The Collection Chamber: ANIMANIACS: A GIGANTIC ADVENTURE

A game of titanic proportions!

Crown YAKKO, WAKKO, and DOT as kings and queen of the world in ANIMANIACS: A Gigantic Adventure. The Warner Brothers and Sister are trying to rescure lost movie classics, and they're starting their search on an old luxury liner set at the studio. But watch out for the CEO of Warner Bros., THADDEUS J. PLOTZ! He hid the films and will do anything to keep them hidden. You'll help the ANIMANIACS through the bridge, first class dining rooms and onto the iceberg. And if they avoid the villainous crew members, they'll get a chance to explore other sets on the Warner Bros. backlot.

Play as YAKKO, WAKKO and DOT and experience their zaniness first hand through threee difficulty levels that will challenge everyone from the novice to the side-scrolling expert.

Features:
Single- or turn-based two-person play
Internet play allows you to play against your friends on MSN Gaming Zone
Find power-ups that will help you find the canisters, posters and awards faster and increase the game's excitement
Keyboard, joystick and gamepad compatible so you can play any way you want
Bonus and Hidden Rooms extend the fun and give you a chance to rack up the points

~ from the back of the box

The last of the Animaniacs retail releases to cover on the Collection Chamber, Gigantic Adventure has a lot to live up to. By being a 2D platformer, it instantly draws comparisons to Konami's 16-bit efforts, and they're not exactly favourable. Released in 1999, the budget kids game from SouthPeak interactive seems very unfinished. The levels seems sparse and unfocussed, the animations flat and amateurish and worst of all, the platforming a little janky and uneventful. But that's not say fans of the show would be completely let down. What the game does have is humour.

Yakko, Wakko and Dot storm onto the set of a Titanic-like disaster movie searching for their old animated shorts and posters from the 30s and 40s. For some reason, the Warner Bros CEO thought he could hide the reels and roll-ups in the annals of their latest blockbuster. It doesn't go well.

There is some invention in the levels. Background images and paintings adorned on walls details some nice gags. Each stage conjures up enough variety to warrant the single-movie send-up culminating in a slippery jungle gym that makes up an iceberg. There are even a few bosses thrown around, but that's where the originality ends. The large backgrounds force you to wind across platforms collecting food, flowers and hearts, but your main targets are movie related. Oscar-like awards, unspooling movie posters and canisters of film give you the most points in your quest to one-hundred percent. That's all they give you, removing incentives for all but the most compulsive of gamers. The better objects to hunt for are the TVs. These are randomly scattered in hard to reach places and will unlock a clip from the show. Compared to the cuts-cenes created for the game, these are a vast improvement in quality.

The Warner siblings alternate between each of the large, multi-screen levels and they play a fair bit differently too. Starting off as Wakko, you can use a mallet to whack mice and men. Dot throws anvils in an annoyingly hard-to-judge arch while Yakko copies his brother's swing except with a baseball bat. All three can activate switches by pressing 'up' but the feature is completely under-used. It would be nice if this could also trigger animations from the background or be the basis of a more thoughtful puzzles, but alas; the connected object is almost always a door a few steps away. It's basic gameplay aimed for novice players yet to reach double-digits.

What does irk me is the seeming lack of music. The options menu has a slider for CD Audio, and the music tracks are mentioned in the on-disk readme file but for the life of me I can't find a copy with music. I even have the physical CD re-released in Europe under UbiSoft's FOCUS Essential budget label. Still no music tracks. My suspicion is that the original big-box release has them but my search has only come up with massively expensive eBay listings based in America.

Even so, I don't believe this music would make much of a difference. Animaniacs: A Gigantic Adventure is forgettable fare - especially when you consider the classics that came out on the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive. A curio for young kids and old fans only.