The PC version of this game is a very clunky but strangely compelling genre-melding sandbox game with an ending cutscene that I'm 99% sure is just an extended reference to the final scene of Evangelion. How Jimmy Neutron of all things has a game like this is deeply confusing to me, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't enjoy the nostalgia that comes with it as a result.
It's full of classic licensed kids' game weirdness. Jimmy is a genius human child with a head so large his center of mass must be roughly nose-high, so naturally he moves around with third-person tank controls. The world is filled with multiple categories of collectables drawn from the series' early iconography, all ultimately worthless to varying degrees. The main voice cast reprises their roles, but they sound... off. It's like they were asked to have really slow, flat delivery so it could be heavily compressed for some technical reason and still be intelligible afterward. Most of the characters are at least a teensy bit unnerving to look at. You get the picture.
What really makes this game so unique is the gadgets. Some of Jimmy's inventions are in the game as unlockable items that work as both abilities that open up new areas and weird physics toys/alternative movement systems. A baseball shooter that lets you hit things from a distance, equally useful for puzzle solving and screwing around with the carnival games at the amusement park. A giant bubble that makes you bounce around like you're chaining long jumps in Mario 64 and protects you from environmental hazards on the ground while you're doing it. A grappling hook that attaches to most surfaces and can be detached and re-attached multiple times in mid-air. Every single one is fun to screw around with in its own way. And since all these gadgets can be used pretty much whenever and wherever you want once you've found them, the experience is weirdly open ended for what is essentially just a sequence of people telling you to to from point A to point B and back over and over again.
Like, take a look at the power plant level toward the end of the game. All you need to do in this level is hit a bunch of switches so you can hit the switches next to them, then go into the room at the top and pick up the plutonium. But the overengineered mechanics of this game give you so much freedom to goof off within that structure that the blandness of your objectives isn't as much of a weakness as it could be.
I'm not going to lie, there are parts of this game that are truly miserable. The mandatory rocket segments immediately come to mind, as does most of the time you spend in the alien ships. But the game is super short and has some neat ideas, so I think it's worth a look if you like trying odd stuff and can manage to get it running on modern hardware.
It's full of classic licensed kids' game weirdness. Jimmy is a genius human child with a head so large his center of mass must be roughly nose-high, so naturally he moves around with third-person tank controls. The world is filled with multiple categories of collectables drawn from the series' early iconography, all ultimately worthless to varying degrees. The main voice cast reprises their roles, but they sound... off. It's like they were asked to have really slow, flat delivery so it could be heavily compressed for some technical reason and still be intelligible afterward. Most of the characters are at least a teensy bit unnerving to look at. You get the picture.
What really makes this game so unique is the gadgets. Some of Jimmy's inventions are in the game as unlockable items that work as both abilities that open up new areas and weird physics toys/alternative movement systems. A baseball shooter that lets you hit things from a distance, equally useful for puzzle solving and screwing around with the carnival games at the amusement park. A giant bubble that makes you bounce around like you're chaining long jumps in Mario 64 and protects you from environmental hazards on the ground while you're doing it. A grappling hook that attaches to most surfaces and can be detached and re-attached multiple times in mid-air. Every single one is fun to screw around with in its own way. And since all these gadgets can be used pretty much whenever and wherever you want once you've found them, the experience is weirdly open ended for what is essentially just a sequence of people telling you to to from point A to point B and back over and over again.
Like, take a look at the power plant level toward the end of the game. All you need to do in this level is hit a bunch of switches so you can hit the switches next to them, then go into the room at the top and pick up the plutonium. But the overengineered mechanics of this game give you so much freedom to goof off within that structure that the blandness of your objectives isn't as much of a weakness as it could be.
I'm not going to lie, there are parts of this game that are truly miserable. The mandatory rocket segments immediately come to mind, as does most of the time you spend in the alien ships. But the game is super short and has some neat ideas, so I think it's worth a look if you like trying odd stuff and can manage to get it running on modern hardware.