Magical Fairy Hologram Energy: “Nicktoons Unite!” For Nintendo DS
Developer: Climax Action Limited
Publisher: THQ Inc.
Genre: Action, Platformer
Release Date: Early 2006
When it came to licensed games during the time when they were being made left or right, you would see a title get released on a bunch of different consoles and handhelds (though of course, just because they held the same name didn’t mean that they were the same game—the Game Boy Advance just isn’t capable of the same stuff as the GameCube, you know?).
I have already spoken about “Nicktoons Unite!” on the Game Boy Advance (GBA), so let’s take a look at the Nintendo DS version.
Story
The main story is effectively the same as the GBA version, minus some minor differences here and there. For instance, there is a subplot in Jimmy’s world where the heroes have to find and save Goddard (Jimmy’s pet robot dog). We also have this version acknowledge that Jimmy still fully believes that Timmy’s fairy godparents are holograms, as established in The Jimmy Timmy Power Hour trilogy (but Jimmy still refers to the fairy “hologram” energy as “magical” in this game, so...).
Gameplay
To preface, this game is, strangely enough, a three-dimensional platformer rather than a two-dimensional platformer. I am just going to be blunt and say that the camera wasn’t great and made it hard to see where I was jumping at times thanks to being too close to the character and also turning by itself at times. Still, it’s interesting that the developers went this direction.
Anyhow, just as it was with the GBA version, there are twelve levels with three per hero’s world. Instead of the final level of a world being solely dedicated to a boss, you have a platforming level and then face off against a boss. Instead of always having the same two objectives for every level, it changes for each room of the level. Sometimes, you have to collect all of a specific collectable, defeat all the enemies and destroy the portals or just get to the end.
There will be the occasional switch in order to activate platforms or events that you must reach. In addition to that, there are four minigames that utilize the touch screen that you do throughout the game in order to make progress. The first minigame has you connect similarly shaped diodes in order to complete a circuit; the second minigame has you flick ghosts toward a portal; the third minigame has you circle jellyfish or fairies in order to bubble them up to safety while jamming a machine by tossing jellyfish jam or anti-fairies into it; and the fourth minigame has you tap on projectiles thrown from the Syndicate of Evil before they hit a friend or family member of one of the heroes.
This game allows you to change heroes on the go using the touch screen. There is only one active hero at a time, so you don’t have a partner trailing behind you like in the GBA game. Each character has their own special abilities and movement options that allow you to traverse the environments or deal with foes in different ways.
Said special abilities take up expendable power displayed through a bar on the right side of the screen, just as the Game Boy Advance version did. However, there are some key differences in the Nintendo DS version. For context, the GBA version starts you off with half of that bar filled, and when you deplete more than a half of the bar, you automatically regenerate up to a half. The GBA version also has pick-ups that fill up the bar completely that are placed throughout the level or are randomly dropped by enemies. Because of these factors, the power bar hardly matters in the GBA version, and that’s why I didn’t mention it much in that entry.
However, in the Nintendo DS, you do not regenerate power naturally, and enemies do not randomly drop power-replenshing pick-ups upon defeat (with one exception that we will go over later). Your only source of power is pick-ups specifically placed in the level (that do come back after a bit), so finding pick-ups and maintaining your power bar matters more in this game.
Fall damage is also a mechanic in this game. You do some vertical platforming at times, so falling off to your death is a real possibility. However, you can avoid it in time using some of the character abilities.
Characters
Danny Phantom has the same special ability as he does in the GBA game, where he can phase through walls. He also possesses a wall jump that he can use to get up to higher places. His attack has him shoot out a green ghostly projectile. He’s (part) ghost, alright. (Strangely, it seems you can wall-jump off of any wall, but I didn’t mess with this much.)
SpongeBob SquarePants uses a bubble to reach high places but offers little movement horizontally. He shoots out bubbles as projectiles to hurt enemies. After performing a jump, he can then pull out his underwear from his square pants and use them as a parachute to float down. I’m not going to question how he is able to do that, let alone mid-air.
Jimmy Neutron can use his jetpack to propel him into the air, giving him both vertical and diagonal movement. He can also use his jetpack as a short double jump, giving him some added movability and precision. For his attack, he uses a shrink ray to diminish enemies to the atomic level, where not even their body can be found again. That’s kind of fucked up, Jimmy.
Timmy Turner’s special ability lets him briefly make enemies (and a certain boss) freeze in place, allowing him to coast past them without a care in the world. He is also always in a dash, giving him the fastest movement speed out of all of the heroes. He has no attack; instead, he disguises himself in a bush that allows him to remain undetected by enemies as long as he remains still.
In a direct contrast to the GBA version, where Jimmy was the most useless hero, I used Jimmy the most in the DS version. As said before, the camera makes platforming more difficult than it should be, so having a double jump for more precision helped a lot. SpongeBob’s underwear parachute also help in this regard, although not to the same extent. Jimmy and SpongeBob’s special abilities also received the most usage.
Originally, I was going to say that Timmy was the most useless hero, since he has no attack, his dash isn’t that much faster than the other heroes’ running and his special ability is very rarely given a time to shine (you can only really use it in his world, so three levels at most). However, there are a fair amount of stealth sections—yes, you read that right—where you have to sneak around patrollling enemies with the threat of an instant game over if you get caught. You have to use Timmy for these sections.
Danny, on the other hand, also has a rarely used special ability (I can only think of two places where you use it), and there aren’t many areas for him to wall-jump. His attack is good, but it is also functionally the same as SpongeBob’s. I would hardly switch to Danny because of these reasons. So while Timmy is niche, he has his place, whereas Danny barely does. (Timmy has definitely fallen the most down the tier list, though.)
Bosses
You fight off against Vlad Plasmius, Plankton, Denzel Crocker (they fixed the typo in this version) and Professor Calamitous in four separate boss fights. As said before, you go through a level prior to facing them off.
Vlad Plasmius seems to be the easiest of the bunch, where he just summons a bunch of clones that you have to shoot at until you find the real deal. The clones will deflect your projectiles back at you. I got extremely lucky during this fight and only hit a clone, like, twice, so if he does something else during the fight then I straight up don’t know.
Plankton is the worst boss, period. In comparison to the other bosses, which go by fairly quickly, Plankton is a long and protracted fight. Let me delineate the extended process of one cycle of this fight, which is going to take multiple paragraphs.
First, you start off on a ledge high up around the same height as Plankton, who is in a flying contraption. You hit him with a projectile. Plankton then activates the suction force of his machine, which forces you down into a hole where he drops a bunch of enemy jellyfish on you.
You then must keep on defeating jellyfish until they drop SpongeBob’s special ability pick-up. In fact, you are going to need at least two of these pick-ups, as one pick-up will not fill up your bar for what you will need to do. Now, although Plankton is still high up in the air, he is chasing you down in order to drop jellyfish on you, so you have to rush over away from him to a side of the hole.
Now, as SpongeBob, you want to activate your special ability and float up back to the ledge via the bubble. However, there is a chance here that, since Plankton is quite the helicopter parent, he is going to be hovering right above you and hit you right out of the bubble. I don’t know how to prevent this; it just happened sometimes that Plankton wouldn’t damage me through contact. If you do get hit, though, you will have to defeat more jellyfish to collect another pick-up, since you burned through enough of your power bar since he hit you right before the ledge.
Anyhow, let’s say that you got back up to the ledge. Great, so you just hit him again because he should be right beside you, right? Wrong. He is now on the other side of the arena somehow, and your projectiles don’t reach that far. In addition, as you run towards him, he will try to move away from you. Also remember that you have a horrible camera that you have to fight with and keep readjusting as you run in a curve.
So you switch to Timmy Turner for his faster movement just to make it easier to reach him in time. I say “in time” because if you don’t catch up to him and hit him in time, then he’s just going to activate the suction again and force you back into the hole. Keep in mind as well that once you are close enough to him, Timmy doesn’t have an attack, so you have to switch to another character and then, and then, hit him. Once you do that, he then activates the suction, and you do the whole process again. You have to do this three times, by the way.
Anyway, in direct contrast to Plankton, you have Denzel Crocker who you just run away from and use Timmy Turner’s enemy freeze ability to make him stop under thunderstorms so he gets shocked.
Professor Calamitous has you first go through two vertical platforming sections as he shoots you. The shots honestly don’t do that much damage, and you sometimes have to wait for moving platforms to get close enough for you to get on them, so I would just stand still and just take the hits instead of trying to swerve through them. After the vertical platforming sections, you then face off against him and shoot at him a bunch until he rockets away, leaving behind a computer chip. Using the chip, you hack the main computer and then complete four diode connection minigames under a time limit in order to stop the doomsday device.
Tutorials
...or lack thereof. A specific note that I want to make about this game is the lackluster tutorials. The game would tell you that you can do a certain action, but then not tell you how to do said action. For instance, I got briefly stuck in the first level, intended to be a tutorial level, because I needed to use Jimmy’s jetpack... but I didn’t know how to activate said jetpack. It took me some fiddling to figure out that I had to hold the icon in the middle of the touch screen in order to do that.
Two of the minigames—the diode connection and the bubbling jellyfish/fairies ones—were also poorly explained. The diode connection only said to connect similar shapes, so I thought that I had to make a direct connection between all the shapes. But no, you just have to power up a circuit, and then you can make a connection from any of those diodes, even if you haven’t made a direct connection to it. The bubbling minigame also did not explain that you only had to jam up the machine in order to win—I thought that I had to bubble up a certain amount of jellyfish/fairies and jam up the machine, but nope, the only win condition is jamming the machine up enough.
There is also this pick-up which apparently allows you to use a “Super ability” once. What is that Super ability? I have no idea because I never figured out how to use it as the game never told me and I didn’t bother looking it up during gameplay. Now after the fact looking it up, it appears you have to draw a circle around the icon on the touch screen in order to activate it. Yeah, I don’t blame myself for not figuring that out.
These issues could have easily been resolved by just having the tutorial text say what button to press or part of the touch screen to touch in order to perform the action.
Touch Controls
The touch screen detection wasn’t the best in this game. It especially became apparent during the minigames, where I would do an action such as swiping or circling multiple times and yet not have it register. It was especially irksome during the diode connection minigame where I didn’t completely know what the minigame was expecting out of me until much later into the game. Thankfully, the game doesn’t have you use the touch screen that much, so the frustration didn’t become overwhelming.
Conclusion
I would say that “Nicktoons Unite!” for the Nintendo DS is the more interesting game out of the handheld versions of the game but is significantly more frustrating. That frustration never became too much for me, but it was still a factor in my playthrough. Still, I think if you enjoy these Nickelodeon cartoons, the game is at least worth a look-see for being a three-dimensional DS game.