The Grinch will be stealing this Christmas is your money if you spend more than $15 on this thing.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/18/02, Updated 02/27/03