Spongebob Squarepants Movie: The Game (Game Boy Advance Review)

Zane Blalock

Aug 20, 2014 — 2 min read

Spongebob Sqaurepants Movie: The Game for the Game Boy Advance

Written by: Hunter “PantherFang” Minerley

Medium Game Review

Who here has watched the Spongebob Squarepants cartoon?

Well, for those who don’t know about the show, allow me to explain. For those who do know, feel free to skip this paragraph. Spongebob was a very popular kids cartoon on Nickelodeon. It starred a yellow sponge who lived in a pineapple under the sea, oddly enough. His name was, what else, Spongebob Sqaurepants. Spongebob was a fry cook at a local fast food restaurant called the Krusty Krab. I should stop now, because if I continue, I’ll be going for a while. On to the game review.

Due to the success of the show, it had to have a movie. The movie was released in 2004, and as of today, has made over $60,000,000 in profit. Now, with every successful movie, there needs to be a game. So, THQ took it upon themselves to create the game for the movie. Now I have a history with THQ games, normally, I don’t enjoy them. I even despise some of them. The company has since went bankrupt and had to shut down, mainly because of making crappy movie games that no one wanted. But, this game wasn’t actually as bad as I thought it would be.

To start out, this game is a platformer and the platforming is actually one of the better aspects of the game. The layout is also pretty good, it’s overworld map is very similar to Super Mario Bros. 3, which allows you to navigate the map however you like. But it is pretty limited, You can only navigate to the next level and the warp zone. The warp zone’s only purpose is to move quicker in between worlds only after you’ve unlocked them. It also contains a shop, which is pretty pointless if you ask me. You only buy stuff like extra lives, which you can easily get in the levels. You can also replay levels if you want, so you can farm lives all you want for later in the game, you’ll need them if you played on hard mode like I did.

The game has a health bar, containing 3 blocks of health, but you can actually take 4 hits. How full your health is depends on your difficulty level. For example, if you play on easy, it’s full. If it’s on hard mode, you only have one block. Once you get hit, you get invincibility for a short time. Also, some of the deaths can be very cheap, especially on hard mode. Like you can crawl out of a tunnel into as small confined room with a giant clam in it, and a charge attack is needed to kill it. It is impossible to charge the attack, because the clam can move fairly fast. So you would need a higher amount of health. On some levels, I had about 10 game overs due to things like these, which can be very frustrating. Health comes in the form of Krabby Patties, each one fills one block of health, about 5 of these can be found in each level. Believe me, they’re needed.

There are bosses at the end of every one of the 6 worlds. They are actually minor bad guys from the movie, a nice touch. These bosses can actually be easy once you figure out the patterns. They’re not really that fun.

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