Game #1024: Shrek Super Slam (Gameboy Advance)

  Surely it's gotta be as surprisingly good as the console game, right?..... right?

 Shrek Super Slam on home consoles was SO good, so much better than it had ANY right to be. In my mind, I remembered a fighting game with chibi-sprites  featuring Shrek, so I thought it might be this one. It wasn't. Also, since the console game was so good I expected something at least half as good. It isn't.

 From an arena-fighter to the blandest 2-D platform fighter, think Smash Bros., you could find, that's Super Slam on the Gameboy Advance. The controls are terrible, UP is used to jump and the jumping arc is so stiff. You mash A to attack, and you can use Up or Down to change the attack, B and Down+B are your other attacks. But there's like no knockback on attacks, so it feels so weird. Like, you can mash A while the enemy mashes A and you both hit each other. It feels so cheap and floaty. The objective of the game is to land attacks to fill your Slam gauge and then your next attack is a Slam and you score a point.

 There are 10 characters and three modes: Story Mode, which features and intro and an ending for six of the characters, and I kid you not, Prince Charming's story mode ends with Shrek with magic wand up his butt. I am not making this up. It has you fighting through various forgettable battles. There's Challenge that features more battles sans context and then Melee in which you and up to 3 other players or CPUs can duke it out. That's it.

 Man, I gotta comment on the graphics, they are so ugly and the animations are so choppy that this feels like a bootleg game. This officially licensed game feels like one of those NES Chinese bootlegs, it's THAT bad.

 I've absolutely nothing good to say about this travesty. It's not fun in any way, shape or form, not even in a so-bad-it's-good kind of way. And the fact that the original game was so good only adds salt to the injury.

 1.0