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For most people over a certain age, the idea of playing a licensed adaptation of a current Nickelodeon 'toon is about as appealing as surgery without anesthetics. This might not be the case if half of the games that fall in this category were remotely playable. One would be somewhat remiss, however, to blindly smack the DS edition of Danny Phantom: Urban Jungle into the Bog of Eternal Stench; an unfitting punishment for what, as it turns out, is a halfway decent game for the young'uns.
Based on a Nicktoon created by Butch Hartman, the mind behind massive hit The Fairly Odd Parents, Danny Phantom is translated onto the dual screens of Nintendo's successful portable in the form of a horizontal shooter. The level of challenge in Urban Jungle is perfect for its target audience. Fans of shooters, especially hardcore vertical shooters from Psikyo or Cave, will hit a catatonic state in the first few screens, but it's a great introduction to the genre for fledgling gamers.
Speaking of hardcore, the game's hook will be familiar to fans of the Dreamcast/Gamecube shooter masterpiece, Ikaruga. With a flick of the right shoulder button, you can change Danny's aura to red or blue. This coincides with the color of the ghosts' bullets. If you're familiar with Capcom's game, then you know the drill: you absorb bullets of your current color, which leads to a bit of strategy as to when you switch up. Absorbing bullets also adds to your "ghost power," which is a meter used to fuel the different Phantom Powers you unlock throughout the game. Danny's implementation of this technique exists at a very basic level, but it's nice to see that it borrows from the best.
One would be somewhat remiss, however, to blindly smack the DS edition of Danny Phantom: Urban Jungle into the Bog of Eternal Stench; an unfitting punishment for what, as it turns out, is a halfway decent game for the young'uns.
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The only thing that will be of interest to seasoned gamers are the bonus stages, which can be pretty fun tests of endurance, even if they're still relatively easy by genre standards. The bosses are also somewhat engaging, as most fill the screen and lumber about impressively. Curiously enough, the game's best boss fights are stuck within the confines of a Boss Battle mode that you unlock after completing the game. By that point, though, most players won't care enough to bother going back and capturing different ghosts in order to open up even more boss encounters.
Aside from the horizontal stages, there's also a level in which you get to pilot the "Fenton Flyer." This switches things up a bit, and is sort of reminiscent of a stripped-down version of the Gummy Ship stages in Kingdom Hearts, complete with a similar behind-the-ship point of view. This is a bit more suited to the warped 2.5-D graphics of the rest of the game, which are a bit off-putting. Maybe the drab color-scheme is an aesthetic unique to the show itself, but it doesn't translate too well to a light-hearted shooter.
The use of the stylus is completely superfluous, and you honestly won't need to take the thing out of its holster at all. That's just fine, really, as it's better to have a competent game that doesn't overexert itself in vain attempts at gimmicky functionality. It won't be anything special to most of you, but Danny Phantom will play pretty well within the group for which it was intended. While it's not a great game, it's better by leaps and bounds than most of the licensed, half-broken platformer dreck that tortures kids by the thousands each year.
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