Cartoon Network (aka Turner Media) seems to like to sponsor games that espouse sheer maniacal depravity. One of their games, which I can't play because Intel-based Macs don't have Shockwave support as of yet, has the subtitle "Enter a world of magical wonder, kill everything you see" which kinda sums up their entire production strategy. In this one you play a crazy skull-faced, proto-Jack-The-Ripper running the streets of London to capture orphans, ostensibly to feast upon them. Its a platformer with an Oliver-twist.
The arrow keys move you about, Space makes you jump, A is the melee attack and S allows you to projectile attack. Usual stuff. The difference here is that progression doesn't mean simply moving from point A to B, it means capturing snotty-nosed orphans. You beat them up, stuff them in a sack, and then grab the umbrella icons to return them to your lair, where you cage them. You usually have to cage two or three sackfuls of 'em to move on.
So you're thinking, "ok, they're re-skinning a tired genre with a shocking but gratuitous premise, why bother with that when I can watch Metalocalypse for free on a pirate video link aggregate site?" This criticism plays out particularly with the game's animations, which while beautiful and intricate as you'd expect from a game sponsored by CN, can often get in the way of smooth gameplay, unbalancing the timing cycles with periods of animation where you lose control. Bagging children is, of course, the main offender. But then, something magical happens...
After the first three levels you see a little cut-scene of the skull-faced guy getting ready to boil the kids alive and eat them, when all of the sudden he sees a little skull-faced kid in the cage, and has flashbacks to newspaper headlines of a kid eating hundreds of cats, and so forth. From then on, he decides to SAVE the orphans instead of FEAST upon their marinated flesh -- except he goes about this exactly the same way as when he was malignant. You still beat them up, sack them, cage them, but now the premise has shifted. You even see him take a bite out of the fat kids when he sacks them. Kind of a disjunction, a perpetual WTF, but whatever. The platforming stays pretty fresh until the end, when you discover a rich guy has been putting these kids in factories and in restaurants to do unpaid labor. Of course! A rich guy! Whats more evil that a subhuman monster that parasitizes the innocent? A rich guy! Brilliant!
The last level involves throwing pies into the rich guy's face. Clearly there's something interesting happening here; it's worth your time to take a bite.
I played this game a while
I played this game a while back and really had trouble getting into the game. Actually, it was hard to get through the first couple of states to even know what the first twist was, mainly because I kept getting nailed by "I hit him!" or long animations with kids jumping around me. Kind of frustrating, but it is a gorgeous game.