The Muppets: On With The Show!

"Oh Boy."

Right now, Muppets are trying to make a comeback. They were one shunned ever since that Muppet Babies show, but hey, you cannot get away from those felt frogs, pigs, and Gonzo. This game, though, really wants me to hate those cute Muppets. TDK was able to make a game that is just a plain disaster in every sense, except for, strangely, some of the best graphics I have seen on the Game Boy Advance. Literally, this is one of the worst games out for any system this generation.

The main story of Muppets: On with the Show is that the Muppets are having a nice little show, but just about everything seems to be going wrong. Penguins and Seals show up in Kermit’s Banjo Act, Beaker pours Garbage in to Bunsen’s latest experiment, and even a large pre-historic pig shows up to sweep Kermit off his non-seeable feet.

Overall, the game feels like eight short mini-games, stretched out in length so you would need to play them for much longer than needed. Depending on the difficulty you have unlocked, the games last for some painful one or two minutes. Though it may seem that you have a pretty good variety, but all but one of them involve dodging one thing or another, may it be large rocks, portraits of Beaker, or large ten ton weights. The only one different is Animal’s skit, where you have a refreshing rhythm game. Also, after you beat a game, those two old guys Statler & Waldorf give you a nice heckling. The game takes at most a half an hour to complete every level, and then you need to remember a password to play the unlockable skits of Fozzie Bear and Pigs in Space. The game is a catastrophe, because of just how simple it is. This game was made for very young children, and really, you should not be playing this unless you really have affection for Muppets.

Strange enough, the graphics in the game are superb. Though a little grainy, the full motion video looks great, even though there are only a few parts that last for over a second. However, a little small point is that every background is stale and lifeless; and the amount of color used makes it seem that TDK only had primary colors to work with. However, the game does look certainly different than almost anything being pumped out on the GBA; it seems to look like a mixture of clay-mation and really, really bad animation. It possibly would of looked better if they had actually used clay-mation, a graphic technique that is rarely used.

There is no music or even nice Frank Oz blips worth mentioning here. The Muppet voices have all sound difference from one another, but each of them only says one thing, and I stress variety. Not one of the little Muppet Show ditties really stands out above one another. The more and more you will listen to the stuff; it somehow becomes random buzzes and bloops mixed together.

I highly doubt that anyone would even want to play this game in the first place, let alone want to play it again and again and again. The more I played the game myself, it made me contemplate the idea of dark matter. But then, that is just poor little me. One of the best things about the game is after every game, you get Statler and Waldorf making jokes that seem exactly what they (or the puppeteers) would of said in their situation.

If you just happen to be a very big Muppet fan, and collect everything that has a picture of everyone’s favorite Rainbow Connection singing Frog, then of course, you would buy the game, even if you do not have a GBA. Really, everyone should try and stay from this game.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 02/27/04