Scooby-Doo!: Mystery of the Fun Park Phantom begins just like every Scooby-Doo episode has since 1969 ... with the catchy Scooby theme song and the suspense-filled opening animation (Who could forget the look on Scooby's face when he pops his head out of the barrel after running into that guy in the old-timey diving suit? Scooby, you so crazy!). Unfortunately, the movie compression quality used in the game is extremely poor, making the familiar opening sequence very pixilated and full of artifacts. What's worse is the movies made specifically for the game. Not only do they suffer from the same compression problems, but the digitally rendered movies have been re-inked to give them a hand-drawn look. This style fails, though, because the colors and inking are very blotchy, giving the impression that the Scooby Gang are slowly melting whenever you see them in a video sequence. It's all very eerie and incredibly disappointing at the same time.
The rest of the game looks pretty good and stays true to the original cartoon. The menus are slick and retain the same campy sixties look of the show, and the mostly static backgrounds are well detailed and look nice enough, but overall the game presents an inconsistent visual experience at best. The same coloring problems that are apparent in the animated sequences are just as noticeable on the in-game characters, and the blotchy, mottled colors combined with stiff animation really stand out against the nicely rendered backdrops of the Fun Park.
As you would expect from a game based on the Scooby-Doo cartoon, a lot of the charm of the product revolves around atmosphere. While the spooky music does sound like it could have come right out of the show and adds a lot to the ambiance of the game, the only original cast member to return to dub a voice for the game is Frank Welker as the voice of Fred. And while the voice talent behind Velma and Shaggy sounds pretty dead on, Daphne and Scooby are way off the mark.
The game itself is a lot like Clue, only simpler. Given enough time, you're lead directly to the face behind the Phantom, and the only mystery behind the game is why the design team made it so easy to solve the game. Here's how it plays out ... You're set loose in the Gobs' family Fun Park late at night as one of the Mystery Gang (Fred, Velma, Daphne, or my personal fav Shaggy -- you can't play as Scooby, but you can enlist his help through the use of Scooby Snacks which you'll find throughout the game) to find a Phantom that has been haunting the park, keeping visitors away and threatening to cause the family to have to close the park. Being the inquisitive kids that the Scooby Gang are, they smell something fishy and begin to look for clues and an ingenious way to capture the villain. The Fun Park is split into nine different sections, each filled with different clues and different components used to set a trap. What makes the game so simple, though, is that you already know exactly what three clues you need to determine which of the six suspects is the Phantom, so it's just a matter of going to every section of the map so you can collect them all. There's only one real villain, so you know you've nabbed him or her when you collect the three clues that correspond to a certain suspect (and the three pieces of the trap used for the area of the Fun Park that the suspect is loitering in). Unfortunately, there's no deductive reasoning (or any reasoning at all for that matter) used in the elimination or collection process. You just click, click, click until you can't click no more. You can go ahead and make a guess as to the Phantom's identity even if you don't have all of the clues (as long as you have enough Scooby Snacks to persuade Scooby to set your trap into motion), but it's just blind luck whether you're right or not. There's no puzzle-solving or mystery in this game at all, and the assertion that it's a "PC Mystery Game" on the front of the box is just absurd. The way it all plays out, it's just a matter of time before you stumble upon who the suspect is. It's not really so much a mystery game as it is an exercise in clicking the mouse button. The first person to randomly find the right clues and gather the right trap pieces wins, and as boring and mind-numbing as that sounds to play against a computer, it's even worse trying to find an online partner on the Microsoft Gaming Zone because two people were the most I ever saw in the Scooby-Doo game room, and they wouldn't even respond to my tells.
Scooby-Doo is a game that has about four miles of concept and an inch of ingenuity. This could have been a fun puzzler, but as it turns out, Scooby-Doo only falls flat on his face and leaves you wondering what could have been. Like so many other software companies who grab up big licenses for games, it's obvious that SouthPeak and EAI Interactive were hoping to just rake in a quick buck without providing any real substance -- and they might have gotten away with it if it wasn't for this meddling reviewer.
-- Tal Blevins
