The Scooby Game, Part 1:
My son loves Scooby Doo. I can’t blame him. I loved Scooby Doo when I was a kid. And honestly, looking at some of the kids shows these days, it holds up pretty well. The Mystery Gang cares about others and they don’t use weapons. They just use their minds. Granted, each episode usually has at least one plot hole big enough to accommodate a decent sized planet, but I still give ‘em an “A” for effort. With this in mind, last year I decided to introduce him to a fairly current Scooby game. (Keep in mind that I have systems that are 30 years old, so the fact that this title was available for the Xbox, PS2, and GameCube puts it only one generation behind and, therefore, fairly current in this context.)

For those of you who may grow weary of my assorted analogies and meandering prose, I’ll give you the quick up front. It was a BAD idea. My son was just three at the time and he was at too early an age to appropriately relate to a more engaging and immersive title such as this one. I would seriously advise against such exposure at this age based on this experience. Now, for those of you still interested in the details and willing to navigate the twisted thought patterns of my mind, read on…

The game is called Scooby Doo! Night of 100 Frights. It’s actually a pretty good game. I’d rate it a 7.5 out of 10. The ESRB grants it an “E” for everyone with a caveat of “comic mischief.” The game is essentially a 3D platformer in which you have to solve a rather complicated mystery. It appears Professor Alexander Graham has mysteriously disappeared and the gang sets out to find him. However, before they get far, they all get kidnapped and it’s up to Scooby to find everyone and solve the mystery. This title is hub-based and requires multiple re-visits to stages to get all of the “Scooby Snacks” and “monster tokens.” The former are required to open additional areas while the latter are not required to complete the story. However, it was the monster tokens that became my son’s obsession.

Acquiring a monster token unlocked a 3D version of that monster in the monster gallery. In many cases, you’ll see a monster token when you enter an area, but you will have no way to reach it. Most of these require special inventions made by Professor Alexander Graham. And the inventions required to access many of these tokens are not available until the later parts of the game. I can’t tell you how many times we’d spend time in the same room or on a particular section of docks trying to figure out how to get a monster token. And it wouldn’t matter if I told him that we needed to come back later, he wouldn’t hear of it.

That was just one of the issues. Another was the difficulty curve for this title. Even though it’s listed as an “E” title, that’s just content. Nothing offensive in there. However, I cannot imagine anyone under seven or eight years having the patience and the hand-eye coordination to handle many of the tricky maneuvers. Especially one sequence that required the player to jump from ship to ship as they were sinking and if you made one mistake, you had to start all over again. There were a number of these sequences throughout the game and after my son failed repeatedly, he’d hand me the controller dejectedly and say, “I can’t do it Daddy. You do it for me.”

As you may have already guessed, I had enough warning flags to try to stop this, but he was obsessed. I tried to tell him that we could play it when he was a little older. That really depressed him. It was like I had opened Pandora’s box and it was too late for me to ask everything to get back in so I could close it up and pretend that it didn’t happen. Nope. My son begged to play, “The Scooby Game,” as he called it, all day long.

My wife, God bless her, played dumb. She has never been a big fan of videogames anyway so it wasn’t really a lie when she told him that he’d have to wait for Daddy to come home from work because she didn’t know how to work the system. We had him play in the evening after his younger sister had gone to bed. We didn’t want her to want to play the game at this point (and she was only one). But this time of day was a problem too. Be aware that some forms of entertainment can wind us down whereas other can do the opposite. In this case, the attention required for the platforming elements and the puzzle-solving components was enough to have his brain in high gear. Not only did he hate stopping the game at the one-hour limit, but he had a harder time winding down and going to sleep. My wife and I discussed this at length after the first week and we resolved to get through this title, but as soon as it was done, we would not introduce another game to him that would require this level of involvement and attachment. I’ll pick this up next week and give you the details of what transpired over the following month or so that it took us to survive our first immersive title with our son. In the meantime, if you have specific questions, observations, or relevant experiences of your own, I invite you to click the link below and share your comments.