Critically acclaimed forgotten darling good.

Don't think I have a lot to add to the conversation that others haven't sad better. A masterpiece of rpg storytelling, delighting itself in cliches while experimenting and tinkering and expanding the genre to new heights. Stunning from beginning to end. There were some chapters where I got kind of burned out and ready to move on, but the whole game is so packed with charm and care, and the game leaps from story to story so fast that you can't help but adore it nearly every step of the way. The impact its add on the industry is immeasurable.

Imperial China's is perhaps the game's most ambitious in its mechanics and scope with its characters, but Wild West and Far Future also stood out to me in just how much it was experimenting with and how it instantly seems to nail these aspects without any trouble. Just stunning.

Subtracting half a star just because it succumbs to the multiplayer shooter syndrome of "we're gonna add some maps and make a few tweaks and call it a new release." I'm not really sure what star rating to give something that is essentially just "more of the same" when "the same" is something I enjoy very much. One of those things that makes me regret giving out star ratings to games (something I don't do with movies on my letterboxd) as if the quality of this type of thing can be measured out numerically. The campaign is better this time 'round mainly because you only have to do a few of the "in-between" levels before getting to the boss fights, which is the only real reason to play the campaign for me, but it is still like, hours of time spent to fight 5 neat bosses. Dope credits sequence though. I ultimately am not rating it too low because this is still my favorite multiplayer shooter franchise. Literally it launched the day after the Queen died and everyone made fun of her in the lobby. If that's not evidence that this is the only good multiplayer shooter community, idk what is.

It probably says a lot about me that this is the remake/remaster game that I can actually pinpoint issues of and say a lot about on a replay two years later.

The differences between the original and this one are fascinating. The visuals are undeniably stunning. Levels that looked garish are these amazing spectacles. Dark mazes on the ps2/gamecube version are bright and colorful. The sky boxes are incredible. Beautiful green moons in Flying Dutchman's Graveyard, colorful bright skies in Spongebob's Dream and other levels that looked so bland... its an amazing game for visuals!

But the choices they made in remaking it are strange. The original game operating on a physics engine. There are puzzles and gameplay gimmicks that revolve entirely those physics. That gameplay can be... finnicky and frustrating, but it worked.

The remake abandons that physics engine entirely. On a certain level this is an advantage. Your attacks naturally roam towards an enemy, making it harder to miss them if you misjudged a distance. The infamous Rube Goldberg puzzle is much less frustrating when your giant stone ball gravitates towards the right spots it needs to go. The game is designed to be easier. But it creates some jarring disconnects in gameplay too. I'm sliding down a ski mountain just as I leap off the final jump, Spongebob abruptly stops in the air and craters down to the earth. He exited a zone designed for speed and that speed suddenly needed to stop existing. The game didn't want those skiing physics anymore, so it vanished.

This also hurts Sandy's gameplay. Sandy's mechanics are incredible in the og Battle for Bikini Bottom. You get to swing around levels, lifting yourself high into the ski and float around to explore all the secret corners. Because that mechanic doesn't operate on physics anymore, that gameplay is hampered. Your freedom is restrained and directed onto the set paths the game wants you on for Sandy. Its frustrating, especially when there's so much detail in Sandy's animations

In a previous review, I think I described the game as both slower and faster. Bosses are sped up to keep players from getting bored, but it ruins a bit of the fun and drama of those sequences. The things that are slower are general improvements, things that make the game easier to engage with. The skiing sections are easier to control and manage without getting shoved off a cliff for not moving fast enough.

Despite all my criticisms, if someone was unfamiliar with this game... I'd probably rec this version still? The original is better, but this is so close and so much easier to acquire that I wouldn't direct anyone against it. And the announcement that the team is making a new Spongebob platformer is huge! This game is really magical and getting more of it is exactly what I wanted.

It’s hard to believe how early in FOP’s run it really hit its stride. The season 0 “Oh Yeah Cartoons” era felt like it was running out of ideas fast, but the first real seasons of the show really found it’s footing and developed some just jaw-droppingly clever writing. Even compared to other shows, the show’s quality really seemed to last longer than I expected too. The first movie “Abra-Catastrophe” feels like it should’ve been made in 2006 or 2007, not right at the show’s peak in 2003. Knowing what we know about Butch Hartman, I’m sure that quality primarily relied on who he hired more than anything else. But the show cultivated some excellent characters, charming world-building, and just incredible humor.

So I hope I can convey how highly I think of this game when I say that the show could’ve easily stolen some story ideas from it to add to the show proper.

Shadow Showdown was a frequent rental from Blockbuster for a number of years. I don’t remember when I actually did get a permanent copy, but it was the kind of game I wore down through many sleepless nights. I was kind of worried about reappraising it. I remembered annoying pinball games, hours of frustrating puzzles, and nerve-wracking bosses. But I also remembered exciting gameplay, beautiful level design, and a sense of whimsical adventure.

As it turns out, as an adult, it’s 1000% of the whimsy and charm and basically 0% of the things that I struggled with as a kid.

I already talked about Breakin Da Rules, but I can lay out it’s problems again. Each of its levels tend to revolve around completing three different tasks, with long roundabout paths towards those tasks. Doing three tasks is a time honored video game tradition, I’m not dissing on the formula. But the design is enforced to be completely linear. Fight the villains in this order, time travel through history in this order, stay on rails in these tight corridors.

Shadow Showdown offers much bigger levels, with large areas to explore. It’s still a platformer, but there’s a greater freedom to interact and engage with those levels. Several levels let you approach your plot mandated three tasks in your own preferred order. Because the game is more open and spacious, the collectibles are also just more fun to search for. You can return to old areas with new powers you’ve gained and unlock secrets that you were barred from before. It’s not a revolutionary invention, but it’s the kind of design choice that makes the game feel more rewarding to play.

The mechanics are also vastly improved. Like BDR, each Shadow Showdown level features three wishes Timmy can make, which gives him different moves in the level. In BDR, those moves were always limited to one specific area of a level. New gameplay never existed for longer than a few minutes. Sometimes all it did was light up a dark room. Shadow Showdown adds a “Wish Menu,” that lets you switch between any of the three powers you can get in a level on the fly. This lets the devs create much more interesting platforming and puzzle mechanics that help you balance all these powers. Switching between your super jump and your super flight powers in the comic book level. Following invisible footprints with your magic magnifying glass and using your gravity flipping power to puzzle your way through that path in the haunted mansion level. There’s so much more to interact with compared to BDR’s dull focus on platforming over puzzle design and wider gameplay.

It also helps that the game has actual combat. BDR let you “stun” the occasional enemy, but they could kill you quick and force you back to the last save point. SS has basically no real consequence for death and attacking enemies is quick and easy. This also means the game throws more enemies at you, but when losing all your health just punts you to an invisible checkpoint that’s like, ten feet away? It just makes those enemies much easier to manage. Timmy also just feels so much more fluid and enjoyable to play. The double jump feels easy instead of rigid, the new run button speeds up the downtime in these large levels, and the range of motion just feels great.

The writing also just feels sharp in a way that the best of classic FOP does. The characters haven’t been exaggerated too far yet. Cosmo can make smart insights or quips about things that annoy him, Wanda can enjoy herself on the adventures, and the jokes generally land. On top of that, the new characters are a really great idea to add to the setting of Fairy World. The idea of King Oberon and Titania as these stuffy royalists who want to revive the monarchy so they can be rich again is just such a great gimmick I can’t believe it never happened in the show proper. Maybe it would’ve given Fairy World too much of a real “history” that it’s always tried to avoid. But these are important questions. I demand they outline the exact details of how Fairy World shifted from a monarchy to a military dictatorship under Jorgen. Explain, damn you.

Modding this game also demonstrated just a greater elegance to its file design than its predecessor. BDR required me to personally edit about ten different “Timmy” files so that I could get the right kind of eyelashes on his face I wanted. Since this involves switching Wanda and Timmy’s eyes, this ran into a lot of difficulty. The game would crash if a Timmy model was switched out, since this meant Wanda’s eyes were getting deleted and recreated. I basically ended up leaving them both with the same eye setting for a while to make things easier. Shadow Showdown doesn’t have ten different Timmy and Wanda models that require personal edits. There’s just the “Timmy_face” and “Wanda_face” file, which they could apply to any individual models deeper in the coding that they wanted to utilize. The texture models were easier to dump and edit at my leisure. No crashing, no problems, I could play the whole game with my coding changes without any graphical issues. The studio clearly had a handle on the system and tools they had and learned how to improve upon their output as a result.

It feels weird that most of this review is just comparing two games to each other, but I think playing a bad game and a good game back to back helps highlight what does and doesn’t work in game design. Everything I’ve listed here is really obvious stuff. It’s stuff we’re probably trained to take as a given. If the game is doing a good job with these features, we never think or notice that the game could be playing worse. And theres still the typical licensed games issues. Bad camera, some glitches here and there. But this game kind of retroactively makes me happy that I played Breakin Da Rules, because it helped me recognize and appreciate this game more.

Licensed games are strange beasts. They’re designed to be quickly churned out and abandoned for a quick profit. But gaming industry’s current focus on AAA titles over some B or C games makes it hard not to feel like we’ve lost something. You need variety. There’s a charm to this kind of experience that you can’t get in many other games. Now, licensed games are all gacha pay to win scams to steal money from children. If corporations are gonna trick kids into buying cheap products that remind them of that cartoon they like, I’d rather see them put actual work into it. Sometimes, you get something special out of it.

When you’re a young kid in the 00s who hasn’t quite figured out that you’re trans yet, there’s certain pieces of media you fixate on. Things that give you Feelings that you don’t fully understand or know how to explain. This is particularly weird with media that is created by people that are absolutely not trying to create a trans message and would probably spit on in your face if you implied they were. Polyjuice potions in Harry Potter, the entirety of Ranma, and, of course, the "Boy Who Would Be Queen" episode of Fairly OddParents.

There's a bizarre nature to these kinds of projects. The creators are so single minded in their idea of how things are "supposed" to be and so consistent in using things they consider "wrong" as a cheap gag, it kind of swerves back around to give some kids (or least me) some young gender euphoria. A lot of FOP falls under this umbrella, but The Boy Who Would Be Queen episode toys with some interesting attempts at examining the idea of gender. Timmy is magically transformed to become "Timantha" to understand his crush, and discovers how his tastes haven't really changed as a girl. He still likes soap operas and comics, but now he's supposed to be ashamed of the latter rather than the former. He discovers his crush falls into the same problem. Trixie likes comics and video games but feels the pressure of society forcing her to fill the traditional gender roles. The prison of gender hurts all parties involved. What's particularly easy to read as queer in the episode is how both Timmy and Trixie are presenting themselves. Timmy's obviously dressed as Timantha, but Trixie is also trying to pass as a boy. In these disguises, these two can express genuine, vulnerable feelings to each other that they will never express in the rest of the show. Trixie tells Timantha, a girl she's known for just a few hours, like a normal straight girl would, "If only you were a boy, then I'd date you for sure." The gag is obviously supposed to be that Timmy's crush is still out of reach, but its so on the nose its hard not to read into it. To a young 10 year old who was just lectured and ostracized for agreeing with the girls that "girls are better than boys", this episode sent a chill up my spine. And I wasn't the only one. If you dive into fanfiction communities, you'll find more than a few stories that center around Timmy choosing to permanently stay as Timantha so that Trixie can have a real "friend."

Much of Breakin' Da Rules rehashes various plots from the early FOP canon. Timmy becomes a dog. Timmy becomes microscopic. Timmy fights aliens. Timmy and friends trapped in a video game. And, of course, Timmy becomes Timantha.

There was a time in my life where I would focus in on that ten minute segment where you're Timantha, trying to ignore the "could this GET any more silly?" quips. Begging for something more, I would spin elaborate narratives in my mind where this segment could go on forever. I never finished the game proper, that segment was all I needed.

Now I'm an adult and I can do two things:

1. Mod the game to add the Timantha face onto Timmy full time, which I sat down and learned how to do.

2. Understand how deeply bad this game is past that ten minute segment.

There's certainly ambition here. When you crack into a game's files, you get a greater understanding of just how much work went into the game. There's dozens of different models that Timmy plays as throughout the game. Timantha, Dog Timmy, Superhero Timmy, Robin Hood Timmy, Greek Toga Timmy, and so on and so forth. Modding the game required me to manually change the eyes of every single one of these models. The levels themselves clearly built a lot of assets. Each level has a different gimmick, sometimes multiple gimmicks. The time travel level required a bunch of different textures and assets built for all three of the time periods you travel to. I can certainly respect how much effort went into that.

But its hard not to compare this to its successor Shadow Showdown. The other FOP focuses in on the fantastical and allows the developers to build huge, elaborate levels with bizarre mechanics and designs. Breakin' Da Rules sticks with the human world and the established FOP episodes, to its detriment. The level centered around Timmy's neighborhood is empty and miserable, its almost haunting. It doesn't feel lonely in Shadow Showdown when you're journeying through someone's dream or investigating a spooky mansion. It would be easy to call this a beta for Shadow Showdown until you look at all the same files I did. If they centered in on developing Timmy's central model and mechanics, even if it meant losing my girl Timantha, the game might at least feel alright to play. But they had to program all the ways these different models had to move and it clearly bogged the game down. The actual art decision and level design are messy, but at least that can be something I know they learned from moving forward. The mechanics themselves are similarly flawed. Each level requires collecting five stars for a wish, which typically involves "press this button to progress" with no change to the actual gameplay. The game operates on the life system, which most platformers had moved past already. Losing all your lives get punted past to the last save point, which forces you to repeat tedious and dull levels just to reach whatever stupid thing trapped you for so long. You just get the sense this game suffered from poor direction even beyond being an underfunded licensed game in the 00s. Its a real shame but its tempered with the face that the sequel is so much better.

And also, I learned to mod shit in the pursuit of fulfilling some childhood dreams, so I gotta give that to it.

truly a modern tragedy
if you want an example of a game that failed to understand why users liked it and how to keep and moderate a user base, you're looking at it

this game had so much going for it back in the day
as basically virtual legos it was a great tool for creatives to express themselves, create games, structures, media, everything
to say i had a lot of fun with this game back in the early 2010s is an incredible understatement this game probably shaped who i am today in some ways (it's also where my username comes from)
it really was a sandbox in the best ways possible
the maps really made you feel like you were a toy and that you were playing with toys
and that was great, many days were spent roleplaying or playing minigames or just building what i wanted to build
like minecraft but legos
like roblox but with no need to play other people's games
like garry's mod but without need for ownership or understanding of other games
it really was great, with fully moddable assets like sounds, textures, models, items, vehicles, etc, etc, etc, etc, and etc.

but unlike garry's mod, roblox, or minecraft, this game had a fatal flaw
it's creator (badspot) couldnt handle the popularity
the game lacked updates with substance, and left most of the content making to the users
which is fine when your game has (close to) a thousand concurrent players and probably way over a thousand unique players each day
but then he removed ALL maps that werent completely flat (so he could add shaders), and that nearly directly lead the game into a death spiral
peak users online has dropped and dropped and dropped
like actually its gone from anywhere from 400-700 players online at a time to 30 players if you're LUCKY
like actually look at these statistics https://blockland.online/statistics
very sad
i wouldnt even really recommend playing on what few servers actually have players on them since what little userbase is left has formed a clique and has proven itself (to me) to be incredibly hostile to new users, and if you're looking for a certain kind of experience chances are there are no servers (with people in it) that can meet your expectations

for a game that (at least i thought it was) marketing itself towards children its p disgusting for a rape mod to be a common mod to find on some servers

these are all problems with the actual game itself but there are problems outside the game too, namely the forums

the forums are by far the worst part of blockland, just being a cesspit of negativity, elitism, and hostility
the amount of terrible people who are on the forums or have been on the forums is too many to count (although im sure someone has a list somewhere)

did you know the creator of kiwi farms used to play blockland?
did you know the person who leaked the tf2 source code back in april 2020 (supposedly) played blockland?
did you know a school shooter in 2017 used to play blockland? (Aztec High School shooting)
maybe these examples are cherry picked but by god is it what i expect from the user base that exist(s)(ed)

im gonna try to end it here but theres a lot i left out
numerous hacks to the forums, users, server list, etc.
personal experiences with terrible people, including someone who got my ip and did a lookup to scare me when i was like 10
bullying of children (of course) and other terrible shit

honestly only if you stick to single player or private friend groups can i say the game is maybe worth playing
the mods, maps, and other customizations that are available are pretty interesting
but i absolutely cannot recommend anyone buy this game, or that anyone seek out the currently existing user base

also be careful with spiritual successors like brickadia they're newer but the player base is the same as blockland which is a big red flag

im sure other people have a different view of the blockland experience or properly remember some of this shit, most of my notable memories of the game are from 2015-2018 and my GOOD memories of the game are from 2010-2013
maybe i personally have had a terrible experience with the game and its users and its not actually as bad as i remember
but theres no way in hell im going back to find out