The Haunted Hoard: Aaahh!!! Real Monsters (SNES)

In the Nickelodeon cartoon Aaahh!!! Real Monsters, a trio of friendly but still frightening monsters study at a scare school to become professional terrorizers of the human population. For a video game adaptation of such a show, a midterm exam seems like a good fit for such a premise that ups the ante without having too much finality, and thus, Ickis, Oblina, and Krumm are put in the player’s hands to see them through their terrorizing tests. Rather than split up the group though, you’ll find yourself playing as all three at once in this side-scrolling platformer, although one of them certainly does get the short end of the stick.

 

When traveling with your three monsters, one will take the lead and actually performs actions to impact the environment or harm enemies. Ickis, the small red goblin-like character, is perhaps the most flexible, his skills not particularly exceptional but his special ability is to have the group work together to fling themselves across wide gaps. Levels in Aaahh!!! Real Monsters on SNES can be surprisingly complex affairs where you’ll head up, down, left and right as the paths sometimes take you back to earlier areas or over and around them. There are a fair few moments where the path will branch, usually one having special items to reward you for picking it despite it not always looking like a different path than the way onward, but how you get to these extra areas can vary in difficulty. Ickis leading the group in a long jump is a pretty simple way to access such areas, but even during normal navigation it can be a more reliable means of clearing open space if you’re worried you might fall short or get knocked by an enemy while airborne that would otherwise cause you to plummet.

Oblina, a striped black-and-white umbrella handle of a creature, is the next useful leader. Taller than the other two, Oblina’s special ability is to instead jump higher by stacking up the other two and jumping off of them. While Ickis’s long jump has some rare standard utility on top of required moments, Oblina’s high jump feels like it more often than not will just crop up when the game designers put a ledge that is a tiny bit too high to reach otherwise, and since using the ability requires all three monsters to be close by and everyone standing on even ground despite many areas having bumpy surfaces mostly for aesthetic reasons, you can end up fiddling with the ability use for a bit before finally you can spring up and reach the way onward in what served as a bit of a pointless barrier. Ickis can sometimes help you skip past moving platforms or even avoid low ceilings being a concern when you’re in a tight spot and need to jump over something dangerous, but Oblina’s team jump’s only other utility is when useful items are floating high in the air. To be fair, 1ups, healing food, and attacking items are all good to grab, and Oblina also has a different unique feature in that she’s that tallest of the group. Some stages have you leaping up to grab horizontal bars, Oblina able to often naturally grab these without the team ability due to her height. Since swapping monsters is usually a quick affair this is a fine reason to swap between Ickis and Oblina, so while moments of necessary high jumps are rather weak, she still feels like a valuable team member.

 

Krumm, unfortunately, is a load. This fleshy fellow who holds his eyeballs in his hands is first hampered by a usually awful jump that gives him very little height, making him a bad choice most of the time in this jump-heavy adventure. Sure, he can still throw trash at enemies to take them down just like the other two, but many enemies throw projectiles that can be best avoided by jumping and a good deal of the bosses are fought on flat terrain that necessitates jumping over them to avoid damage or feature platforming as part of the fight. Krumm’s special ability is also the most situational of the bunch, one of his eyes being knocked away to observe a small region ahead if you want some information before heading forward. Considering the sometimes maze-like designs it can be a good way to get a lay of the land or notice a secret area with some goodies, but it also feels like it exists to justify the annoying blind jumps that can lead to danger and lost progress if you don’t come to a halt and do the eye search for the many moments where you aren’t quite sure what lies below or ahead. Outside of some quick bonus stages you aren’t ever going to be forced to use Krumm, but it feels like the level design may have been made more hostile to force this scouting ability to have purpose which either slows things down too often or leads to players hitting into unexpected danger because they didn’t want to use Krumm’s unexciting ability.

 

The game’s two difficulty settings show a similar lack of good judgment. You can play through the adventure on either Scary or Nightmare difficulty, the difference being that Nightmare difficulty makes enemies take longer to kill. When the game already wants a threat to stick around like the twirling toy airplanes it will make them invincible, and a good deal of opposition will just stand in your path repeating an attack you shouldn’t struggle too much to avoid if you can see them before they start attacking. However, while your monsters can take out most enemies by hurling three pieces of their infinite trash on Scary, taking someone out takes twice as long on Nightmare, and with some sections being flat terrain briefly broken by a baddie, it grows tedious to just stand still and chuck trash at them til their gone. Some like the mechanical arms in the post office stages are only dangerous if you try to skip them by jumping over, meaning whittling them down with trash on Nightmare is a bore. On Scary things are more acceptably brisk, a lot of children at the school and employees at the businesses you hit up to scare still having a decent chance of hitting you before you can send them scampering away with attacks. There are special trash bags with fishbones in them that serve as more powerful trash to throw at enemies that will wipe them out more quickly, but they’re not so common that Nightmare would be redeemed if you continually seek them out.

Playing on Scary is the way to go simply because it’s not drawn out for little reason beyond artificial difficulty. There are Scare Manuals to be found that will instantly frighten away any regular foes that are on screen when used, but these are far more limited and can deal some strong damage to bosses so it’s more a matter of determining if the enemies nearby are pesky enough to warrant using this resource to get out of a bind. Oblina and Ickis throw trash at different heights though and even then some enemies like the tiny rats at the junkyard can be hard to nail before they speed towards you for a quick hit, but lives, continues, checkpoints, and health refills are not so rare that you’ll be stuck in a bind save for some later levels that have instant death drops that strain your movement some. Navigating spaces can sometimes be complicated by tight windows too like platforms that are only barely close enough to each other at certain points and missing the jump will lead to a tedious climb back up, and with fall damage in play as well you can be harshly punished even if it’s not an outright fatal fall. Some of the jumps at places like the opening and closing cabinet drawers of the post office try to make you use Krumm’s eye again to even figure out where to go on top of the dangers complicating an already unappealing situation..

 

The stages, while sometimes having pretty involved visual designs and show accurate character designs, also tend to drag as their maze-like structure makes it unclear how much progress you’ve made and sometimes you’ll be thrown back to an earlier area after taking a long diversion for little reward. The stage design can also be a hindrance to even dealing with the dangers found in a stage effectively. You might be climbing up a ladder while a kid fires baseballs at you from a machine that tracks your movement, and even if you can bait him to miss, objects drop in from above to pelt you during this moment of vulnerability that also fall based on your position. Enemies can be made hard to see due to limited screen real estate or pieces of the environment that hide something like a crow until it might be too close to effectively avoid. Timed hazards like pipes spraying nasty water or swinging skulls and mail bags can have very small windows where you can slip through and even then it can sometimes be hard to figure out that window based on their animation. Getting mechanics like riding the air blown by fans to work or even use Oblina’s group high jump to reach somewhere out of reach can be a struggle too, and so, while you can possibly push through this all because of some leniency in pick-up abundance, you’re left wondering why you’re tolerating it at all when there aren’t really many moments where battle or platforming is interesting for any reason beyond its grungy appearance.

THE VERDICT: Even if you don’t play it on its needlessly tedious Nightmare difficulty, Aaahh!!! Real Monsters on SNES is a messy experience. Mechanics don’t always work out well and aren’t that enjoyable to engage with, some like Krumm’s ability to look ahead feel like they’re here so you can’t criticize how many dangerous blind jumps and hidden enemies there are even though Krumm otherwise plays poorly, and the maze-like structure of stages can lead to dissatisfying diversions that draw out a game where things can already be a bit too slow as you whittle down the enemies with your weak trash. Having health and items scattered about so liberally eases some of the issues but it is an ineffective solution to the frustrating obstacles in this licensed platformer that offers very little beyond familiar characters.

 

And so, I give Aaahh!!! Real Monsters for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System…

A TERRIBLE rating. While it would be easy to assume the Nightmare difficulty alone is what makes this game grueling since it just drags out encounters that are already flawed thanks to ambushes or a lack of challenge to spice up the trash-hurling process, Scary is just a faster version of many of the same problems. Some levels will have sections where you just keep entering toilets to eventually luck your way into finding which one leads to the way onward, but this is only the most egregious case of the game spending a lot of time making you move around a space and sometimes encountering dead ends with power-ups you might not even really be happy to find. Another Monster Manual to pull off a scare is a fine reward, but not if it came at the expense of dealing with annoying foes like rock hurling rats or ducks that will just pop out of walls with no indication they were hiding inside to shoot bubbles at you in spaces sometimes too tight to avoid the incoming damage. Boss battles are often just about jumping over them as they go back and forth or repeating a fairly plain attack loop, and while Ickis’s long jump and Oblina’s height can sometimes let you do things a bit differently than intended, you’re often trying to get around a bothersome mechanic that is unreliable or hoping to avoid something like a drop down that leads to lost progress or even later in the adventure outright death. Aaahh!!! Real Monsters on SNES definitely gets worse as it goes because it starts throwing in more enemies to face at once and more confusing layouts that are trying to force you to whip out Krumm despite his many failings so the early stages are at least more tolerable, but if you have no affinity for this franchise, it’s hard to say its platforming is really providing anything worth seeing.

 

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters mostly fails at fundamental ideas that build up into a gross ball of bad experiences the deeper in you go. Fiddling with the team maneuvers or mechanics is easy to brush off in miniature, a few badly placed enemies won’t ruin a platforming game, but besides some setting variety it feels like you’re running into flaw after flaw rather than getting some interesting or memorable moment that challenges you in a neat way. The fact that so often you’ll be expected to head forward into the unknown or whip out Krumm is definitely a downer on the whole playthrough, especially since sometimes the already limited space to show you what dangers are ahead will be constricted by tight spaces that can even mess up how far the eye can even look. The Sega Genesis version does have some appreciable differences and seems to be regarded a bit more positively, but a quick look still shows many of the same stage design issues and it’s not like the core mechanics are being overhauled despite the kind removal of fall damage. This monstrous platformer is boring when it works and aggravating when it stumbles over its own ideas, so while the story might say otherwise, it certainly feels like Ickis, Krumm, and Oblina’s Midterm Exams are full-on failures.