Frankly kinda shit to play and has no real meat on its bones. The main takeaway all throughout for me was how ugly it is. Not only how ugly it is, but how ugly it is for a late PS1 title. Take this screenshot from the ending for example, where every character looks like they're taken from something else. Or the ground here or the acorns here. It's genuinely so bizarre to me.
I suppose it's a good thing I kept asking myself "Why does it look like that? How did it turn out like this?", because it turns out literally every asset from this game's development is sitting around on the Internet Archive and TCRF and such. Finds on the dev discs include things such as a plentiful amount of SNES and Genesis ROMs, a folder titled "New SBSP like we care", a list of suggestions titled "SpongeBob Shit List", and (somewhat infamously) three hand-drawn pornographic sketches of the characters for some reason. All in all it seems to point towards the dev team being very bored or dissatisfied with the project, probably wanting it done as soon as possible. I guess I now have the answer to my question.
So as it turns out, the history behind this subpar platformer is far more intriguing than the actual contents of the game. It kinda makes me wish we got more in depth stuff like this for some better games, honestly. Knowing every little thing going on behind some of my favorite games would be very interesting.
SuperSponge itself is not worth the time, though. If you really want some sort of 2D SpongeBob platformer, Legend of the Lost Spatula is surprisingly a safer bet. Definitely a flawed game as well, but has a decent amount of charm to it and a pretty catchy soundtrack. Even then, everyone says if you have Dolphin running then you might as well just play Battle for Bikini Bottom instead. Maybe I'll do that.
I suppose it's a good thing I kept asking myself "Why does it look like that? How did it turn out like this?", because it turns out literally every asset from this game's development is sitting around on the Internet Archive and TCRF and such. Finds on the dev discs include things such as a plentiful amount of SNES and Genesis ROMs, a folder titled "New SBSP like we care", a list of suggestions titled "SpongeBob Shit List", and (somewhat infamously) three hand-drawn pornographic sketches of the characters for some reason. All in all it seems to point towards the dev team being very bored or dissatisfied with the project, probably wanting it done as soon as possible. I guess I now have the answer to my question.
So as it turns out, the history behind this subpar platformer is far more intriguing than the actual contents of the game. It kinda makes me wish we got more in depth stuff like this for some better games, honestly. Knowing every little thing going on behind some of my favorite games would be very interesting.
SuperSponge itself is not worth the time, though. If you really want some sort of 2D SpongeBob platformer, Legend of the Lost Spatula is surprisingly a safer bet. Definitely a flawed game as well, but has a decent amount of charm to it and a pretty catchy soundtrack. Even then, everyone says if you have Dolphin running then you might as well just play Battle for Bikini Bottom instead. Maybe I'll do that.