Yay! I thought I'd better include Scooby and the gang again this time around, and here we have a pretty standard arcade adventure, clearly focused at the younger end of the market, but still enjoyable enough to be played by the older Scooby fans too!
Fred's cousin Jed makes monsters for a movie special effects company, and the gang decide to visit. But when the turn up at the studio, they find that Jed has gone missing and that his creations have run amok and everyone is blaming him for the chaos. Obviously Fred won't believe his cousin could be responsible for a second, so off our friends go to investigate, look for clues and try to find out just who is behind all this animatronic mayhem!
Players control Scooby himself, as he bounds around the levels collecting hundreds of Scooby Snacks and finding the odd clue, which he takes to Velma to analyse. Usually this unlocks another area, and Scoob gets back on the case! Food items can be found lying around, as can a gooey substance called Mubber which can apparently be shaped into anything, but here just works as a nice device to create random items.
The collected food can be delivered to Shaggy who'll cook up a recipe and restore some of Scooby's health, and Fred & Daphne can also be approached, but just like in the cartoon they tend to be mostly useless, mysteriously disappear together or end up getting "kidnapped"....Hmmm...
All the voices sound suitably accurate, with the exception of Scooby who can sometimes sound a bit strange, but not too noticeably so...and even ex-Batman Adam West voices the creator of Mubber! And at the start, the intro music to the show and intro itself are recreated in game, making it all very much like a proper episode of the cartoon!
It's a pity that the actual platforming, collecting, etc. is very standard stuff then. Scooby can dress up in a few outfits that give him extra abilities and that spices things up a little, but you'll have seen it all before. There's even sections that feel just like Crash Bandicoot, and you'll notice a few other ideas lifted from similar sources.
But it's fairly enjoyable even though it's highly unoriginal, and if you're a Scooby fan you could do a lot worse than this game to try and get a taste of what it's like to follow in his paws!
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