AAAHH!!! Real Monsters

"As bad as the television show."

I’ve always despised Aaahh! Real Monsters. The Nickelodeon show was one that I thought was extremely stupid, and I actually ended up watching it one day when I had absolutely NOTHING to do. (I can’t believe I watched Nickelodeon...) And when I had seen my friend playing this game on his Super Nintendo, I played it, and didn’t find it any better than the television show, as it stuck with the fact that any game based on a movie or television show is usually below the average game.

The story behind it all is disgusting. You wake up on day as one of the monsters, and you go to school for mid terms. It is a school that teaches monsters how to scare people (WTF?), and your purpose is to go plow through many boring levels while scaring people, and your goal is to find a sneaker at the end of every level. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that this story is ridiculous, and it did not make the game any better.

There are a few elements of Aaahh! Real Monsters that make it a little bit more interesting. This game is just another platformer, which has a few additions to it to make it better than just “walk-and-stomp-baddies-to-beat-the-level”. For one thing, you don’t control one character, but three. However, you cannot control them all at once, and instead you can switch to one while the other two follow the first, each having a slightly different ability. For instance, one of them could climb on top of the other two, and then jump from the two-person tower for added height in its jump, thus allowing you to reach certain things such as one-ups. However, there weren’t as many situations that forced you to use these abilities as there should be, and if there was, it would make the game much more fun with a nice strategy twist. Instead, there were only a few cases that were rare, and therefore it was almost pointless to use three different characters.

Throughout the level, you can grab some books that allow you to make a big scary face with your monster and literally scare all your enemies to death. This makes dealing with enemies a bit boring, but it’s also kind of fortunate, because some enemies are very small and a pain to deal with. However, there are even more obstacles than enemies, and they tend to get on your nerves a lot. Each level is filled with useless obstacles such as poison leaking pipes and spikes that only make the game more frustrating.

Your only weapon, besides making the occasional scary face, are fish bones to throw. These weapons prove to be very lousy and useless with their small size and the character’s very bad accuracy. These bones often end up going above the target, which is extremely unfortunate because 90% of your enemies are ridiculously small and very dangerous. Also, your life heart seems to drain out very quickly, even when hit by a small nut thrown by a mini-monkey.

The controls weren’t so bad. They almost always responded quickly and allowed you to smoothly walk your way through the levels. The problem is the movement in the air, after you jump. It is extremely hard to control your monster in the air, as they seem to not respond and end up traveling half of the way that you would like. It is quite annoying in areas in which you are required to jump on several moving platforms. Other than this flaw, the rest of the control seems perfectly fine.

To get to some good points, the graphics are pretty nice. They are extremely cartoonish for obvious reasons, and they seem to be almost identical to the cartoon show. However, they seem slightly blurry at certain points, which dulls the game down a bit. They have a nice amount of detail, and the environments look pretty sharp, but extremely dull due to the grayness, which were made that way because of the whole “scariness” theme. However, I felt that the graphics could have been a lot better, considering that this game was created in 1995. After all, games like Chrono Trigger were made in 1995, and although I am NOT expecting Chrono Trigger’s graphics, they are still easily topped by other games made during that year.

The music was just plain old annoying. They tried to make a somewhat creepy kind of song, and although it was kind of creepy at first, it just looped over and over until it got to a point when I could just scream. Also, it didn’t do a very good job of fitting in with the environment. For instance, the first level was in a really big garbage dump, and the music sounded like it would fit a whole lot better in a haunted house level, although there was no such thing in the game.

Aaahh! Real Monsters is interesting and fun to play at first, but it soon gets boring after a couple of levels. Also, a very large amount of fun is torn away because of the challenge of this game, as it is quite frustrating to try and hit an extremely small monkey with a fish rib that doesn’t go where you would like it to. If you like lots of challenge and have the patience to keep trying, then I commend you, and you may find it quite fun, because I didn’t.

Final Word
If you like the cartoon show known as Aaahh! Real Monsters, perhaps you will play this game and enjoy it immensely. However, just like the cartoon itself, I did not enjoy this game too much. It seems way too hard for its own good, and it’s mediocre compared to all the other platformers in existence. You can at least give it a try if you have a chance to for free, but otherwise, don’t go running down to FuncoLand for a used copy.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 08/17/01, Updated 08/17/01