Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge (GBA)
The cartoon Dexter’s Laboratory focuses its attention on a boy genius, so attaching the show to the strategy heavy game of chess game feels fairly appropriate. One might expect a Dexter’s Laboratory chess game to be something you’d find on the Cartoon Network website or maybe it would be on a CD in a cereal box, but publisher BAM! Entertainment had quite a bit of faith in it, the game Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge exclusively released on a Game Boy Advance cartridge. Were it just a standard chess game with a coat of paint to match the cartoon then it would certainly feel like a bad bet, but Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge provides quite a bit more than just a way to play the classic strategy board game on a handheld console.
Of course, Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge does allow you to play chess normally. You have your standard set of 32 pieces placed in their normal positions on the board, and regardless of the mode you play, the goal is always going to be locking the opposing player’s King in checkmate by ridding them of any valid moves that could protect their most precious piece. Castling is a valid maneuver although it can be disabled in custom matches, but otherwise playing chess will be as simple as picking up and moving your pieces in the same way you’d play the classic board game. Where the Dexter’s Laboratory elements enter the picture is in the appearance of your chess pieces. There are four players you can pick from in Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge: the boy genius Dexter, his effervescent sister DeeDee, Dexter’s rival Mandark, and the super hero Major Glory from the show’s Justice Friends segments. They have a few voiced lines for introductions and the like, but otherwise the main ways they’ll contribute are with taunts by way of text box when they take pieces or get the player in Check and the visual appearance of their chess pieces.
The main draw for many players of Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge will be the fact that the four teams are made up of plenty of recognizable references to the cartoon Dexter’s Laboratory. While the team leader will always be the King or Queen for their team, the other pieces contain plenty of familiar characters and more interesting draws from the show’s history. Dexter and Mandark pull a lot of their future selves from the special Ego Trip, but DeeDee’s pawns are the Cootie bugs seen primarily in one episode and Major Glory, while he has guitarist Valhallen and Hulk parody Krunk as his bishops and rooks, also borrows fellow heroes from the show Monkey and Action Hank to round out a recognizable roster. Some choices are appropriate if potentially problematic, DeeDee’s King is her giant imaginary friend Koosalagoopagoop and he can end up hiding pieces behind his impressive stature, but at any time you can press Select to see the board’s lay out if you are worried he’s blocking the view of someone. There is no time pressure for your moves in any mode as well, meaning you’re free to figure things out instead of making uninformed moves.
What makes playing with these characters more interesting is the wide range of animations they exhibit. When you have one piece take another, you’ll be shown a brief animation of the two characters involved interacting. Some of these are straightforward, the super spy Agent Honeydew will do a crane kick to send Mandark’s pet duck/pawn Quackor flying, but not all actions are necessarily violent. DeeDee has two friends on her team and it would be a little extreme to see one of the superheroes attacking schoolgirls, so instead when someone like the musclebound Krunk goes up against them, he’ll instead do something like shake the earth so the ice cream cone the girl was eating falls to the ground. While most characters have one “attack” animation, the character being removed from the board can have plenty of reactions depending on who’s attacking. They might be transformed into something embarrassing, a character like Old Man Dexter might have the wrench he uses as a cane knocked out from under him, or if they can take it, they can be knocked away by a powerful blow. Every possible combination of pieces has a technically unique interaction in these short scenes making it fun to see if you can set things up for an interaction you haven’t seen before, and just like the taunts from the team leaders, you can easily and quickly skip them if you feel you’ve had your fill of them.
Were this all the game offered, it would be a nice reskin of chess for fans of the show and one that had a bit of effort put into it despite the clear influence it takes from the older video game Battle Chess. Where Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge shows off that it’s more than just a recognizable face on a recognizable board game comes in the modes on offer. Tournament is the simplest offering, the player choosing one team leader and then having to take on the other three in a row, but already here we see something important. The game offers multiple difficulties, from Easy to Hard with an unlockable Boy Genius mode, and the tournament gets a bit tougher with each match. Despite the game’s target audience no doubt being younger players, the computer controlled opponents in Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge can be quite capable. Easier difficulties can have them make a few mistakes to leave them open for less strategic players to still have their fun, but you can also find the game puts up a powerful fight if you so wish. The computer opponents do sometimes need time to think on their turn, no doubt running calculations on optimal moves, and one of the game’s few stumbling points comes from the occasional need for a good long think. If the opponent is dragging their feet on making a move though, that’s usually an affirmation of your own ability, for you have likely locked the computer into a rough situation with few obvious strategies that warrants deeper consideration. The wait can be rather long unfortunately, but the game trying to play optimally but also not trying to be perfect makes them a suitable opponent. If you can find another person, Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge also allows players to pass the GBA and play a match using one system if they like.
Versus Mode and Quick Play sound like fairly standard ways to play Chess, but they hide within the game’s second big appeal. Custom Matches offer much more than the ability to disable castling because you are free to mess with the pieces on the board to create your own special rounds of chess. You can replace the whole row of pawns with rooks, have players start a few pieces down, or create other strange and interesting setups to make for a game with new strategies or amusing situations. There are a few rules in place, you need a King of course and they can’t start off the match in checkmate, but since even the AI can handle the rules of custom matches, this opportunity to reshape chess gives the game greater longevity than a short tournament mode would.
Similarly, Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge also gives you a reason to return to it with a set of 60 checkmate challenges. Puzzle Mode has three difficulties, Easy and Normal focused on presenting you a normal chess board free of the Dexter’s Laboratory characters and asking you to figure out what single move is necessary to force your opponent into a checkmate. Hard will shift this instead to needing to take two moves to get them in checkmate and the game does get to make a move between them so sometimes you need to think a touch ahead, but there are definitely a few thinkers to be found in the puzzle designs so you’ll certainly need some time to figure out the higher rated ones. However, unlocking them does require clearing out previous puzzles, and Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge has no internal save battery. Instead you receive passwords you’ll need to enter if you want to return to unlocked puzzles later, and while offering passwords for the short tournament doesn’t feel too necessary, things like Puzzle Mode and the unlockable Boy Genius difficulty do mean you might want to keep a paper nearby to jot down the important letter strings.
THE VERDICT: Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge already makes itself a bit more appealing than a standard game of chess thanks to the cartoon characters that replace the pieces having a wide range of unique and often silly interactions to make taking pieces more entertaining, but the extra modes push the game above just being a way to play chess with characters from a recognizable show. Being able to customize the pieces present in a match makes room for new ways to play and the AI can usually keep up unless the game really does need the kind of long hard think that even you’ll be likely to engage in on your turn. Add in Puzzle Mode’s set of 60 checkmate challenges that get your brain working as well and it’s a surprisingly strong package for a chess video game.
And so, I give Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge for Game Boy Advance…
A GOOD rating. If all you had in a chess video game was the ability to play standard chess, it would likely just earn an Okay rating. Chess is enjoyable, sure, and having a way to play it with a computer opponent is nice to have if you can’t find a person. Even just adding a range of sometimes humorous animations to the mix still doesn’t put it that much higher, but what makes Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge a good game is its willingness to do more with chess than merely put characters from the Cartoon Network show in place of the pieces. It is still fun to see Dexter’s friends, foes, and idols on the board attacking each other in sometimes strange ways, but popping over to do some puzzles or taking on someone with custom piece placement is what gives the game life after you’ve managed to clear its small tournament mode. This isn’t just a way to play chess on the GBA, it’s also a way to see what the game would be like if the pieces were placed differently or the amount of crucial ones were altered. The checkmate puzzles going to two move versions does make it a bit harder since you might not predict the opponent’s move, especially since some don’t involve putting the King in check first, but the range of puzzles offered also makes the more interesting than if they were all single move checkmate challenges since that does have some limits on how it can be designed. Besides some visibility problems on the board when using the characters from the show though, the only other parts that feel a little off would be things like the sound quality on the music and voices from the show, but that’s just a reality of being on the Game Boy Advance.
Some even more room to be experimental with custom chess could certainly push things higher, things like different board shapes potentially leading to an even broader range of options, but so long as you don’t dislike Dexter, Dexter’s Laboratory: Chess Challenge can certainly scratch an itch to play virtual chess and then some. The ideas for what were added aren’t too wild either, but they’re just enough of a smart idea to make this game about a boy genius feel richer than run of the mill chess, all while offering the kind of silly character interactions that people who liked the show wished to see.