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When I saw the words Animaniacs spread across a DS package on my desk, I was both excited and confused. Excited because I remember watching the cartoon when I was just a kid, but confused because the license is long since dead, and I kept asking myself ‘how good could this possibly be?’ After a few hours with the title, the answer is clear: not very.

The games premise is simple, and very much in the same spirit as the cartoon that spawned it: The Animaniacs have cost Warner Bros. a zillion dollars in damage from their numerous havoc-sprees. In order to avoid being locked up in the Warner tower forever, the Animaniacs are tasked with making 3 movies in a short period of time to help make back the money they’ve cost the studio. It all starts out well and fine, but…

Animaniacs suffers from numerous gameplay faults that make this a game easy to dismiss; the biggest and foremost being that this is a direct port of a GBA game of the same name. No additions have been made to the GBA version to take advantage of the DS’ unique hardware, save hitting the touch screen to pause the game. Joy.

Another problem is a duet, really: camera and controls. The entire game takes place in an isometric view, which puts everything on an angle for you. With such a camera comes the paired isometric control scheme, which makes it unnecessarily difficult to traverse the games terrain, line up your jumps, or aim to shoot apples at your enemies. There is, however, an alternative control method to the isometric scheme, though it doesn’t make things too much easier.

Lastly, repetition becomes extremely prevalent in the game. Each and every of the games 15 levels have nearly identical goals to complete. Get this key, open this door, flip this switch, etc; all very overdone platforming objectives that have been done many times by many other (better) games.

Throughout the game, you take control of five of the different main characters from the cartoon: Yacko, Wacko, Dot, Pinky and The Brain. Each of the games characters offer a unique ability that makes using them necessary at different intervals during the game. For example, Brain can use complex switches that the other characters can’t, but he doesn’t have the ability to jump. It’s this interchangeable character system that’s suppose to add some variance to the games stale formula, but it just doesn’t help.

To make matters worse, should you choose to partake in the game long enough to beat a level, you’ll find that the game uses the ancient and long since forgotten save method known as passwords. For reasons beyond the comprehension of this journalist, Warthog games decided to implement a password saving system instead of the now-standard cart save method. Not only does this serve as an annoyance, it’s just another reason you won’t want to play for very long.

From a visual standpoint, Animaniacs is the definition of sub-par. Nothing is terribly ugly looking, but both the characters and environments are far from impressive, especially given the eye candy the DS has received in the way of Mario 64, Metroid Prime, and even the quasi-3D Spider-Man 2. The game takes place entirely in 2D, which would be fine, had the game boasted sharp sprites and bold environments, but the game is actually pretty low res.

The games audio doesn’t fare much better, offering up short repeated midi songs as the soundtrack, and overused ‘cha-ching’ sound effects when you collect different items. The soundtrack especially gets annoying fast, since there’s not much variance in songs, and the loop that makes up the songs are very short.

I can’t say much good about Animaniacs, which disappoints me, because a revival of the Animaniacs sounded so welcome on paper. What we got in reality was a repetitive and pretty boring rendition of the wackiness portrayed in the cartoon so many years ago. If a developer really wanted, and they put the time into it, a great Animaniacs game could be made for the DS. A shame this is all we have for now.