Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights

Pros • Amusing power-ups like springs and bubblegum • Major nostalgia (relive those lazy Saturday mornings) • Varied environments and familiar Scooby monsters • Scooby-Doo!	Cons • Repeating the same section over and over because you keep missing a jump • Some of those Scooby snacks are really hard to reach (pout, pout) • “Rikes!” gets irritating quickly • Theme song gets stuck in your head (forever)
Bottom Line Don't expect a serious adventure game with Scooby-Doo. What you'll get is a silly, campy, mindlessly fun time-waster of a platform game. But, like the Comedy Channel folks say, "It's time WELL wasted." The Mystery Inc. gang arrives at Mystic Manor to help a friend of Daphne's, and everyone disappears. You, as Scooby-Doo, have to explore the manor and surrounding areas, find all its secrets, rescue the gang, and defeat the evil Mastermind. Yikes! The publisher describes Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights as an adventure/character platform game, but it's really more of a platformer than an adventure. But it's Scooby-Doo, which means it's campy and it's fun.

Scooby-Doo, where are you?

Actually, in Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights, it isn't Scooby-Doo that's missing; it's everybody else. The Mystery Inc. gang arrives at Mystic Manor in the good old Mystery Machine to investigate the disappearance of the inventor Alexander Graham. As soon as they arrive, everyone vanishes, leaving Scooby-Doo to solve the mystery. You get to guide Scooby through the manor, its gardens, the nearby fishing village and other environments to figure out where everyone went.

I smell Scooby snacks!

One of the first things you discover is that there are Scooby snacks everywhere. Some of the doorways you need to get through are blocked by "snack gates" for which you need to have collected a whole lot of snacks. Yum! Also, collecting all the Scooby snacks in a given area unlocks some of the extras. For each area you finish, you can view images and movies in the Monster Gallery. The movies are the same ones you see as cut scenes throughout the game, but the pictures document the making of the game-design sketches, early 3D models and the like.

Other items continue the typical Scooby zaniness. Bolster your courage by eating enormous sandwiches, ice cream cones, cake and chicken legs. You'll find these throughout the game, and sometimes the monsters obligingly drop food (or turn into it) when you defeat them. Power-ups are similarly silly. Gain the double-jump by finding springs. Walk on sticky surfaces with Professor Graham's special galoshes, or on slippery slopes using the suction power of toilet plungers. Bubble gum wads will stick your enemies to the spot and soap bubbles will temporarily trap them while also allowing you to bounce up to higher items.

Jeepers, it's the Creeper!

Look at all those familiar Scooby-Doo monsters! You'll encounter zombies, werewolves, and headless specters along with lesser frights like rats, spiders and bats. Defeat witches and witch doctors and battle the infamous Black Knight! Along the way, you'll also collect Monster Tokens. These will appear in the Monster Gallery where, for each token you collect, you'll be able to view images of that monster and read about the classic Scooby cartoon episode it appeared in. And there are trivia questions to test your Scooby knowledge.

Rikes!

I think the high score I gave this game comes as much from the nostalgia the game evokes as the fun I had playing it. And it was fun. On the other hand, hearing Scooby-Doo say, "Rikes!" the first few times is as amusing as the rest of the elements in the game, but he says it an awful lot. I soon had the volume turned down so far I could hardly hear the rest of the dialog, just so "Rikes!" wouldn't be so irritating. I suppose Scoob has to say something, but maybe he could have had just a little more variety.

The other thing I had a problem with, and this may be entirely due to the fact that I rarely play platform-style games, was having to do the same bit of jumping-and-avoiding-monsters over and over. I'd miss a Scooby snack, fall off the edge of something, or get zapped by a witch doctor, and end up back at the start of the section. I didn't mind having to do things over a few times, but it could get a bit ridiculous. But like I said, it could just be me (and here I will take the opportunity to point out that most PC games let you save at any point, so you can avoid some of this repetition. But I'm not biased against console games. Really, I love my PS2).

Zoiks! I'm hearing voices! And seeing things!

Does that groundskeeper sound awfully familiar? He should, that's Don Knotts giving him a voice. Other celebrity voices include Tim Curry as the Mastermind and Tim Conway as Professor Alexander Graham. Frank Weller of the original cartoon cast voices Fred, while Scooby's voice comes from Scott Innes, who voiced him in the recent Scooby-Doo movie.

There are a few snips of old-style 2D animation in the introductory bit of the game, but the other cut-scenes and movies are all done in the same 3D style as the game. While I liked the 3D look of the game a great deal, and thought the animation was great (except for a few repetitive actions), I think I would have liked to see the good old flat animation for the movie sequences. I expect the producers decided on 3D to make it more seamless with the game itself, but it just looked weird to see these characters in full 3D all the time. Still, the animation is quite good, with a cartoony look that is a logical and suitable evolution from the old style.

Scooby-dooby-dooo!

This isn't a game that requires much brainpower, and in that it's much like its cartoon inspiration. It's rather mindless fun, but no less fun for being mindless (see what strange things this game had done to my brain already?). I had been hoping for more of a mystery-solving adventure game, and so I was a little disappointed to discover it was really platform-style, but once I started to play I forgot to be disappointed. I think I keep saying this, but Scooby-Doo! Night of 100 Frights is fun. And that's about what all these words you've just read amount to.

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