Wow! Revisiting childhood games sure is fun, but I expected a Spongebob tie-in to be way better than this? Immensely bad call on my part to make the worst one in this franchise be the first I return to.

So many assets here clash visually. Spongebob's house looks empty and each piece of furniture feels like it doesn't belong, which should've been my first signal to dip. Leaving Spongebob's house was really no better, every single place out there looked awful and going into the Krusty Krab was bizarre. I felt like I was in a Creepypasta-version of the world where SOMETHING just doesn't feel right about it even though LOGICALLY it is MOSTLY correct.

The visuals improve a lot after the first area. Downtown is kinda cute looking, the construction site is admittedly detailed well enough, and the high rise apartments had a lot things going on at once that made it feel more lively. I also give this game a point for at least TRYING to cultivate unique objectives. Having to deliver crabby patties to different apartments is a fine idea, even if the execution is utter shit.

What really brings Revenge of the Flying Dutchman down is the unbearable platforming and how awful Spongebob feels to control. It's a fucking nightmare, I hating moving through this game, not only are you omega slow but all of your jumps feel off and having to switch between the costumes to do different objectives is exhausting. There's nothing dynamic to do and all the jumps are painfully easy. Even if it was meant to be an "explore" type of game, that'd feel more justified if the environments were worth exploring.

The collectibles are also pretty unexciting. You get like a really shitty puzzle mini-game if you collect all the letters in a level and it's not fun. There's nothing fun to do here, the hour I spent felt like an eternity. Hoping the other Spongebob games are better!

true liminal gaming - LSD Simulator eat your heart out

It’s the little things: the way the music completely cuts off into eerie silence when you open up the pause menu before restarting completely when you return to the game, the game's surprisingly lonely, empty atmosphere, how the game constantly freezes and jump-cuts to the black loading screen every 10 seconds, how the character models distort and bend in increasingly uncanny, horrifying ways whenever they speak, and how the game’s objectives are never properly explained, instead relying on a literal checklist to even comprehend what you have to do to.

Now don’t get me wrong, this game sucks ass - BUT there is legitimate fun to be had in experiencing how all of the pieces of this shit-pile coalesce into such a fever dream of a “finished” product. Guilty pleasure gaming at its finest

SpongeBob's first foray into 3D platforming territory is still up there as one of his worst endeavours to date.

It just feels so much like a fever dreamy game, though the bad kind which ends with you accidentally wetting the bed.

It just isn't pleasant to come back to nowadays and the dreadful levels, non existent plot that might as well not be there, rubbish writing (why is Larry acting like such a dick to SpongeBob for no reason for a start?), piss ugly graphics and incredibly irritating music (all locked to one costume so be prepared to have the stupid Jellyfishing music locked into your brain) certainly make sure of that.

Thank god for the next game Battle for Bikini Bottom because otherwise Spongey boy would have been locked in the confinements of "Typical Rushed Out Licensed Video Game Hell".

One of the most bizarre games I ever played as a kid. The game has such a weird, eerie and lonely vibe to it, a sharp contrast to the animated show it's based on. The game has an ear-bleeding overworld theme that plays almost non-stop and it just adds to that weird aura. Bikini Bottom feels extremely abandoned, the only NPCs you meet are hostile for seemingly no reason, it almost feels like a post-apocalypse. I'd actually recommend playing this at least once, it's so weird and uncanny that it has its own charm despite not actually being a good game per say.

From what I played of it, this game was okay. A decent 3D platformer that had promise but needed polish. I was excited about playing this game at first and was actually having fun until I was hardlocked out of the game and literally unable to progress without starting the game over from scratch.

Much like Garfield for the PlayStation 2, a game I reviewed earlier, there's no autosave feature, something that almost every PS2 game should have.
This issue hardlocked me out of the game, unable to progress from a reasonable starting point.

One level's objective in order to get a letter tile you need to collect all of the treasure chests needed to complete the game, is to put rocks onto a pressure plate.
The pressure plate is a circle surrounded by 4 metal squares, each metal square having a rock next to it.

Naturally I'd assumed the squares with the rocks next to them were the plates and put a rock on each one.
Nothing.
It wasn't until I read a guide online that I learned the pressure plate was actually the circle in the middle, and moved all of the rocks off the plates and into the circles.
Once a rock goes on the pressure plate you can't take it off, and one of the rocks on the plates had somehow clipped through the plate that had risen up (you have to put the rocks down to make the plates rise up in order to climb up and get a tile) rendering it unusable.
I couldn't take off the rocks from the middle as they were too heavy to throw out and as you add rocks you get further into the hole where the pressure plate was.
The rock I needed to progress was unobtainable as it was trapped inside an object I couldn't move. The only way I'd be able to get it was to restart the game from the last save, which for me would've been the beginning because I'm used to autosaves.

At least with Garfield for the PlayStation 2 I could actually have fun replaying it from the start again. This is just sad.
So is the tale of BigSky Interactive.

Outside of the really glaring issues like the requirements for catching jellyfish, the game-breaking glitch the ps2 version shipped with, and the lack of music variety, this wasn't really that bad. In terms of being a light Banjo-Kazooie style collect-a-thon, it does everything just fine, not amazingly, but enough to keep me playing. The thing is, the weirdly floaty jump this game has activates my 3D platformer brain so much more than the generic double jump that Battle for Bikini Bottom has. It's the kind of jump that makes it fun just to see what you can and can't reach with it, it opens up the levels in this game in a way that Battle for Bikini Bottom doesn't. The level design in this game is fucking bizarre, it's a mix of trying to make locations accurate to the show but also randomly sticking in other shit. The cutscenes and animation are also strange to behold, clearly made before Nickelodeon fully went all in on Spongebob and had standards for what could be made for it. "Purgatorial" is a word people have passed around about this game, and I can't explain exactly how it applies but it simply does. That's good to me, though, I had a good time exploring this mess of a game, it's the exact 3D platformer I love turning my brain off to while also constantly serving me something new to gawk at. The way Spongebob fucking spins wildly when you collect all the letters, Larry the Lobster being surrounded by dark clouds and giant foreboding jellyfish just to get away from Spongebob, the Flying Dutchman ramming a boat into a pier, killing hundreds, while unfitting music plays, the CLOWNS, it's all a joy to marvel at.

Well I can definitely say that it has aged like rotten milk.

As much I like Spongebob Squarepants growing up, this was such a terrible and janky attempt to bring the franchise to life for gaming.

Just play Battle Of The Bikini Bottom or the Movie Game instead and don't bother with this one.

Thank god I played Battle for Bikini Bottom before I played this game, or else Spongebob/licensed games would've disillusioned me. As a kid, I played anything that came my way because I didn't have any money to buy my games, and I was impressionable and wide-eyed as any other kid. Spongebob was the prime cartoon character of my generation, and the yellow sponge getting his own console video game was exciting back in the early 2000s. As big as Spongebob was back then, you'd think they'd put some effort into his first major video game outing. Man, I would've been disappointed if I bought this game the year it came out.

The game begins with Spongebob waking up from a bad dream. He then plays fetch with Gary as Gary picks up a treasure chest instead of the stick that Spongebob threw. There are already two significant issues present here in this cutscene. For one, Spongebob's facial animation clips out of his head when he plays fetch with Gary. Even for 2002 PS2 graphics, it looks hilariously lazy. Another problem is the pacing of the story in this game. Have you ever gotten tired while writing a paper that you try to get to the end of your points while the flow and ebb of your essay are compromised because you want to get it done? That's what the story of this game feels like, and I'm convinced the writers in this game didn't give a shit. The story just kind of...happens. How does Gary find the Flying Dutchman's treasure chest right outside? Why is The Flying Dutchman angry that Spongebob released him and will ruin his life by taking all of his friends away? Who knows, and who cares because the writers didn't. Spongebob spends the game rescuing his friends, finding puzzles pieces doing different objectives in different levels to find Flying Dutchman-related items to get access to his ship eventually. I'm okay with item-collecting in games like Banjo Kazooie, but I'm convinced the developers of this game went with this type of platformer to pad out the game because they didn't give a shit.

Speaking of not giving a shit, there are only four music tracks throughout the game; each way coincides with Spongebob's costumes you unlock throughout the game. Each of these tracks fit the world of Spongebob just fine, but they get tiring REALLY fast. The levels in this game are "familiar" places from the TV show, and I use the word familiar loosely. Downtown Bikini Bottom is a dark, dingy alleyway filled with tough greaser fish. Remember Downtown Bikini Bottom being like this in the show? Because I don't. Sandy's Treedome is fine, albeit a bit too large, probably to appropriately fit the scale of the rest of the levels, but the problem is that Spongebob doesn't even have his water helmet on, and he doesn't get dehydrated. Come on, guys, it's from the first episode of the fucking show!

Goo Lagoon looks like a desert and has the least thrilling boat chase in gaming history. At least that part is funny. Jellyfish Fields is the reason why I quit this game. The level looks better than all familiar areas from the show, but its level design is worse. . The point when I gave up was the Jellyfish challenge because this objective signifies that this game is so lazy to the point where it's broken. You have to catch 100 jellyfish to get the reef blower, and you naturally assume that this objective is within the confines of the level, but there are only about 75-80 jellyfish in Jellyfish Fields. The game doesn't tell you that the total considers jellyfish you can catch in the areas outside of Jellyfish Fields, but how the fuck are you supposed to figure that out as a kid? It also doesn't help that the only way to progress in this game is to 100% every level, so I said fuck it and gave up.

So yeah, I never finished this game when I was a kid, but neither did the developers in my defense. I imagine them putting the least amount of effort possible into the game, hoping that it would sell like hotcakes because Spongebob was such a hot item. Battle for Bikini Bottom was a licensed game made with a love for platformers and the Spongebob source it was built on, but this game falls under the standard category of "kids are dumb, so they'll buy anything." breed of licensed game.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com/