The Three Stooges

Out of all the games I have played on the Amiga so far I enjoyed The Stooges the best; the graphics are wicked, with loadsadigitisation. The Stooges in the street scenes are well defined and it is easy to identify their facial expressions. The digitised sound is used to great effect on all the scenes and really does capture the slapstick brand of their classic comedy. Most of the scenes are based around separate short Stooge films and are brilliantly exectured. This is probably the only game on any computer that has intentionally set out to make people laugh, and worked.

The Three Stooges franchise is probably not at the top of anyone's list of concepts just waiting to be made into a videogame. But if one had to be made, this was exactly the way to do it. You may never bother to finish it, but its design allows it to be picked up and abandoned whenever convenient. This could have easily been a really crummy platformer or even a shooter, but instead the creators, clearly Stooge fans, avoided this pitfall and turned out something worth fooling around with even if you never see it all the way through.

As great as it is to see Cinemaware make a return to the gaming scene, I just hope the company sees that many of their games weren't as impressive in gameplay as they were in presentation back in the day. You can't get by on looks alone anymore...which is a good theory on why the company vanished a decade ago. The Three Stooges doesn't stand the test of time on the Game Boy Advance as well as it could have...as improved as it is from its original vision on the Amiga, it could have used an extra game mode or three to make it more significant in the GBA market.

The game's visuals are great and bring back the flavor of the Three Stooges very well, and this aspect of the game will appeal to fans of the movies. Even those who are not big fans will still enjoy the nostalgia. The gameplay, however, leaves much to be desired, mostly in terms of depth; there's just not much here to keep anyone's interest for long. Even arcade-challenged players like myself can master the games in a few rounds of playing and then go on to save the orphanage easily. My family reached a general consensus that this game didn't rate above the mediocre.

In fact, The Three Stooges is such a faithful port of the original that it even reproduces the disappointment many of us felt oh those many years ago when we realized that there was not a lot of gameplay beneath the clever film-like experience. Pieces of the interface remain just as inscrutable, and the narrow range of mini-games is not enough to justify the title's price, let alone the obvious love that went into other parts of the design.

Granted, fans of the Three Stooges or classic Cinemaware games will be pleased to see this game reappear after so many years, especially with the graphical upgrade allowed by newer hardware. Gamers who are unfamiliar with the history behind the game may find the level of gameplay too shallow to fathom, and the novelty of having Larry, Curly, and Moe at your fingertips will wear thin very soon. In the end, The Three Stooges looks and sounds good, but it just doesn't offer the depth that most gamers are looking for.