Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers Game Sample - N64
0"Scooby-Doo! Classic Creep Capers" is a mediocre video game based off of the classic "Scooby Doo" cartoon series, developed for the N64 and Game Boy Color by Terraglyph Interactive Studios and Digital Eclipse (respectively) and published by THQ. The GBC game is usually deemed the better version of the game, as the N64 game does not remotely tap into the series' potential and is plagued by a few key issues.
On the plus side, this game re-interprets three episodes from the show ("What a Night for a Knight", "That's Snow Beast", and "A Tiki Scare is No Fair" and includes an exclusive N64 episode, "The Case of the Classic Creeps"). The game is very basic as the player controls Shaggy while Scooby follows and looks for clues and traps the bad guy at the end of each episode. They get scared by enemies of other irritants and lose "courage", the equivalent of health, which can be restored by a kitchen mini-game and "Scooby Snacks". You meet up with the rest of the gang from time to time and have to deduce who the bad guy is (which is a no-brainer as there are less than a handful of NPCs). Visually, the game is roughly average 3rd-party N64 fare (a few good models, blurry textures, some clipping, nothing special), but the sound (what little there is) is a bit better with a few spoken samples and a few catchy tunes reminiscent to what you'd hear in the actual cartoon.
The game's real problems show when you actually start moving. The game employs fixed camera angles similar to many games at the time (Ex: Resident Evil, Final Fantasy, etc.) and scenes have a habit of changing abruptly, which constantly throws off your controls. This wouldn't be so bad if you didn't constantly have to evade critters and escape from episode-specific bad guys who are crazy fast and incredibly difficult to avoid as-is, but this issue is compounded greatly by the titular Scooby Doo, who poses as a constant physical roadblock and manages to get in the way often. Combine this with awkward views that deliberately hide paths that should often be in plain sight, mindless puzzles and limited characters and dialogue, and you have a game that is as dull as it is frustrating.
I'm sure some will find enjoyment in this title (mainly fans of the series), but there are MUCH better N64 titles to play. This is a video of the first episode captured on original hardware through the "XRGB-mini Framemeister Compact UpScaler". Note that all sorts of tests will be done with the XRGB-mini as its results vary from system to system and game to game (beats the pants off the old quality though). Enjoy.