A lot of younger folk probably don’t have a clue who Ren & Stimpy are. Ren & Stimpy was an animated show on Nickelodeon that was popular enough to spawn toys and video games galore. The cartoon was called, appropriately enough, The Ren & Stimpy Show. The show aired on Nickelodeon from 1991 until 1995 for a total of five seasons and 52 episodes. Ren was supposed to be a psychopathic chihuahua while Stimpy was a friendly but not very bright manx cat…not that you could really tell. The show was known for its crude humor, violence and general disgustingness (I know, not a word). A lot of parents probably weren’t particularly happy with the show at the time.
The Ren & Stimpy Show: Veediots! is of course a game based on the cartoon. It was released in 1993 for both the Super NES and the Game Boy. In both versions, the player alternatively controls Ren and Stimpy through various side-scrolling platform stages. The Game Boy was a more limited system so some sacrifices were made, including removing parts of levels. For some reason the order of the levels was switched up as well. There are a total of four levels, each based on an episode of the show. The overall plot relates to Ren and Stimpy getting trapped in their TV show and wanting to get out.
As far as the Game Boy version goes, the graphics were well done but the game play left something to be desired. Controls were not great and levels tended to be very repetitive. It has the feel of a licensed game fairly cheaply made to capitalize on a popular show or movie. Which is exactly what it was. Still, if you are a fan of the show, it’s probably at least worth looking at, though unless you are just a huge fan of Game Boy’s tiny, blurry, black and white screen, you are probably better off trying the Super NES version. The Game Boy only subtracts and doesn’t really add anything to that version.
If you do want to give it a try on either platform, you’ll have to track down an original copy or make do with emulation. Veediots! has the same problem virtually all licensed games suffer from. The license doesn’t typically carry over to compilation releases or re-releases of any kind and will rarely get renegotiated for such a purpose. I guess it’s fortunate that licensed games are so often of low quality. Nobody wants to play them again anyway..
The screenshots above are from the Game Boy version of the Ren & Stimpy: Veediots!.
