by Staci Clark

Created on: June 05, 2008   Last Updated: June 08, 2008

Downloadable Game Review: Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutzo
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars

Mr. Smoozles Goes Nutzo is a newly released downloadable game from Juniper Games. The premise behind the game is the tried-and-true story of an alien invasion. Goragons, three-eyed purple slugs from another dimension, have invaded Earth and are threatening the very fabric of reality. Not only have they zapped Mr. Smoozles, the neighborhood brown cat, with their reality-altering ray guns, but they have also captured every other animal in the neighborhood.

You play the game as Ed, a blue cat who somehow managed to evade the Goragons. As Ed, your mission is simple: save your friends, save Mr. Smoozles, and then save the planet from ultimate destruction. Throughout your mission, you will encounter 50 characters in 60 different locations that will guide you on your way to Earth's salvation. You may download a a free, one-hour trial of the game from www.harryballs.com. However, after the trial exprires, you must pay $19.99 to continue playing it.

Game play on Mr. Smoozles is rather slow. After you click on the "Play Game" link, you are not taken directly to the game. Rather, you are taken to the game's credit page, which takes a full five minutes to load. Unlike other games, Mr. Smoozles does not allow you to hit the "Enter" button to bypass the credits. If you attempt to do so at this point, the game presents you with a black screen and the sinking feeling that your computer has just frozen up. After a few minutes of black-screen inactivity, the game finally loads, but you still can't play it. Instead, you must read several pages of a comic strip storyboard that tells the game's backstory. Finally, after you have familiarized yourself with the game's designer and soundtrack composer, the Goragons, and Ed's new mission, you get to play the game.

At this point, you'll realize that the graphics are as simple as that in the comic book storyboard. Mr. Smoozles is more reminiscent of an old-school Atari game or early 90's Nintendo than it is of today's 3D, graphic-intensive games. Even the game environment is old school. From the second level onward, Ed runs around in a pseudo-Pac-Man world, navigating mazes while he outruns his enemies and picks up objects that will aid him in his mission.

Mr. Smoozles, however, is far more frustrating than the arcade favorite. There is no big pellet in Ed's world that allows him to destroy Mr. Smoozles. As such, Ed must simply run from the gun-toting cat, a run that's

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>