Tom and Jerry in War of the Whiskers

The joke of the source material is that Tom never wins and Jerry never bleeds. Turning that into a fighting game means giving both of them health bars, and once you do, the whole logic of the cartoon quietly collapses. What VIS Entertainment built instead is a small arena brawler where up to four combatants circle each other in a themed box, grab whatever is lying on the floor, and swing until someone's meter empties.

The roster pulls from the wider Hanna-Barbera bench rather than just the two headliners: Spike, Butch, Tuffy, the duckling, and a couple of odder inclusions round out a cast where the real differences are reach and weight rather than movesets. Everyone has a light attack, a heavy attack, a grab and a jump, and the combat depth ends roughly there. What carries a round is the scenery. Frying pans, mallets, bombs and fish respawn around the stage, and picking one up changes the fight more than any character choice does. Arenas nod at the shorts — kitchens, backyards, a haunted house, a ship — with breakable clutter and hazards that will happily take a chunk out of whoever is standing in the wrong spot.

As a single-player proposition it thins out fast. The AI has one plan, which is to walk at you and swing, and the fights blur together once you've learned that grabbing the nearest heavy object solves most problems. The camera is the era's usual compromise: pulled back far enough to keep four brawlers in frame, which means everyone is small and depth is hard to read when the stage fills up.

With three friends on the couch it works considerably better, for reasons that have nothing to do with mechanical quality. Four players scrambling for the same mallet produces the kind of noisy, unfair nonsense the licence is actually about, and the short round lengths keep the pad moving. It is a party game wearing a fighter's clothes, and it is honest about that within about ten minutes.

PS2 shelves were thick with licensed cartoon tie-ins by 2003, most of them mediocre platformers. This one at least chose a genre that suits its cast, and the presentation — bright, rubbery, faithful to the character designs — suggests people who had watched the shorts. Nobody would call it a good fighting game. But there is something fitting about a Tom and Jerry title where the only way to win is to hit someone with a household object you found on the floor.