If you don’t know the story behind The Grinch, shame on you. But we’ll reiterate for the few who missed out on it during their childhood years. The Grinch lives up on the desolate mountaintop of Mt Crumpit all by himself, with the exception of his always-loyal dog Max. Looking down upon the town of Whoville, Christmas time has arrived, and all the people in Whoville are decorating their town with lavish decorations, buying presents and being all together cheerful in celebration of the holiday. It might seem like any other year, but the Grinch has other plans for this year, plans that cause for destruction and mayhem. In the game, the Grinch has decided to assemble the gadgets he’s come up with over time, but as fate would have it, a gust of wind sends all his blueprints out the cave and into Whoville. Discouraged, the Grinch decides to head down into Whoville, collect his blueprints, assemble the gadgets and proceed as planned.

The Grinch basically becomes one incredibly immense ‘collect the item’ platformer game. Think Donkey Kong 64 on the Nintendo 64 (which had an obscene amount of items to collect), except not as pretty and nowhere near as enjoyable. And this itself is the entire downfall of The Grinch: it’s repetitive, boring and gives the player little motivation to continue forward in their quest to complete the mission objectives of the game. It’s apparent right from the start that there’s more than enough to do that it might just make you hit the escape key before you even begin. Feel like stomping on five hundred presents? How about messing up 10 snowmen? Does defacing the mayor’s statue more times than you can count sound any more enjoyable? It gets better; this is only what you’ll be doing in the first level alone. There are plenty of other objectives awaiting discovery, and they only become more inane as you progress.

To make matters worse, it’s near impossible to complete some of the objectives in The Grinch because nothing is explained thoroughly enough. Most of the time I spent playing I was simply running around the screen hoping to run into a new present to smash, and if I was lucky, a new gadget blueprint. From time to time, you might even pick up an item that seems like it might be useful, but there’s no explanation on how to use the item; it isn’t listed in an inventory screen, and they aren’t related to any of the gadgets you are assembling. The Grinch then becomes not a quest to wreck the happy people of Whoville, but to wander aimlessly hoping to trigger and event that will introduce some sort of event to mix things up. And I’m not alone, since one look at Konami’s own The Grinch message board shows how confused gamers are at trying to figure out the objectives that are presented.

In addition to the gameplay being boring enough to bring a tear to your eye, The Grinch is absolutely nothing special to the eye. The main fault for this is that The Grinch on the PC is a direct port of the PlayStation version except made to use a 3D accelerator. It might clip along with a fast frame rate, but that’s because most of the time none of the character or objects are on the screen at once, since things pop in an out of the distance when you’re literally a few feet away from them. The Grinch is not a particularly action-filled game, however, so this problem stays mostly a mere nuisance. Even running at a higher resolution with my nVidia GeForce II behind it, The Grinch isn’t able to rise above its simple port status; the textures and environments are incredibly simplistic and low-res, and feature little or no detail whatsoever.

The problems seem to be never ending with The Grinch, since they continue on with the game not being tested enough, as I continually ran into the problem where if I attempted to move up or down the elevator atop Mt Crumpit, the game would replay the same elevator cinematic over and over. The game won’t crash; it will simply sit there and slowly build your frustration level while you search for the off button on your computer. Then there were the times where the game would crash out to an obscure DLL error, and instead of concentrating on figuring out the gameplay puzzles, I’d be more inclined to slowly progress and save every few minutes to prevent losing too much when the game crashed.

Odd as it might seem, The Grinch is the most appealing in the sound areas. All the narrative is done in the recognizable Dr. Seuss style (most of the time, at least), and it perfectly fits the style of the game. It even poked a couple of chuckles out of me! It might not be Jim Carrey acting as the Grinch, but the voiceovers for the evil one is well done, and makes him out to be the ever so sinister creature that he is. There isn’t much to comment on in terms of music; it’s nothing terrible, but then again, it isn’t anything all that noteworthy, either.

The number of movie-to-game conversions has certainly gone down in recent days, but there are still the times like this where a movie that might have had promise as a video game hits rock bottom due to the rush to make the game done in time for the release of the film. The Grinch is a boring, repetitive, bad looking platformer that follows the same footsteps as everything released before it, and there is no real reason to give it a look. And if you think your kids might enjoy it, think again; it’s sure to frustrate them to no end. Go pick up Crash Bandicot 3 or Banjo-Tooie, instead.