Of all the licensed games and shovelware in the world, we had to run into this one.
I certainly enjoy M&M’s as a food product, and mildly enjoy them as advertising mascots, if only because there only so many animated food items voiced by Oscar winners:
This week’s game, M&M’s Mini Madness, is regrettably not edible. It was released in 2000 as a Game Boy Color exclusive by Majesco, the same company that gave us Babysitting Mama (just to give you a vague idea of what’s about to happen here). The game itself is pretty simple – you have to run and jump around a factory and flip some switches to save it or something. There’s a brief story to the game surrounding some chaos being caused by Mini M&M’s, a new product at the time. So, this is basically just a big ad for a product that…causes chaos? Hmm.
A (relatively) neat thing about Mini Madness is that you can, at any time, switch between four different M&M’s, who each have different abilities. Specifically, the red M&M can do a mildly useful spin attack, the yellow one can make huge jumps off of certain objects, the green one can “blow kisses” as a projectile weapon, and the blue one can swim. That’d be pretty cool, if all of these abilities became relevant at one point or another. That, unfortunately, isn’t the case – yellow’s ability comes up nearly constantly throughout the game, while blue’s swimming ability only comes up in a couple of levels – at other times, he’s pretty much useless. He does wear shades, though, so I guess there’s that?
The other two are…fine, I guess? There isn’t always a lot to attack, so those abilities don’t get used much either. They also all control pretty imprecisely, though for a Game Boy Color game it could probably be worse.
In addition to generally being poorly thought out in every way, Mini Madness is also shockingly short, with just a dozen levels can be completed in under an hour even if you don’t know entirely where to go (and if you do, it’s much, much faster). I suppose it’s sort of merciful in that way. It may come as a shock, but as it turns out, the M&M’s game is pretty bad.
This was apparently one of the first video games to star M&M’s (a fact I learned thanks to the helpful Wikipedia page “List of M&M’s Video Games“), and the first for any sort of portable console. There are some others, including a widely panned Wii racing game that sounds great if you like to hate video games and yourself.
Next week’s game appears to be, at first glance, the bastard stepchild of a beloved 8-bit game that is almost certainly much, much better than the one I’ll actually get to play. Fantastic. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go buy some M&M’s.