Sabrina the Teenage Witch: A Twitch in Time

"Eww! I guess I have to put up with, like, dorks PROGRAMMING the game I'm in but dorks DESIGNING it is TOTALLY too much. S-orry!'"

It appears I'm becoming an old crank, out of touch with teen pop culture, at a much younger age than I'd originally hoped. How nice it is when you unconsciously accomplish a goal ahead of your target date! Sabrina: The Teenage Witch is one of those TV shows that affirmed my suspicions in this matter. It had collaborators; I confuse the female lead, Melissa Joan Hart, with Jennifer Love Hewitt and Sarah Michelle Gellar on separate occasions. In fact I have confused Sabrina herself with Buffy(played by Ms. Gellar,) a star in another show I will never bother to watch. At least I haven't confused any of them with Tiffani-Amber Thiessen who has dropped her middle name, as I am sure to forget in the future, or thought of the show as 'what kids these days are watching.'

I'm not particularly worried about this, but I do lose faith in my bargain rack scraping skills after a couple of games of this caliber. I'm under no illusion that I might be getting In Tune With Teens playing such a game. In fact I expect a certain amount of amusement along the lines James Thurber once had when reading, from a Western novel translated to French, Indians hailing pioneers with 'Alors, je veux voir vos cartes d'identite!' The laughs don't come as hard but the gaffes are so obvious that you never look back and feel you must have missed something. There is enough for some hearty belly laughs, and there are mini-challenges and a decent structure to solving the game. And when I slipped into a serious mood briefly, there were plenty of frustrating mistakes to analyze and quibble to myself over. There are two before you open the game: Sabrina on the front cover and on the back have clearly different hair lengths, and there's no text ad for fast-growth tonic. Then the screenshots don't seem to appear in the actual game.

But it's more a forced stroll than a game, and it might scream it was being lazy--if it had the energy, which I doubt. All the worlds you visit feel dead. The only effort seems to be in showing a lack of emotion. It's evident in the 'hook' scene where Sabrina's annoying cat, Salem, has tried to steal his personnel file from the Witches' Council and disrupted the space-time continuum in the process. There's a standard Do-We-Have-To-Yes-Well-I-Do shtick(the instruction book is useful here, as you can catch advance warning of the painful dialog and skip it) before Sabrina goes off to the Cosmic Cog(black background,) where she must restore the twelve Zodiac signs(one per scene, three scenes per time zone) to their rightful places on it to straighten things out so Chaos doesn't take over. There she meets Diva, an effeminate clothes salesman who charges 100 gems for different suits of clothes and dishes out tired sales and fashion aphorisms. The worlds themselves have many areas where Sabrina is unmolested, and in fact enemies take time to notice her. Bosses are even worse, sending out emissaries to fight her and generally acting laid back and stereotypically Californian even in their death throes. The final fight with Chaos is ponderous and totally random to my knowledge, and all this would ruin whatever snappy dialog that could have gotten close to the level of humor the writers had hoped for.

Let's follow her through level one--but not too close behind. The PSX version of Sabrina isn't pretty enough to be worth stalking. Want skin? Stick with Ms. Croft. See, Sabrina has this nasty attack with her hand; if she shoots a sparkle beam anywhere near her opponent, it curves into him for a hit. It's better than mace! Like any pretty blonde, Sabrina also gets a couple of other breaks. First of all, a shot can curve through the side walls of a gorge without vaporizing it. Environmentally conscious magic! Yet even if you don't have a bend to hide behind so you can attack the enemy, you should be able to take advantage of some misguided chivalry; there's a large zone where you can hit an enemy with your fire, but it won't shoot back. What chivalry! Monsters just aren't so polite in modern days. The only problem is that it does not work against patrolling animals, which turn out more dangerous than enemies with firepower. So you have a dichotomy: annoying monsters you can't shoot and absurd ones you can. Their teamwork is nonexistent. I in fact found it tougher to save a game than to defeat the first wave of monsters as the default menu option was always the leastsensible.

After picking up a few gems she will encounter her very first Demon Flower. It's got pink petals and a weird pollen attack, but you should win slugging it out with alternate attacks. Then there's an intimidating dragon maw(the only one in the game) followed by the first save point and, later, dinosaurs that look like enormous porcupine skeletons. At various points in the game you'll see a blue zipper. Get close to it, and Salem will appear with a wise-crack. Then, if you get killed, you won't be kicked back to the start, but only here. Since you can usually find the green zipper leading you into the next area, it's not really worth the horrid puns you must suffer until the Wild West trifecta--basically pre-history with faster, more damaging monsters. Salem comes off more as that annoying guy at work who congratulates people with 'Boy! That was such an accomplishment you'll probably never repeat it again!' But you'll need him, as by the end monster damage even overtakes the fuzzy areas that turn out to be deep pits that give Sabrina a fatal fall--a popular theme in rushed console games to prevent them from seeming totally trivial.

Later on you'll find a one-up and, if you search out the only nontrivial alternate paths in the game, three eggs, which together give an extra life. There's also a series of jumps where you have to remember to hold the button down. You can go back and do it again if you get low on lives, especially with the 'surprises' you find in chess(healing up every one,) but I found I kept gaining them until the Wild West scene. As for collecting all the gems in a level, the count mysteriously disappears when you work your way to the next era and get the clothes. So Sabrina's motivation may be to find all the gems(we're never given the full count) and keep evil in a box that much longer and delay playing in an assuredly awful sequel, but you, if you develop the fiscal prudence not to make such a purchase again, don't have any.

Subsequent levels have the same paradigm: three eggs, one zodiac sign, three save zippers, some monsters, and a fairly linear path to the exit zipper. Occasionally you'll have a vortex in the side of the wall or cliff, and you'll need the right clothes to enter. There's more treasure in here. In each time zone you also have a piece of property belonging to another age and a receptacle for the piece lost in your current age, which allows access to a platform with loot. The Egyptian scene's main crime is the boss, who greets you to cheers of ''Rah! Rah!''(guess his name) and the Japanese scene is probably the best one in the game, featuring enemies of varying girth. Yet the game isn't a complete straight shot. You'll have to revisit areas with portals you're not dressed correctly for and, if you are well below average in game skill or find your miserly attitude isn't just about money, you can pick off extra lives by repeating a level.

Through all this I haven't mentioned spells. That's because they're utterly useless. Thankfully bad guys are easy enough to clear anyway, and it's more a case of just having to shoot a monster instead. Her comments when you stock up on spells mark her as a soccer mom whose main magical powers seem to be keeping herself looking eighteen, and the spells all simply cause one enemy to disappear. You might as well tap the fire button twice. Still I guess this can be spun as 'it's not your magic ability, but what you have INSIDE of you, that counts in the very end.' Sort of like t's not the fancy graphics, but the ideas for a complex plot, that tend to hook gamers.

It's a good thing your fire is so smart, because Sabrina herself gets stubborn if you try to tilt the camera to catch her bad side. The game seems to have a revulsion to placing your camera behind a wall, yet it has the usual polygonal problem with particularly curvy walls in front bending oddly or flat out disappearing. In one critical juncture you must move to the right as the camera shifts and perfectly time a jump she can see much better than you. Yet more consistently disappointing are the outfits: an orange Xena:Warrior Princess style outfit is too drastic a make-up for all her other dull outfits which sadly featured pants. I mean, she was dressed anachronistically most of the time, and apart from her initial outfit it just didn't work. And your most animated obstacle turns out to be a mine cart that rattles around a blind bed--animals glide quickly or bounce rhythmically.

So what is Sabrina? It doesn't seem like an outright sacrilege--licensed games can't be sacrilege if they're not based on something good in the first place. I don't think the TV show is that. It isn't completely horrendous as you do have many items to pick up and even use some to get new ones. But given that so many of its features(spells) just don't matter, and there's a whole lot of hanging around, I think the best word to describe it is inert.

On the bright side, it got me in the mood for The Grinch on my next visit to the bargain rack. Unless I get distracted by some horrendous spin-off of Charmed in the hope that there's a subgame with Shannen Doherty cat-fighting the current cast members in one foot of Jell-O, err, I mean the concept of magic is more useful, and the game is more substantial, where different characters get different attributes.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 10/25/02, Updated 10/25/02