Scooby-Doo! Mystery Mayhem

It's 2004 and after all these years, people still love Scooby Doo! This giant talking dog already has two hit live action films and they're still doing new cartoon movies on DVD. Of course, you can't have a successful franchise without having some video games out there. Here's yet another Scooby Doo game for the Xbox, so let's see if it's any good, eh?

If you're unfamiliar with what this series is all about, then here is a little background info. Scooby Doo and his best human friend Shaggy are part of a team that investigates paranormal activity for a living. The only problem with their job is that both Shaggy and Scooby are huge cowards, and the two would rather look for something to eat than go searching for around ghosts. Finding food doesn't pay the bills though, so you have to get the team of Shaggy and Scooby to face their fears in order to collect important clues. They need to do whatever it takes to help solve these five ghoulish mysteries.

When you first start out in the game there isn't much you can do other then run away or sneak by your enemies, but there is a special magical book that can let you capture any ghost -- as long as the book has the proper page. This is great way to fight back against the ghosts, but I hate how you can't move while you use it. Still, even with the overly complex Xbox controller the game is easy enough to master for most people, but younger kids might still have problems figuring out the search and collect game play.

Scooby Doo MM may be part of the Xbox generation now, but this game still knows how to kick it old school. That moves me to Mystery Mayhem's graphics. Some of the colours look kind of dull compared to the original cartoon, and the game's frame rate isn't very impressive for an Xbox title, but it does have some detailed backdrops to go with the excellent character models. Everything here is done in rendered graphics, but the game still follows the original 70's and 80's cartoon very closely. It even has, what sounds to be, the original actors doing the voices for the characters here and that classic background laughing is intact as well -- believe it or not. A2M did a good job recreating the feel of Scooby Doo.