Nickelodeon Jimmy Neutron - Boy Genius - Attack of the Twonkies

The joke at the centre of this one is sound. Twonkies are small, fuzzy, harmless-looking aliens that mutate into hulking pests the moment they hear music, which means an entire tie-in platformer gets built around noise as a hazard and a tool. It is a genuinely odd hook for a licensed kids' game, and to the credit of everyone involved it actually shows up in the level design rather than sitting in the manual.

Retroville is the playground, and Jimmy works through it with a partner in tow. Carl, Sheen, Cindy and Libby each attach to him for stretches of the game, and the second controller can pick one up at any time for drop-in co-op. This is the part that has held its value. A lot of 2004 licensed platformers were strictly solo affairs with a sidekick who existed to talk; here the friend is a body on screen with their own reach, and two kids on a couch could genuinely split the work of clearing a room of Twonkies.

The gadgets do the heavy lifting. Jimmy's inventions handle traversal and capture in roughly equal measure, and the combat loop is less about hitting things than about corralling them, since Twonkies respawn and multiply if you let them near the wrong noise. It never gets complicated. Aim, fire, hoover up the mess, move to the next set piece. The platforming underneath is the standard sixth-generation template of ledges, switches and collectibles, delivered without much invention but without much cruelty either.

Where it shows its budget is in the presentation. The Nicktoons house style translates cleanly enough to PS2 polygons, the voice cast is the show's, and the writing has the manic Sheen-and-Carl energy the series ran on, but the camera fights you in tight interiors and the animation between actions is stiff enough that jumps feel approximate. Difficulty is pitched at the intended audience, which is to say an adult will finish it in an afternoon and never once be stuck.

Judged as a product of the licensed-tie-in economy, it is on the better half of the curve. THQ shipped a great deal of this material in the mid-2000s and most of it treated the cartoon as a skin over a generic engine. Attack of the Twonkies at least took one idea from the show's own logic and made a game rule out of it. That is a modest achievement, but modest achievements were rare in this corner of the shelf, and a child who grew up with it is remembering something real.