It's a shame when good ideas go bad. You can see the intent, you know where a game developer is coming from, you really want to be supportive, but in the end you can't help but admit that it's a complete failure. Such is the state of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: Attack of the Twonkies for the GameBoy Advance. It means well, and its heart is in the right place, but ultimately it's a dull platformer-by-the numbers that is utterly forgettable in just about every way possible.

Imitation is not always flattering

When I was little, I worshipped my big brother, and tried to be just like him. I wore the same kinds of clothes, ate the same kind of food, and watched the same kind of TV shows. As endearing as my parents may have found it, the fact remained that no matter how hard I tried, I just wasn't ever going to be quite like my elder sibling. Twonkies suffers from much the same problem, trying to imitate its older brother on the PS2. The story is roughly the same, starting off with Jimmy's rocket trip to the Twonkus-3 comet, where he encounters a hostile life form and unwittingly picks up a stowaway. When Jimmy returns to earth, the adorable passenger, a small, orange, bouncing furball, begins multiplying like dollars in Oprah's bank account. Before you can say "Prime Directive," Jimmy's home town of Retroville is overrun by aliens, and everyone's pointing the finger at him. (And shaking it angrily.)

Jimmy's first order of business is to come up with a way to round up the Twonkies. Fortunately, he's a genius inventor who can take just about anything and make it into a fantastic gadget. He devises a vacuum-like device, the VDR, to suck up the Twonkies, and sets about his business. He quickly discovers that music causes the Twonkies to evolve into larger creatures, Stompers and Gromps, and quickly fashions the Sheenograph to devolve them so that they can be sucked up. The cleaning of Retroville can begin!

A blueprint for boredom

Although the story is great fodder for a platforming/action title, trying to cram the same action from the PS2 version into the GBA version simply doesn't work. It's not because of the switch from 3d to 2d, as that works fairly well. True, you don't have the same sort of freedom of movement, but the level design is adequate and the jumping puzzles are pretty good. They're not Mario-style slick or challenging, but since this is a title pretty clearly aimed at the younger set, that can be forgiven. The characters are also rendered faithfully and colorfully, and are easily identifiable as the folks from the movie and TV show. No, the problem is that THQ simply tried to squeeze far too much game into too small a package. Not a complaint you'll hear very often, I know, as we reviewers normally complain about exactly the opposite.

The heart of the game is the wacky array of inventions that Jimmy creates from the everyday objects he finds. As you pick up items, they're added to your inventory. When you've collected all the ingredients for a particular invention, it's automatically made for you. Although that does save you the trouble of making it yourself, it turns the invention process into little more than random item collection. You'll simply pick up everything you see, and every so often, you'll get a new piece of equipment. Similarly scattered around the environments are huge chunks of Neutronium, just begging to be collected. For every five chunks you grab, you regain a unit of health. I know that platformers are usually a frenzy of item collection, but without any real payoff, it just feels like a chore. There's no real connection felt between the invention objects and the tool you eventually create, and the Neutronium doesn't help your health enough when you need it to.

Is that a shrink ray in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

You'll eventually collect enough objects to create around 10 different inventions or so, which you'd think would expand the gameplay past the simple "find a Twonkie, suck it up" design, but you'd be wrong. Most of the things you invent are really only useful in a handful of situations, so for the most part they just clutter up your inventory. I could forgive that, since Jimmy apparently has pockets of unusual size, capable of holding an endless string of trinkets, but using the L and R buttons to switch between the inventions is especially frustrating when so many of them do you no good. Getting hit because you're frantically tapping away on the shoulder button to get to the invention you need really loses its charm after the fourth or fifth time.

This same setup hampers the use of your robot dog, Goddard, who can do much better tricks than just rolling over or giving his paw. He can become a platform for Jimmy to stand on, he can knock down oncoming enemies with a powerful bark, or he can confuse enemies by "playing dead," which in his case means blowing up. You call Goddard by pushing both shoulder buttons, then cycle through his commands with the L and R buttons. Notice how both your inventions and Goddard use the same setup? Not only does that mean that getting your dog to do what you want him to when you want him to is annoying, it means that you can only use him or one of your inventions at a time, not both. Besides being stupid, it's a system that's pretty much tailor-made to frustrate young gamers so much they'll end up hurling their SPs in protest.

Even the inventions that you do use on a regular basis cause their own problems. Anti-gravity sneakers allow Jimmy to jump higher than the average kid, but they also cushion his landing, making the jumping feel floaty, which can mess with your timing. Fortunately, the jumping puzzles in Twonkies aren't so intricate that they require split second timing, but gamers used to tight control will likely find the jumping mechanics unsatisfying. Along those same lines, during the second half of a double jump, Jimmy spins around in mid-air. I know it's just done for stylish reasons, but it gets in the way of precision landings and slows down the entire process, making it feel lethargic.

To press B, or not to press B…

Next up on the frustrating control hit parade is the B button. Because THQ tried to stuff too much action into a system with so few buttons, the B button sees a lot of use in Twonkies. Using an invention and sliding, for example, are both done by hitting B. Not really a problem, until you try to run away from a Twonkie or Gromp, and then quickly turn and fire. More often than not, you'll end up sliding right into them and taking a hit. In later levels of the game, Jimmy acquires inventions that will solve this particular problem, but it definitely saps a lot of the fun out of the first few hours of gameplay.

The few parts of The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius: Attack of the Twonkies that aren't actively bad are mediocre at best. The item collection is dull and uninspired, the level design is taken straight from Platforming 101 and could have come from any one of a dozen similar titles, and the sound is, well, GameBoy sound. It's not what I expected from such fun, quirky source material as the Jimmy Neutron series. The visual style is in keeping with the show, but the animations for just about everything but Jimmy himself are choppy or clunky. The cutscenes aren't so much scenes as they are tableaux, which, in case you missed art class, means they don't move. The mediocrity can, perhaps, be overlooked when you consider that the game is intended for the grade school set, but the crappy control cannot. Twonkies requires too much effort for too little fun, and you don't have to be a genius to figure that out.