atari2600land's Blog - Fists of Foam

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That's the subtitle of the Didj game I played a little of last night. It's the SpongeBob game I was going to play in honor of Mr. Hillenburg's passing. It took a while, but I found out that I had left out batteries in it so they wouldn't corrode. Thus, in order to play any game, I would either have to put 4 AAs in or play it with the charger plugged in. I went the charger route, even though unfortunately the cord wasn't long enough for me to play whilst sitting on the toilet so I had to stand up on the bathroom floor and play it that way. No, I didn't poop on the floor.

The game is an interesting choice for a device that is supposed to be educational. In it, SpongeBob uses his kah-rat-tay skills to beat up bad guys in a Double Dragon (or TMNT Arcade game) setting. What's also interesting is it doesn't start right off the bat asking the math questions. That's done at the end of the stages. Stuff like "Which of these numbers is in the tens column?" and "Which of these shapes has 4 sides?".

I suppose the questions get harder the deeper you get in the game because the box art has a question of "Which of these shapes is 2D?" Of course, "All of them are" would be my wiseguy answer, but there's no microphone. Instead SpongeBob acts like a cursor and you jump up to the bubble that has the right answer. Which is odd because he can't jump in-game.

What I would have done is make a Mario-style game out of it, like the PSX version of SpongeBob. But that's just me. Oh well. I think my favorite games on the Didj are Sonic and Didji Racing: Tiki Tropics. Perhaps I'll start playing them all and doing little write-ups on them like I did with this one, but it won't take very long because there's only 16 games.

http://atariage.com/forums/blog/168/entry-15281-fists-of-foam/