Nicktoons: Freeze Frame Frenzy (GBA)

Pokémon Snap captured the hearts of many by taking players on a photo safari of its recognizable and diverse monsters, so doing the same thing but with characters from various Nickelodeon cartoons isn’t necessarily a poorly conceived idea. However, Pokémon Snap wasn’t simply about about taking photos, a grading system and interactive elements making the game more than just a passive photography game. This is where Nicktoons: Freeze Frame Frenzy falters, failing to realize that the act of simply snapping photos isn’t very exciting on its own.

 

The premise of Nicktoons: Freeze Frame Frenzy, or Spongebob Squarepants and Friends: Freeze Frame Frenzy as it is known in Europe, is that the universes of cartoons like Spongebob Squarepants, The Fairly OddParents, Rocket Power, Danny Phantom, and more are all intermingling unwillingly, characters being flung into different dimensions by a malevolent force that seeks to sow chaos and capitalize on the mayhem by integrating robot doppelgangers of certain characters into these mixed up worlds. Jimmy Neutron, presented in this 2D sprite based game with a poorly adapted version of his 3D cartoon’s character model, seeks to set things right with a special invention: the Neutrino-Cam 4000. By taking pictures of individuals who are in the wrong world, the player will send them back to their home dimension while also trying to sort out the mystery of who is behind the chaos.

 

Players get to pick from the main characters of the cartoons featured here, but whether you pick Otto Rocket, Spongebob, Timmy Turner, or the unlockable characters that come along later, they don’t really feel all too different. The game features a stat list for each character, but any differences are so negligible it’s hardly worth swapping around outside of the desire to see the different animations the playable characters have. Perhaps what could have been the most important stat, speed, is almost entirely useless too, as every level in the game scrolls forward at its own obnoxiously slow pace. Your photography missions all take place in worlds based on the more popular Nickelodeon cartoons, but while there are some recognizable locations in places like Bikini Bottom such as the Krusty Krab restaurant and Dimmsdale can get away with having a school as a main location, the levels quickly lose their luster. Many levels in a dimension will be excruciatingly slow and bland walks through barren outside areas that hardly show off the location’s recognizable traits, but the overreliance on school settings across nearly all the dimensions means they begin to feel incredibly repetitive. Some levels are literally just long stretches of one kind of object, such as the long hallway of a school filled with lockers that devolves to the boring process of opening a locker and snapping pictures of what is inside over and over again. Sometimes this structure is repeated with the exteriors of buildings instead where you open windows and then photograph what’s inside, and perhaps the least interesting level might be the one adjacent to a busy road where the same five or so cars drive by, the player needing to snap shots of these identical vehicles to fill time between the excessively slow rollout of characters you need to take pictures of.

The picture taking process is so straightforward that it poses almost no challenge. You control both your character and camera cursor on screen, although your character’s presence really doesn’t impact much. There are moments where you may need to jump to see the small slice of the top of the viewing area that isn’t visible otherwise, and sometimes what looks like a skateboard wheel will bounce across the screen and threaten to damage you, but you can just take a picture of it with your free-moving cursor to easily eliminate it. You do technically pick up power-ups for the camera as your character as well, but much like the stats, their impact on play is so negligible it feels like a waste of time to mention their marginal impact on your camera’s power. Your character’s position or speed has no impact on the gradual scroll of the screen forward, each level having essentially a set time for you to snap the photos of characters of interest, but almost none of these are particularly difficult. They’ll often be standing out in the open or behind a window or other small barrier, and all you do is repeatedly click the shutter to snap photos of them for points and to send out of place characters back home.

 

Each level has a minimum score you need to beat to unlock the next level, with each dimension having perhaps two too many levels considering how bankrupt the imaginations of the level designers are with their recycled concepts. However, to get this score usually just requires completing the level objectives, which are usually sending home a certain amount of characters who don’t belong, photographing the dimension’s collectable like monkeys or fruit, and taking a photo of interest like a specific character or situation. Usually, the only response a character will have to being photographed is cycling between two poses, but some will move forward through a little scene, something that is rare enough that the game usually draws attention to it by making it a stage objective. Almost everything you take pictures of will be standing around or strolling past, meaning that even if you were hoping to just see recognizable faces in interesting settings, you mostly just end up inundated with characters who get recycled constantly between the worlds doing the same generic activities.

 

There is a bit of fun had with the characters at some points though. You might see certain direct references to the show, such as many visual references to jokes from the episode of Spongebob where Squidward realizes he loves the show’s signature burger. Unexpected faces appear as well, such as the dentist from Fairly OddParents and the Jolly Olly Ice Cream Man from Hey Arnold!, but some dips are almost too obscure, random kids and background characters from shows used to fill out casts that did potentially have more recognizable faces to draw from. If you are looking to get by on simply enjoying the appearance of familiar characters, the game messes that up in its own way too. First and perhaps most egregious is that the photos you take aren’t saved as photographs at all. Whether it’s important characters or some environmental object or cameo you snapped a shot of, you’ll only get the points towards the level score and potentially a headshot of the character in your album of characters. There’s no reason to try and take a good picture, the player having unlimited film and the posing or position of the character not as important as what is ultimately just a recontextualized gun cursor aiming at targets that look like cartoon characters. It’s essentially a shooting gallery, but even the records of who you shot with your camera are flawed, misnaming characters, labeling some generically, or entirely ignoring seemingly important characters you snapped a picture of.

The levels even have troubles keeping their concepts straight. The player passes through five worlds, but the game seems to lose track of who belongs where. Despite All Grown Up! having its own stages, they’ll appear in the Rocket Power level and refuse to be sent back to their home dimension, while the cast of The Wild Thornberrys also linger about in this unrelated universe and even have a level devoted more to them than the series the dimension is meant to represent. The game tries to prevent you from playing as a character in their home dimension so that character can appear as a character to be photographed, but Arnold can find himself as can Tommy Pickles thanks to this unusual mixing and matching. Worlds culminate in a boss battle with a robot copy of a character who is strangely not native to that setting, but these boss battles, despite being one of the few times you seem to interact strongly with a character in the background, aren’t substantial. Bouncing yellow screws will enter your play area and try to hurt you while you try to photograph a boss three times, some of these being hilariously easy since they move so predictably.

 

Surprisingly, after the grueling slog that is getting through the five dimensions, the final push to face the game’s antagonist actually shifts up the gameplay in a way that could have been interesting if explored more fully. Players face a speedy level where photographing and dodging properly are actually lightly engaging instead of a dull chore that is followed up by a boss fight where you are actively moving around and having to deal with an aggressive and quick enemy who won’t go down easy. However, these brief moments of mild entertainment are completely killed by the very final level where the little yellow screws weakly bounce at you and you just spend the rest of that overly long scrolling level taking out screws that have no chance of hurting you unless you stop doing the only thing you literally can do at that point. This final stage doesn’t even have the hollow character cameos to motivate you to continue the slow marches through barely recognizable locations, and the mild level of interaction here is the same weak style that made every moment up until the finish feel disconnected and dull. With the game complete the game only really has the idea of returning to old stages to try and get higher scores to pursue, but in a first run the pace is usually so slow and camera targets appear with very little difficulty to capturing their photo that you’d probably just be scrounging up more ten point opportunities from random environmental objects, a task that is not at all interesting.

THE VERDICT: Nicktoons : Freeze Frame Frenzy is a shallow attempt to distract children with an excruciatingly slow march past barely animate sprites of recognizable cartoon characters. The interaction method of the camera is limited to just opening things, disappearing barely hazardous obstacles, and lightly altering character poses, and with almost nothing else going on in the game as you snap the shutter on the slowly appearing objects of interest, Nicktoons: Freeze Frame Frenzy ends up being an agonizingly drawn out shuffle through boring locations, easy boss fights, and constant repetition of the same concepts that got old in the first world.

 

And so, I give Nicktoons: Freeze Frame Frenzy for Game Boy Advance…

An ATROCIOUS rating. This game was churned out to barefacedly take advantage of its license, perhaps more so than most games based on cartoon franchises. Your goal in this Nicktoons: Freeze Frame Frenzy is literally to walk along and see recognizable characters, the player rewarded for indicating to the game that you saw them. The picture-taking process does not reward or really allow many instances of the player setting up interactions between photo targets, the photos themselves don’t require any staging or technique beyond having an object within the bounds of the cursor, and the worlds you are passing through are very rarely worthy of photographing in the first place. All Grown Up!’s world in particular is literally just meant to resemble real life, and the typical urban life at that. Even the boss fights, the moment the game threatens to have more interactive gameplay than poofing away out of place characters, ends up being so straightforward that the fight will be over before it could really leave an impression. Some of the final stages show that this could have had more unique uses for its camera or better designs for bosses and levels, only to cap things off with the worst execution of the gameplay mechanics without any of the cameos to support it.

 

I do actually recognize most characters and places in the game and was lightly tickled by some of the less overt references, but these oases in a desert of dullness certainly couldn’t redeem the experience and only help to expose how little the game has going on outside of cameos and cheeky allusions. Even just the ability to push the screen forward yourself could at least rescue the game from the abysmal pace of level scrolling, but I brought up Pokémon Snap at the start to help show that a photography game needs more than just snapping wild shots of whatever is laying around. There is no finesse to it or ability to influence your shots here, and even then the picture taking is just asking for pointing at and selecting objects and characters in the game world, there being no film or other limitation balance. This underdeveloped photography game only had brand awareness to appeal to kids, and those who make the mistake of picking it up to see vibrant and animated Nicktoon worlds will find themselves repulsed by the tedium and lifelessness of these hollow stand-ins.