Format: Advance
Genre: Action
Developer: Human Soft
Publisher: THQ

Mode 7 is a fabled technology of the snes era often used for cutscene cinematics. Then some dumb asshat got the bright idea to make an entire GBA game out of it. Thus begins the life cycle of the game Jimmy Neutron vs Jimmy Negatron. Yes, that's right, the entire friggin game is mode 7. To start out, the main menu is an interactive display. This will instantly confuse players a bit. Going to left gives options and credits while going to the right gives multiplayer games. Up and down will toggle between the tutorial(represented by an old woman), new game(represented by a neutron atom) and password entry (represented by random letters). When you start the game, shithead Jimmy Neutron is there and you're on the main map. Now is the moment you realize just how shitty this game is because you not only have to figure out where to go, but have to figure out where the thing is that you're trying to find. Walking up to people will automatically make them talk, and bumping into them further makes their text disappear. This is the only way you will get any direction or information in this game. The game is split up into 3 sections I've dubbed "start" "middle" and "end". There are 3 areas you can initially go to in the "start" part of the game, each with 3 levels inside them as well. That means 9 levels and a Boss at each point in the game. In other words, this game has 27 levels, 3 bosses, and a final combined boss-level thing. This sounds pretty average at first until you discover how horrible the concept of mode 7 is. Almost all of the levels involve some sort of tiny platform jumping and to top it off, you have tank controls. Mode 7 + tank controls + tiny platform jumping = disaster. The skyboxs are almost frenic with their designs as well. Sometimes you get really good ones like the space backgrounds, and other times you get absolute incarnation of shit like the brown jelly level. The jumps are often barely reachable. Worse than that, some of the jumps in the "middle" levels are actually physically impossible. This fact led me to the observation that "L" is the strafing button. Yes, ya'll probably see where I'm going with this. STRAFE JUMPING IS REQUIRED TO PROGRESS THE GAME! This shitpile does the age old tactic where strafing actually makes you go faster and strafe jumping makes you go farther. Aside from the clear and evident horrendous nature of the actual movement, design, and platforming... let's talk about the elephant in the room. Enemies. Now the enemies themselves can be kinda dicks sometimes, but holy tacos, this steaming pile brings this to a whole new level because of how they're designed. You will run into 2 types of situations in this game. Enemies that are beyond stupid and are barely a threat, and Enemies that are stupidly annoying and nigh impossible to hit at all. Sometimes these 2 types of enemies will be the same actual enemy but their AI or placement will just be radically different. As an example; there's a robot enemy on the moon stage of the game, and it can only shoot infront of itself. There are many spots where you can usually get on the side of these buggers, but some specific bridges force you to face them head on to get to the level exit. Likewise, some enemies have annoying "tracker" ai which will haunt you and charge straight at you if you're within their area. This may sound like a 'well why don't you just get good' situation, but aha, there in comes the biggest problem of the game. You see, in order to attack in this game you need energy. A basic 1 damage attack costs about 1/3rd of a bar pellet, and a strong attack takes about 1 full bar pellet. This means that you waste more energy using strong attacks, BUT, you can get rid of problematic enemies faster(and believe me you will want to do this). The max amount of energy you can have is about 5 bar-pellets worth, HOWEVER, you will only regenerate up to the minimum of 1/3rd of a bar pellet. That means that no matter how good you are, at any point in time, you will only have a maximum of 1 weak shot. The length of time to regenerate that energy is about 7 seconds. So every 7 seconds you get 1 weak shot. There are energy neutrons around that can give you about 2.8 bar pellets of energy, however, you will run through any energy you acquire VERY FAST. This will lead to SEVERAL situations where you are simply waiting for energy in order to take out the next enemy. The game becomes less about jumping or fighting and more about waiting for the damn energy bar to refill so you can MISS the next lowsy shot on the stupid enemy and have to wait another 7 seconds to try again. Some enemies are also airbound, meaning you can't hit them on the ground, and you also can't hit them at max height in your jump either. Even worse, some of these enemies are also extremely mobile making it nigh impossible to hit the bastards. The goals of the levels vary and often break down into "collect 10 BLAHHH" "Touch 10 BLAHHH" or "Kill 10 BLAHHH". The worst level in the game was cindy's dream 3. Why was it the worst? Well, your goal was to destroy 10 dark bears. These bears had 8 hit points each and were highly mobile. For anyone wondering, that's 8 hp * 10 bears * 7 second recharge = 9.3 minutes. That's killing the bears alone, not even including the rest of the level. It took me about 30 minutes to get through that dang level. Everything in this game was absolutely horrible. If you die you get kicked out of the level and have to do it all again, which made lives worthless. When you game over you have to restart THE ENTIRE GAME. Each level keeps track of your coin collection %, enemies beaten % and secrets found %... which doesn't even matter. Yes, I said that right, the %'s do NOTHING! There are no menu unlocks or trophies or anything, they just put it in there JUST BECAUSE. By the way, secrets are in every stage, 1's always have 1 secret, 2's have 2 secrets, 3's have 3 secrets, and the final level also has 3 secrets surrounding the final boss arena. NOT THAT THEY DO ANYTHING GAME!!!! The worst part though, after you finish off the final boss, every one of your friends strokes your ego and then.... MAIN MENU. GAME DOESN'T EVEN TAKE YOU TO THE CREDITS!!!!!! Gives you a password that lets you view that 5 seconds of stroking, but NO CREDITS!!! The credits are actually buried over to the left of the main menu and for some ungodly known reason, they don't show them after you beat the game. You have to manually go view them. Nothing else happens after you beat the game either. It's quite possibly the biggest middle finger I've seen in gaming since I started this challenge. DO NOT PLAY THIS GAME.

Hot Tips: Use the shop to restore health instead of buying lives, it's more cost efficient.

All in All, This terrible game gets a 2.5 score for it's barely playable functionality and music. Tank Controls, Mode 7 Design, Pitiful Game Testing, Terrible Design, Terrible Gameplay Design, Terrible Concept Design, Horrendous AI or Lack Thereof, Worse than Breakfast Cereal Games.