Garfield's Nightmare

Rating Everyone Genre action Publisher Game Factory External Links Official Garfield Nightmare Website

Garfield has eaten too much before going to bed and as he drifts off to sleep his nightmare begins in a strange haunted castle. Although Garfield loves sleeping, this horrible dream has to end as soon as possible! Unfortunately, he smashed his alarm clock in the "real world" and now his only chance of waking up soon depends on his ability to find the shattered pieces and put them back together.

Garfield is one of the worst cartoon character's to ever achieve any type of notoriety. Debuted in 1978, the strip has evolved at the same rate mankind has. Garfield is fat, Odie is dumb, Jon is lonely and useless. Good job Jim Davis, maybe you should actually draw your own comic once in a while instead of continuing to be the major of Lame City.

It's hard to imagine building television shows, parade floats, multiple movies, shirts, pajamas, and God knows what else out of such a terrible premise, but the lowest common denominator has proven itself before. The video game spin offs are the hardest to believe though. Watch Garfield eat lasagna, kick Odie, and sleep all day. Just get a feral cat and watch it lay out all day, same thing. So when Garfield's Nightmare showed up, I couldn't wait to find out how they made the laziest creature in show business interesting enough for game play. Turns out not much could be done.

Garfield's Nightmare doesn't really have too many glaring problems; the environments look good in many cases. Shadows appear where they're supposed to, snow looks cold, lava looks hot, all of the parts of a background that should work do work. Garfield is rounded and smooth, not blocky and ugly. His actions are basic and easy to control; jump, stomp, and crawl make up most of the controls of the day.

The levels are fairly interesting with good variations and some nice secret areas. There are even mini-games built into the levels when enough coins are collected. Additionally, playable mini-games are unlocked after every complete level. The games are tacky and poorly put together, but the effort is nice. You can see that Shin'en did a lot of work to get some really slick looking parts into Garfield's Nightmare, but it seems odd that so much work went into another platform-jumping waste of time.

Nothing really stands out about Garfield's Nightmare. Graphically, it stands a head above many games, but with nothing much happening, who cares? Garfield walks, never runs, which drags the game to a snails crawl. Mario covered the single attack of jumping on an enemy over 20 years ago. Game developers have beaten this attack to death. why not innovate with something a little different? The touch screen is totally ignored outside of some silly mini-games that hardly unlock the DS's real potential. Garfield's Nightmare might as well have come out for Game Boy Advance. The secondary menus don't help the game. Why develop for two screens if one will do the trick?

Official looking Garfield cartoons that break the action between levels are also boring and uninteresting, stringing together an unremarkable storyline with equally unremarkable gameplay. Pound for pound, it just doesn't seem like this newest push in the Garfield market makes it. Sure, there are things to do, objectives to complete, but no real motivation other than to play a different game. Shin'en did a good job with the material provided to them, a boring cat with a boring premise. They can and probably will deliver some higher quality games for the DS in the future. Just not today.