Dexter's Laboratory: Mandark's Lab (Sony Playstation, 2002, BAM ! Entertainment)

Dexter's Laboratory is and always has been my most favourite show that Cartoon Network ever produced. While I liked the Powerpuff Girls, learned to appreciate the original Johnny Bravo series and so on, Dexter has always been my most favourite of the lot, outside of maybe Cow and Chicken/I am Weasel, thanks in most part to the tremendous talent of Charlie Adler.

Bugs Bunny Lost in Time looked better then this.

Still, the Dexter franchise has always been dear to my heart. And sadly, I was destined to continously encounter dissapointment whenever I got my hopes up for something more. The New episodes, which ran from 2001 to 2003 had managed, after only a year of production hiatus, to basicly completely alienate me, trying to replace the somewhat angular but recognisable drawing style with the pulsating, contortionist animation of Ren and Stimpy, while also seemingly either abandoning the idea of segments having a point anymore (The Lab of Tommorow) or just plain insult the inteligence of everyone watching (Tele Trauma). The cast was changed, with Christine Cavanaugh replaced by Candi Milo who tries, but just doesn't get it right, and worst of all, the animation at points became painfull to watch, a simple walk cycle proving too difficult for the animators to handle.

The Pointless POV mode

And then, right in the middle of all that, came this game. It starts off with an animated "cutscene" which is, like all "cutscenes", just repurpossed footage from the show, from the original series to be exact. This is made painfully obvious when you have Candi Milo's voice coming out of classic Dexter's mouth, in clips from episodes you've already seen, with the lip flaps almost never matching the words. Worse yet, the cutscenes have the tendency to repeat one or two static or barely moving character poses and superimpose them onto different backgrounds to emphasise the lazyness. A certain shot of Mandark is used at least three times, and this becomes very noticeable given the short length of the game.

After the cutscene ends you are assailed by the second biggest punch in the face - the horrible CGI. The graphics, for a post mortem PS1 game, are just plain embarassing, and actualy pale in comparisson to those of Jumping Flash, a game released in 1995, a full 7 years prior, on the same platform. But not only did Flash's graphics not look ugly, simply more polygonal, it had huge sprawling environments where the player was completely free to go explore in any direction, something even Crash Bandicoot never managed to do in three games on the platform. Mandark's Lab has neither.

Sadly the Dodgeball minigame doesn't even
provide any kind of decent action, as your glued in place
and can only turn about 130 ° in total

And yet I had some expectations for the game, at least from the simple fact of being able to walk around Dexter's house freely. Sadly, this is not fully utilised, as you can't access the kitchen at any point, and worst of all the game doesn't even feature Dexter's parents in any way, highlighting the true cash in nature of this title.

The fact of the matter is the game consists of a small series of minigames you have to play through to win, the overworld serves as a simple, bare bones corridor from one minigame to the next. The total being 8. And they couldn't even be bothered to actualy think up eight distinct mini games, so you have two nearly identical DDR segments only differing thanks to the different CGI animation in the background.

The First DDR segment (no I'm not going to make that pun) realy
shows just how little time was actualy put into this game

The Minigames are, in order : Dee Dee's (DDR) Dance off, Cootie Call (simplistic rail shooter, where you spray 2 D Cootie sprites), What's Buggin Dexter (chasing after a Computer Bug and swating), Up N' Atom (Flying shooter), Dodge Ball (Creativite eh ?), Soapbox Derby, Molecular Mix off (Dance Off V. 2) and Sub Zero Hero (basicly shufflepuck). All of these are realy basic, and the idea to re-use classic episodes as levels is barely executed, with only two of them.

The game itself can be beaten in about 30-40 minutes, including cutscenes, and outside of trying to beat your high score there isn't much point in replaying it ever again once you finish it.