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Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas: Oogie's Revenge Playstation2 Capcom  I'm in two minds about this game. One the one hand, it's a surprisingly faithful rendition of the world created by Burton and director Henry Selig for the 1993 stop-motion cult favourite 'The Nightmare Before Christmas', even down to their excellent recreation of Danny Elfman's score (in fact, the only giveaway is that some of the voices are different), and the voice actors do a bang up job of recreating the characters, especially that of main character Jack Skellington. Some serious thought has gone into the gameplay, the design and the story, meaning that this is about as far from the typical game-based-on-a-film as possible. However there's one major stumbling block that almost ruins it, which I'll get to shortly. Some time after the events of the film, the mischievous Lock, Shock and Barrel bring back the wicked Oogie Boogie while Jack's away researching ways to make Halloween even more scary. He returns to find Halloweentown seemingly abandoned, the populace replaced with evil skeletons roaming the streets. Luckily resident mad scientist Professor Finklestein had equipped Jack with a strange, Flubber-like weapon called the Soul Robber, which acts as an all-purpose whip/grappling hook affair - and so the job of defeating Oogie, finding all the vanished townfolk and rescuing his kidnapped love Sally begins. It's obviously had no small amount of love put into it. Boss levels are set to song (with a bonus-point-getting dance-off in the middle, akin to similar moments in 'Space Channel 5' or 'GTA: San Andreas'), the sets and characters look superb and the story, with some qualifications, is a worthy sequel to the film. There's also some variety to the gameplay: Jack can also take on a couple of guises, including Santa Jack (flinging presents with various weapons thererin) and The Pumpkin King (fire attacks) - and there are occasions where you'll have to switch personas mid-level (or, indeed, mid battle), so be ready. On the other hand, at times it's also unbelievably frustrating. The camera swoops around at will from a series of fixed positions, making it damnably hard to get perspective on your foes - which is a fairly serious liability when they have ranged weapons and you're slashing at them with your Soul Robber - and if you're anything like me, you'll start pre-emptively crying when the inevitable jump-and-swing-across-lava level appears. There are also a lot of levels that are common-or-garden platform fare; run along defeating enemies in a very linear path, overcome the odd obstruction or unlock the occasional puzzle, with a Boss awaiting you at the end. Those with loads of time on their hands can collect the many, many bonus items (including unlockable characters if you can get an A rating). Dedicated fans of the film will probably enjoy this, although I admit to getting pretty bored after a while - whatever charms the story has are offset by the sheer frustration at the camera set up. However, as adaptations of movie source material goes, 'Oogie's Revenge' is one of the most faithful I've seen.  |
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