N-Philes

Atomic Betty

Posted December 10th 2005 by Jordan Mammo.

Creativity. Ambition. These are a couple of the words you'll see fade in and out of the screen if you visit Atomic Cartoons' website. These are also things that the Atomic Betty video game totally lacks. "Pfft... what else is new?" you ask. After all, this is but a lowly licensed GameBoy Advance game based on yet another kids' television show. It's just something hastily whipped together, packaged, and sent out to suck the money out of parents who are buying the game for their children who recognized their favorite cartoon character on the box, right?

Or is it?

Well, it turns out that it is exactly what you expected, but at least the developers at Big Blue Bubble can be given credit for making me question that notion at all, if only for a little while.

Atomic Betty opens up as Betty meets up with her friends at school. As luck would have it, Betty's forgotten her homework at home and can't play in the big game and get her MVP award unless she turns it in that day. When she returns to grab it, her cat steals it and runs off into the school's basement (don't you just hate when that happens?). As if that wasn't enough to contend with, the evil Maximus I.Q. (a cat in a robe) is causing a ruckus. At this point, Betty will transform into the galactic superhero she truly is and travel across the cosmos in order to stop the crazy feline.

As you may be able to tell by now, Atomic Betty is split up into two main parts: the search for homework in the school basement and the quest to stop Maximus I.Q. What I was expecting coming into this game was basic platforming fare, but Atomic Betty surprises by deviating from this set-up in favor of a more mission-based, puzzle-oriented structure. Betty is accompanied by two friends on each mission and each character has abilities unique to them, such as Sparky the Alien being able to fly for a bit. So players are faced with puzzles that need to be solved by using each character's skills to their advantage. Now you may be thinking that this sounds somewhat appealing, but you'd be much better off taking a large wrench and slamming it into your forehead. Allow me to explain.

I had to do a creative arts project once for my American History class in high school and I had this amazingly cool idea: To create a model of the first man landing on the moon. In my head I pictured an elaborate kick-ass astronaut figure I would create with blood, sweat, tears, plaster, glue, space-age materials and of course, love. Two days before it was due, I took a block of Styrofoam, carved a hole into it with a butterknife (duh, a crater), painted it gray, plopped a white Lego helmet onto a Lego figure and taped him to the moon. Then I cut out a small paper rectangle, drew the American flag on it, taped it to a toothpick and jammed it in the Styrofoam. Of course, only one side of the flag had the stripes and stars on it. In case you were wondering, I didn't receive an "A" for this project.

Ladies and gentlemen, Atomic Betty is my history project.

This could have been a pretty good game. The ideas that hold promise seem to be there, but the execution is light years off the mark. There are the bare-bones essentials here and absolutely nothing is expanded upon. If Atomic Betty resembles anything already out on the market, it's Namco's excellent Klonoa: Empire of Dreams for the GameBoy Advance. The focus isn't so much on old-school platforming as it is on figuring out how to reach certain areas and either get your homework back or "hack" into the enemy computers. But where Klonoa is constantly adding new puzzles and environmental features to toy around with, Atomic Betty, for the most part, sticks very close to what you learn in the first couple of levels.

For example, as I mentioned earlier, Sparky can fly. Obviously this means he can reach higher platforms that Betty and X-5 (a little yellow robot) can't. So you make Sparky fly up to a ledge where there is a switch, you hit the switch, and then the elevator starts moving so Betty and company can use it. Congratulations, you have now figured out roughly a third of this game's obstacles, and for a game that can be finished easily in less than two hours, that's not very good.

To break up all the switch-pressing, Atomic Betty offers a handful of mini-games, none of which are very fun or challenging and all of which will get monotonous pretty quickly. "Hacking" into a computer's firewall simply consists of moving a robot right or left to sneak through the gaps in red bars as they fall down the screen (just like hacking in reality). When you collect Betty's homework, you've got to shoot freethrows by pushing the "A" button to determine the force you put behind the ball and the trajectory it's thrown at. This was mildly amusing at first, but considering you play this mini-game three times in the first level and will continue to play it three times each period you're in the school until the game is over, getting sick of it doesn't take very long.

If the mini-games don't sound very exciting to you, perhaps the combat aspects will amaze you! Or, perhaps not. Fighting attacks are the first thing you learn in the opening tutorial, and it's easily this title's most mind-numbingly boring aspect. Rather than confuse the player with having to learn more than a few moves, the game's developers made it easy by having Betty run up to an enemy where you can hit the "B" button and attack. That's about it.

Now you may think that because Betty gets some special moves in each level like a boxing glove, things may start to get interesting. Think again, Space Cowboy. Shooting robots with this super awesome special move only gets you electrocuted, but simply running up and kicking them with your bare feet will turn them into trash heaps. Luckily Betty can kick her way easily to the end, because the hardest enemies in the entire game simply walk back and forth a short distance or stand in one spot hoping you don't kill them. Way to reach for the stars, Big Blue Bubble.

This game gets an N-Philes score of D.

In the overall scheme of things, it's not very surprising that Atomic Betty turned out the way it did despite an interesting foundation. Simply put, there's just not much substance. Almost everything there is to experience can be found in the first couple of levels, and what little is added to the game later on certainly doesn't make it worth a play-through, much less a purchase. For those thinking about getting this game for a younger gamer, realize that after leaving the game with my little sister, I returned to find her reading a book instead.

Hey, if Atomic Betty can make kids want to read more, it may not be so bad after all.

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