However, that didn't stop me from wanting to play their video games. After all, a television show doesn't have to be exciting all the time, but a video game...man, those need to always be action packed!
How naive I was back then.
So I got this game for my Game Boy, played for a while...and halfway through stopped and didn't pick it up again for many years afterward. In fact, I don't think I ever completed the last stage, based on what the speed run I just watched looks like.
So let's look back at a game that I honestly couldn't care less about.
Now, some times a video game will attempt to expand upon existing story lines or make up entirely new ones. The Tiny Toon Adventures games were basic side-scrolling action games, but you had interesting stages such as a train, the Looniversity, and other settings. The Simpsons managed an arcade game with an entirely new (and completely perplexing) story line, but their handheld games were also unique. Bart's Nightmare, Bart Simpson's Escape From Camp Deadly, Bart vs. The Juggernauts, Bartman Meets Radioactive Man... they each took an existing property and did more than just rehash old story lines in it.
The Ren And Stimpy Show: Veediots rehashed four episodes and called it a day. Then someone pointed out that sure, that might work for the Super Nintendo version, but the Game Boy doesn't have as much processing power. So they threw out one of the stages, cut out the boss battles, all the opening "cinematics," the quality music, the tightness of the controls, and then went home.
First, you have The Boy Who Cried Rat! which lets you play as Ren. You're wearing mouse ears, and you need to avoid being caught by Stimpy. This involves things like jumping to cling to clocks so you can be flung further, throwing around logs and vases, avoiding Stimpy, and generally jumping around and saying...you know, I'm not really sure what the cheap sound bite actually says, but it sounds like "hurting!" whenever you get struck.
The stage ends when you wind up being eaten by Stimpy. I'm not kidding, it has that gag where Stimpy holds a fake wall in front of his mouth with a hole in it, and Ren just jumps right in.
Congratulations, kids, your character's now dead, I guess.
Stage two through....man, I think eight? Are based on Stimpy's Invention, which is the source of the "Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy!" song. You play as Stimpy, running around a ridiculously large lab while trying to get to giant tubes that suck you up and send you to the next stage. It's like Portal if you stripped it of all the personality, fun, and physics puzzles.
There were a few puzzles you had to solve, though. Things like "pick up chemical A, pour into beaker, move beaker near wall, pick up chemical B, pour into beaker, run away while beaker explodes and takes out wall." Except I remember getting stuck and reading the manual multiple times and never finding any references to "picking up things to pour into beakers."
There was also a blow torch you had to pick up (and I'm being generous with that, as they simply glued the pixels to Stimpy so it looked like he was holding a lit blowtorch with his nose...which isn't too far out of line for the cartoon) and burn through walls. Except the book didn't tell you that you could do that with a blow torch, so I ran around trying to light everything else in the lab on fire to see if it would become a bomb to blow up the wall blocking me.
And, since I couldn't get past that...I quit.
I gave the game to my sister a couple of years later and let it completely slip from my memory.
Apparently the last stage is Ren running around in boot camp, dodging bullets and a replacement for Stimpy until he gets to the end of the stage and the game just ends.
No, really, that's it. The game's over.
Congratulations, if you did a speed run, you just used up less than ten minutes of your life.
Here, I can save you some time. Here's the speed run.
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