Fun fact - this was the second ever Game Boy game I owned. I mentioned the story behind my first Game Boy game here, and I would get both Pokémon Yellow and Pokémon Sapphire for my birthday subsequent to this, but this was a little surprise my mother got me, since the whole family liked The Muppets and it must've caught her eye. Thanks, Mom. =)

I of course mean this as no slight against my mother when I admit that this game really doesn't hold up. I don't think that's much of a surprise once you learn the game's high concept - a minigame compilation with practically no narrative thrust, where each minigame is only a little more involved than your average Game & Watch game (only without the mechanical complexity, if that makes any sense).

The game's so short, I can run through each minigame here and now:

- Kermit's Banjo Bayou Serenade: Switch lanes, avoid Miss Piggy, use the spin attack if you have it. Weirdly the most fiddly of these minigames, since Kermit has a bigger hitbox than you'd think and Miss Piggy is an insta-fail. Decent musical loop though.
- The Sweedish Chef Cooking Hour: Yes, that's how it's spelled in-game. Whack Rizzo and the other Rat, dodge Camilla's eggs. At some point you get a second frying pan, and the game plays itself for a bit.
- Muppet Labs: Fling away junk, don't fling away potions. An extremely forgiving game, despite how easy it is to get stunned by steam; I've gotten five stars even without getting the meter all the way in the green.
- Gonzo's Stunt Race: Run through targets and avoid obstacles. Weirdly the only one of these that breaks the framing device of these being part of the Muppet Show, since there's no way this Excitebike-esque stunt track could exist on the stage. Maybe the best minigame, though?
- Jurassic Pork: A... boss fight??? Karate chop projectiles, avoid mirrors and attacks that will hit Kermit. Decent, but kind of a weird choice for a Miss Piggy-centric game.
- Electric Mayhem Band: A pretty limp call-and-response rhythm game. You know the drill, hit the buttons when they come up in the song. For some reason, even though Medium and Hard difficulty are up-tempo, the interstitial music between rounds stays at the same tempo on all songs. I guess that's part of the difficulty?

These six minigames represent the full campaigns, but Medium and Hard clears respectively unlock these two bonus minigames:

-Pigs in Space: Horizontal space scroller. Avoid meteorites for as long as you can. PIIIIIIGS IIIIIIIN SPAAAAAAACE
-Fozzie: Helmet. Avoid falling objects for as long as you can. Why is Fozzie relegated to a bonus round?

Paradoxically, while there isn't much to this game at all, I sort of find that there's a decent amount of care to this game as a licensed property. Statler and Waldorf riff on every minigame, with different comments based on how many stars you get and whether you actually finish it. The Newsman is there on the Pause Screen, being abused by falling objects related to the minigame. "Gonzo's Stunt Race" notwithstanding, every minigame is presented as a skit would be presented on the Muppet Show, complete with the Muppets' lower halves being off-screen. The rasterized CGI models are... a respectable job at communicating how the Muppets themselves animate (though something about Kermit's fingers feels off). There's generally that sense of mayhem that the Muppets are known for, perhaps a bit restrained, but not too far off...

Don't expect much game at all, but it's a decent enough time waster. Really nothing in the way of staying power, though. Not hard to see why this game uses passwords instead of a proper save system.

Another licensed title I cleared from my backlist early on during COVID. This was perhaps the best of the little trio I played, over Simba's Mighty Adventure and Great Valley Racing Adventure. Which is to say, it was "generic" instead of "bad".

SpongeBob being in a PlayStation title is one of those little things that always throws me. I have to remind myself that SpongeBob is older than I remember, and that the PS1 lasted waaaaaaay longer than I remember. Still, this is another one of those early SpongeBob tie-ins where you can tell Stephen Hillenberg had no involvement. The final Iron Dogfish boss is maybe less embarrassing than Operation Krabby Patty's "Sea Ants", but still pretty out of place. Also, what exactly are we to make of the presence of a Cannery in Bikini Bottom?

The game itself is fine. Inoffensive 2D platformer, some collectables to collect, a semi-requisite hip drop, etc etc etc. I have to admit that very little of the game stuck with me, but there's at least still plenty of stuff going on, with most of the original voice actors to help sell it (weird that they could swing Ernest Borgnine as Mermaid Man, but not Clancy Brown as Mr. Krabs). Disposable for me, perhaps, but you could do worse.

It's trying really hard to be the Genesis game on Game Boy. In some respects that's commendable, but it's obvious that the Game Boy wasn't geared to handle it. The only way the team found to translate that Disney animation onto handheld was to sloooowwwww the game speed down to accommodate all the extra frames. Levels are fairly minimally updated, so a lot of sequences that benefitted from the extra screen real estate are now needlessly tricky and leap-of-faith-y. This of course means levels that were already dickish like "The Escape" are just even meaner this time around. I do think a better call would've been to take more of the approach Dark Techologies did later on with The Lion King, where the general ideas of these levels are preserved but updates are made to account for the reduced screen space, etc. Not good, but it's at least over and done with quickly enough with the Disney Classics Collection port and its special features.

A cheap cash grab with surprisingly high quality (animation wise, not compression) cutscenes. Arguably better advertisements for M&Ms than the crap they put on TV nowadays.

Shell Shocked is not good. The Minis are mentally sick in the head and it felt like I was too by the midpoint - I haven't finished this game. I can't do it. I won't do it. The physics are janky. The graphics are stilted and ugly to look at. The hit detection is dreadful; getting slightly too close to something without actually touching it kills you immediately. The collision accuracy is about on par with Stevie Wonder using a Tommy Gun.

It fails at being a mediocre Crash clone and doesn't even succeed at making me want M&Ms. No wonder the developers just made shovelware until they closed.

I really need to stop spending money on FOMO early access survival games just because my friends are playing them. The potential this game has is cool but the odds it gets realized ever are low, and currently its just a sequence of a bunch of ideas stolen from other games tacked onto gameplay loops intentionally designed to waste your time.

Survival games have so much potential as a genre but they just always come out as these really grindy, skinnerbox games that just infuriate me to play. I've only ever liked 2 survival games, Subnautica and Minecraft, and its because those games actually make exploring the world exciting and rewarding, and also aren't intentionally designed to waste your time by forcing you to grind levels to craft things and making you watch bars go down constantly.