Rocket Power: Gettin' Air

"Rocket Power? Yeah...right."

Introduction to: Rocket Power: Gettin' Air

This is a game that I played soon after it came out, when Gameboy Color games were so cool. Even for its time, this game was a disappointment. At the time I was a fan of Nickelodeon cartoons and I thought this would be a fun little extreme sports game that I could goof around with. Turns out that the fun for this game didn't last long.

This game was released by THQ in 2001. It is rated E for everyone and gets a difficulty rating of 1/10, 10 being hardest; 1 being pathetically easy. It is based on the once-popular Nickelodeon cartoon, Rocket Power.

Game play 3/10

So when you turn on the game, right off you start to skate around (2D of course) Ocean Shores and stop to complete certain goals. These include doing tricks down a snowy hill and capturing floating points while sometimes dodging snowballs being thrown at you; surfing and doing certain tricks for points, roller-skating, and skateboarding. Everything that you see in the Rocket Power show is here. You also unlock new characters and harder goals.

Sounds good so far until you consider how some things are impossible to do. Several tricks don't work. There is supposed to be ways to turn to several different tracks while snowboarding (according to the manual), but I've tried everything, and it never happens. I'm not going to say that it is impossible, but I played for a while and couldn't figure it out so I gave up. If it is possible it must be something that you have to time perfectly, and it seems way too hard for simply turning your snowboard. Sometimes you can see the path that you should be able to go on, but I could never get to it.

Even though there is weird problems like this and tricks not working, the game is still ridiculously easy. On my first play-through (keep in mind that at the time I'm a 10 year old that doesn't know the controls or anything) I beat the game in about one hour. Start to finish. Learning the controls and things as I went. I'm a good gamer, but even a bad gamer would find this game too short and easy. They could have added much more to this game, like road trips in the story or something so that you could have more goals to complete. In the entire game there is only about twenty goals, and about 7 of them are repeated only with a few more obstacles to make it a little more challenging. So overall it is just way too short of a game.

Basically you can just repeat the easy tricks over and over throughout the level, and you pretty much never fall so you can beat the level without doing anything challenging at all. This game doesn't really have much of a story either, it's basically just that you control one of the gang (Otto, Reggie, Twister, Sam, Tito) and you just do different extreme sports, kind of like in the show, but nothing else happens.

Graphics 6/10

The graphics in this game are just decent. The game is just a flat 2 dimensional surface with a repeating background and a moving character. I think that the style that they chose to make the game in made it look worse, for example in games like Tetris, they don't try to do anything challenging, they just do a simple design and it looks fine. In this game, it seems they really tried to make it look good, but failed because of the Gameboy Color's limits. I think that if they had put a little more effort into making a more unique background and worried less about how realistic things looked, I would have enjoyed it more.

Sound 3/10

Same repetitive music gets annoying and very little sound effects. Players don't actually talk or anything, only in word bubbles. Could have been much more interesting.

Replay Value 2/10

I played through a few times, but like I said, the game is so short that playing it over and over gets boring fast. There is only one mode to play in as well, and nothing to customize, so you are just playing the story mode again and again. Had the game had some kind of two player skating games (Horse, Trick attack, etc.), there would have been more to do.

Final Recommendation

I wouldn't suggest that you bother to buy or rent this game. It is too short, and just isn't all that much fun. If you are a big Rocket Power fan or something, you should probably try one of the newer Rocket Power games on Gameboy Advance or something, because this one isn't really worth it.

Final Score: 3/10

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 09/13/05, Updated 07/24/06