Disney-Pixar Finding Nemo

The jellyfish level is the thing people remember, and not fondly. A field of drifting stingers, a strict route through them, and Dory trailing behind in a follow-the-leader exercise that turns one mistimed nudge into a restart. It is a strange centrepiece for a licensed film tie-in aimed at children, and it explains why this 2003 adaptation has a reputation out of proportion to its size.

Traveller's Tales built the game as a march through the film's set pieces, handing you Marlin, Nemo or Dory depending on which scene the script demands. The underwater movement is the whole foundation: full three-dimensional swimming, with the camera doing its best to stay useful in tight coral tunnels. That freedom is a real asset when you are threading a reef, and a liability the moment a level asks for precision, because judging depth against a moving hazard is much harder than judging distance on a flat plane. The controls are responsive enough; the trouble is that the design keeps testing something the perspective does not reliably communicate.

Between the swimming stages sit a run of short objective-driven scenes drawn straight from the movie's beats, from the dentist's tank to the pelican and the East Australian Current. Progress is measured in collectibles, and shells feed into unlockable extras that were the standard sweetener for family titles of the period. THQ published a great many of these, and most were content to be gentle. This one is not, which is either its distinguishing feature or its central miscalculation, depending on who was holding the controller in 2003.

Visually it holds up better than most tie-ins of the generation, largely because the source material's palette does a lot of the work. The water has weight, the reef is dense with colour, and the character models are close enough to the film to sell the illusion during cutscenes assembled from film audio. The PS2 was well suited to this kind of pretty, enclosed environment, and the game rarely strains the hardware.

What is left is an oddly demanding little platformer wearing the skin of one of the most successful animated films ever made. Adults revisiting it will find something tighter and meaner than they expect. Children who owned it in 2003 already know that, and many of them never got past the jellyfish.