Game #956: The Grinch

  Who needs Christmas anyways? Halloween is where it's at!

 While I couldn't care less about Jim Carrey's The Grinch flick, because by the time of its release I had already outgrown his comedy, for one reason or another I wound up with The Grinch on PC, and I loved it. Hearing it had a PS1 port I had to get it on my collection.

 It's a sort of collectathon kind of platforming game. It's made up of four worlds and each world has a different set of missions, such as defacing 10 posters, hitting 10 shorts with thimbles or replacing a cake's candles with fireworks. You don't need to finish every goal to unlock the next world, but in the long run you'll probably be finishing most objectives since you'll need to unlock more gadgets to clear certain objectives, and in order to unlock gadgets you need blueprints and blueprints are usually hidden next to objectives.

 You'll never be able to finish a world the first time you set your foot on it, which I think is fine... but the final stage requires you to backtrack to all four worlds to finish a new objective. This new objective is usually in plain sight, so it's not like it's too much of a hassle, but still... On the other hand, I didn't really finish the game because I couldn't find every Submarine blueprint, and the final stage requires the submarine. It's not that I hated the game, au contraire, I felt like I already got my money's worth and I didn't need to aimlessly backtrack through every world until I found this miserable blueprint.

 The Grinch has an interesting assortment of moves. From the outset you get a butt pound and a bad breath attack, as well as the ability to switch to and play as Max, his dog. Collecting blue prints unlocks the bad egg launcher, the slimer, a rocket-assisted jump, a climbing octo-pack and, lastly, the infamous submarine I couldn't finish. There are very few hints after the first world, but using my head a bit eventually led me to the solution of most puzzles. Unluckily, it couldn't lead me to the missing blueprint.

 On the other hand, sometimes figuring out the solution can be a bit boring, and some of the levels can have some clunky or poorly thought-out segments. For instance, world 3, the dump, you constantly need to hit switches to turn off the electric gates, and then jump up a tube using the rocket jump, and do it under a time limit because while you be going back and forth through these gates, you can't turn them off completely. From this very same stage, there are some poles you need to spin on in order to connect tubes, but if you happen to spin on the wrong direction... nothing will happen, and you won't realize why you can interact with these poles. Vaulting over poles was poorly implemented altogether.

 All this years later I still think that The Grinch is a good platforming game, which is surprising considering it's just a licensed game Konami probably threw together in a few months. I wouldn't say it's accurate Dr. Seuss' story nor to the movie, since I haven't watched the latter, but it's a fun game nonetheless.

 7.0