Completion Time: 9h:20m:00s
Rating: 4/10

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Ruh Roh

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It's fascinating how a property can endure over time, especially when it comes to the creations of Hanna-Barbera. Most of their characters endure on concept alone, as if you go back and watch the various television shorts, you'd be hard-pressed to find any that hold up very well. The one's that tend to break the mold here are Tom & Jerry (which were pure slapstick and had theatrical short budgets), The Flintstones (which had a specialized format and aired as a primetime sitcom), and Scooby-Doo. The overall vibe and atmosphere that goes into Scooby-Doo, the fact that it was one of the earlier examples of spooky comedies for kids, and even the character design (Iwao Takamoto) and background art (Walt Peregoy) stands out. The original show only lasted a year, and yet has created an enduring legacy that Hanna-Barbera themselves tried to replicate a hundred times over.

Goober may be no Scooby, but at least he's not Speed Buggy

To that end, there have been large swaths of merchandise to come from the property, and you I'm sure everyone is well aware that it extends to video games too. I myself had Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase as my first PlayStation game and played it countless times until I could actually beat the thing (it should be noted, I had no memory card at the time). But enough beating around the bush, it's about time I actually get into Mystery Mayhem as the final entry in my "Halloween 2023" themed GameCube Gauntlet.

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Jinkies, Zoinks, and So On

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So early on in my experience playing this game, I was actually pretty charmed by the presentation. The vocal performances were pretty good, with all of them being the actors that performed the characters regularly in the early aughts. Of course, that's with exception to Frank Welker, who's been voicing Fred since 1969. The musical choices behind the different backdrops and scenes are reminiscent of something you would find in that original show, and there's even canned laughter that plays during these cutscenes as well. That's a nice touch, especially when accommodating the awful jokes that are told in these clips. All together, it's a good first impression of the type of game you're getting into when progressing through the first chapter.

The models are pretty bouncy and expressive in these scenes too, surprising

By the time you get the the second level, everything is starting to wear thin though. Besides running around and collecting things, the primary mechanic of the game is sucking ghouls up into this magical book that you've found, and finding new pages will allow you to grab new types of monsters. The only problem here is that these monsters tend to litter every crack and crevice throughout each stage, and the second level may be the worst offender. It's a giant twisting maze fashioned like a movie studio with puzzles that need to be solved in order to move set pieces together for traversal. All the while you're constantly being attacked by creatures that you can't defeat, because the game's built in sneak mechanic doesn't seem to function correctly. I tried this a number of times and could never get it to work, so instead I opted to just run around everything a million times until I finally discovered where it was I was meant to be going.

Now if I could just be semi-invisible like this guy to the right, I'd have no problems!

But perhaps the worst offenders and the biggest headaches I encountered were the "on-rails" segments. In Chapter 3, there's a segment which sees you in a minecart, riding around and jumping, dodging, and ducking your way through an abandoned mine. In Chapter 4, there's a similar segment on a motorbike as you drive through the bayou, also with ducking, dodging, and jumping. The minecart was frustrating just due to the controls not always responding, sometimes it felt as if I were on a delay, which led to more than my fair share of dead ends, which would cause me to start the segment over. The motorcycle is slightly less on-rails, which makes it even worse because controlling this thing with the analog stick was a nightmare that saw me plummeting off of bridges and into the Louisiana swamp more times than I care to mention. And both of these segments are WAY too long, with the difficulty, length, and need to revisit for collectibles (we'll get to that later), I probably spent close to an hour and a half on these portions of gameplay alone. I hope to never encounter this again so long as I can remember the hassle.

I swear this minecart gave me more problems than any in the Donkey Kong Country franchise

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Completing the Game

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As is the case for most games I've been completing recently, the main completion criteria here comes in the form of collectibles. And thankfully for myself, the list of items here is blissfully short and definitely manageable. The two items to be considered here are Clues and Ingredients, there are 5 of each in every stage, of which there are also 5. So 50 total collectibles across the entire game, with Clues unlocking art gallery items and character models, and Ingredients unlocking mini-games (though only if you collect all within a stage). Not bad, but if you think that they'll come easy then you're sorely mistaken. A couple will kind of just be thrown in your path as you progress, others are dependent on completing specific tasks before they'll appear, and yet a third kind require you to pointlessly revisit sections of the map that you've already been to once before and magically something will now be there. The last one there, that is the most frustrating, just because there's no real rhyme or reason, just time wasting.

Well, I've been here three times already, but... oh, where'd that steak come from?

But, similarly to the previous section, the worst of it really does come from the two "on-rails" segments. It figures that the minecart and motorcycle portions of the game would have Clues and Ingredients hidden in out of the way places that seem similar to every other path available, which requires you to probably go through both multiple times if you want to come across exactly what it is you're looking for. And remember, these segments of the game are LONG, much longer than they need to be, so if you reach the end and you still haven't found that

Shaggy and Scooby came across food way more easily in the show than they do here

Scooby-Doo! Mystery Mayhem is not a good game, and I can't say that I enjoyed my time with it. Not nearly as bad as that Universal Studios game I played earlier in the year, at least this seems competent, but its a frustrating exercise in testing my patience more than it is anything else. It gets point from me operating solely on charm alone, and the various ways that it tries to ape the Scooby-Doo, Where Are You? formula rather than just dropping familiar characters into a wacky situation. However, by the second level that charm evaporate into almost nothing. It seems there are two other Scooby-Doo games on the GameCube, maybe I'll play another one for next Halloween and we'll see how it measures up.

This is the last entry of my GameCube Halloween entries for this year, so have a happy Halloween everybody! Gonna go back to trying to make these biweekly instead of weekly now.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 10/652