This game is yet another 3D platformer. and it is one that I actually do like. Say what you will about Butch Hartman, milkshake duck him all you want, call him a cunt, whatever you fancy, but the show was good (at least early on before it went downhill) and so was this game. Though the characters are 3D-modeled, the way the game does it actually looks pretty decent and as far as Cosmo and Wanda go you don't get anything resembling the monstrosities of that hell spawn of a live action film. The environments have a certain look about them that fits the art style of the show really well. The music is decent and on par for what you would hear in the show. Look into it if you want. You may like it, you may not. I am not always the best judge when it comes to what can actually pass as good. I like GTA III more than the other 3D Universe GTA games for Christ's sake. Play it for yourselves and form your own opinions. You aren't sheep.

It’s hard to believe how early in FOP’s run it really hit its stride. The season 0 “Oh Yeah Cartoons” era felt like it was running out of ideas fast, but the first real seasons of the show really found it’s footing and developed some just jaw-droppingly clever writing. Even compared to other shows, the show’s quality really seemed to last longer than I expected too. The first movie “Abra-Catastrophe” feels like it should’ve been made in 2006 or 2007, not right at the show’s peak in 2003. Knowing what we know about Butch Hartman, I’m sure that quality primarily relied on who he hired more than anything else. But the show cultivated some excellent characters, charming world-building, and just incredible humor.

So I hope I can convey how highly I think of this game when I say that the show could’ve easily stolen some story ideas from it to add to the show proper.

Shadow Showdown was a frequent rental from Blockbuster for a number of years. I don’t remember when I actually did get a permanent copy, but it was the kind of game I wore down through many sleepless nights. I was kind of worried about reappraising it. I remembered annoying pinball games, hours of frustrating puzzles, and nerve-wracking bosses. But I also remembered exciting gameplay, beautiful level design, and a sense of whimsical adventure.

As it turns out, as an adult, it’s 1000% of the whimsy and charm and basically 0% of the things that I struggled with as a kid.

I already talked about Breakin Da Rules, but I can lay out it’s problems again. Each of its levels tend to revolve around completing three different tasks, with long roundabout paths towards those tasks. Doing three tasks is a time honored video game tradition, I’m not dissing on the formula. But the design is enforced to be completely linear. Fight the villains in this order, time travel through history in this order, stay on rails in these tight corridors.

Shadow Showdown offers much bigger levels, with large areas to explore. It’s still a platformer, but there’s a greater freedom to interact and engage with those levels. Several levels let you approach your plot mandated three tasks in your own preferred order. Because the game is more open and spacious, the collectibles are also just more fun to search for. You can return to old areas with new powers you’ve gained and unlock secrets that you were barred from before. It’s not a revolutionary invention, but it’s the kind of design choice that makes the game feel more rewarding to play.

The mechanics are also vastly improved. Like BDR, each Shadow Showdown level features three wishes Timmy can make, which gives him different moves in the level. In BDR, those moves were always limited to one specific area of a level. New gameplay never existed for longer than a few minutes. Sometimes all it did was light up a dark room. Shadow Showdown adds a “Wish Menu,” that lets you switch between any of the three powers you can get in a level on the fly. This lets the devs create much more interesting platforming and puzzle mechanics that help you balance all these powers. Switching between your super jump and your super flight powers in the comic book level. Following invisible footprints with your magic magnifying glass and using your gravity flipping power to puzzle your way through that path in the haunted mansion level. There’s so much more to interact with compared to BDR’s dull focus on platforming over puzzle design and wider gameplay.

It also helps that the game has actual combat. BDR let you “stun” the occasional enemy, but they could kill you quick and force you back to the last save point. SS has basically no real consequence for death and attacking enemies is quick and easy. This also means the game throws more enemies at you, but when losing all your health just punts you to an invisible checkpoint that’s like, ten feet away? It just makes those enemies much easier to manage. Timmy also just feels so much more fluid and enjoyable to play. The double jump feels easy instead of rigid, the new run button speeds up the downtime in these large levels, and the range of motion just feels great.

The writing also just feels sharp in a way that the best of classic FOP does. The characters haven’t been exaggerated too far yet. Cosmo can make smart insights or quips about things that annoy him, Wanda can enjoy herself on the adventures, and the jokes generally land. On top of that, the new characters are a really great idea to add to the setting of Fairy World. The idea of King Oberon and Titania as these stuffy royalists who want to revive the monarchy so they can be rich again is just such a great gimmick I can’t believe it never happened in the show proper. Maybe it would’ve given Fairy World too much of a real “history” that it’s always tried to avoid. But these are important questions. I demand they outline the exact details of how Fairy World shifted from a monarchy to a military dictatorship under Jorgen. Explain, damn you.

Modding this game also demonstrated just a greater elegance to its file design than its predecessor. BDR required me to personally edit about ten different “Timmy” files so that I could get the right kind of eyelashes on his face I wanted. Since this involves switching Wanda and Timmy’s eyes, this ran into a lot of difficulty. The game would crash if a Timmy model was switched out, since this meant Wanda’s eyes were getting deleted and recreated. I basically ended up leaving them both with the same eye setting for a while to make things easier. Shadow Showdown doesn’t have ten different Timmy and Wanda models that require personal edits. There’s just the “Timmy_face” and “Wanda_face” file, which they could apply to any individual models deeper in the coding that they wanted to utilize. The texture models were easier to dump and edit at my leisure. No crashing, no problems, I could play the whole game with my coding changes without any graphical issues. The studio clearly had a handle on the system and tools they had and learned how to improve upon their output as a result.

It feels weird that most of this review is just comparing two games to each other, but I think playing a bad game and a good game back to back helps highlight what does and doesn’t work in game design. Everything I’ve listed here is really obvious stuff. It’s stuff we’re probably trained to take as a given. If the game is doing a good job with these features, we never think or notice that the game could be playing worse. And theres still the typical licensed games issues. Bad camera, some glitches here and there. But this game kind of retroactively makes me happy that I played Breakin Da Rules, because it helped me recognize and appreciate this game more.

Licensed games are strange beasts. They’re designed to be quickly churned out and abandoned for a quick profit. But gaming industry’s current focus on AAA titles over some B or C games makes it hard not to feel like we’ve lost something. You need variety. There’s a charm to this kind of experience that you can’t get in many other games. Now, licensed games are all gacha pay to win scams to steal money from children. If corporations are gonna trick kids into buying cheap products that remind them of that cartoon they like, I’d rather see them put actual work into it. Sometimes, you get something special out of it.