SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman

hEy, nO rUnNiNg oN dA bEaCh!"

SpongeBob SquarePants: Revenge of the Flying Dutchman is a 2002 video game based on the Nickelodeon animated series SpongeBob SquarePants, developed by Vicarious Visions and published by THQ originally for the Game Boy Advance. It was later released for the PlayStation 2 and Nintendo GameCube, which was developed by BigSky Interactive.
NOTE: This does not apply to the Game Boy Advance adaptation.

## Why It Should Get Off the Beach

1. Terrible graphics that are comparable to those of an early PlayStation 1 or Nintendo 64 game, with terrible animations and bad lip-syncing.
2. Poor grasp of the source material. Such as Jellyfish Fields (which looks like a canyon), Downtown Bikini Bottom (which looks like a dark city) and Goo Lagoon (which looks like a desert) look nothing like they did in the show.
3. Poor controls.
4. Several glitches, such as getting stuck in platforms.
5. Poor hit detection is really inconsistent.
6. Squidward's Scarecrow is pretty much a useless set-piece since all it does is drop some coins. And to use it you need the reef blower but you don't get the blower until much later in the game.
7. In Goo Lagoon, the default enemy causes the music to stop, and after it talks, the music starts back up again.
8. Speaking of music, when you wear the jelly-fishing costume, you're force to listen to the same jelly-fishing theme over and over again.
9. Linear gameplay in an open world.
10. In Chum World, the NPC clowns and the enemy clowns are the same characters. How can you tell which ones give missions and which ones hurt you?
11. Horrible bosses. In fact, there aren't many bosses at all.
	* The bosses that are in this stupid and pointless race with Squidward to get employee of the month: you can still lose but Squidward doesn't even try to win the race. Also, no matter if you win or lose, the game continues as normal as if nothing happened.
	* The clown in Jellyfish Fields: all you have to do is hit him once.
	* Plankton: just get the letter he has to finish the Chum World stage.
12. Bizarrely, the narrator isn't voiced by Tom Kenny despite (as always) voicing SpongeBob in-game.
13. The ending is extremely rushed, with no music whatsoever.
14. The slide puzzle to find the Dutchman's treasure is too easy because of the borders on the pieces and the timer gives you too much time, it is basically overkilled.
15. The PS2 version suffers from a glitch that causes the game to freeze when entering a new or old area (read trivia for more info). It also causes players to lose save files on their memory card, just like the 2004 holiday demo disc did. Many letters and death threats were sent to BigSky because of this, and they addressed the issue. However, after many angry letters, the studio shut down due to THQ blacklisting them. The loading issue that causes this glitch also makes it impossible to play the game on a PS3 console. Oddly, this bug does not occur on PS2 emulators like PCSX2 or Play!.
16. In the PS2 version there's a glitch where sometimes dialogue will skip or keep looping over and over and even after the dialogue is finished it will keep looping until you enter a new area which shows just how broken and unfinished this game really is.
17. The music resets every time if you pause the game or talk to someone.
18. You are forced to complete the game 100%. There is no any% route because you can't go back after Dutchman's Graveyard, since that is the point of no return (that is, unless you use the Level Select cheat code).
19. In one section of the game, you have to collect 100 Jellyfish to win a contest. However, the Jellyfishing counter for the level only counts how many Jellyfish you have in that level, and not the total counter, and there are only 84 Jellyfish in the level, causing confusion and leading a YouTube game reviewer, LambHoot (video on the game linked down below) to not beating the game for over a decade.
	* To add insult to injury, the very next part of the game has you collecting 50 Jellyfish for Larry the Lobster.
	* The reward for collecting all 100 Jellyfish is the Reef Blower, which is only used to get coins from Squidward's Scarecrow and the Golf Minigame to get a letter of SpongeBob's name you would have already got the letter title for the coins.
20. Speaking of levels, there are only seven levels in the entire game.
21. This game can be beaten in less than five hours.
22. Both versions have severe frame-rate drops in certain areas.
23. The models on the characters are very uncanny. Spongebob looks rather rough and jagged, and Patrick and Squidward look rather deformed.
24. The game has a large amount of cut content.

## Redeeming Qualities

1. The music is actually decent (even if it is incredibly repetitive).
2. Most of the voice actors are good.
3. SpongeBob can actually glide.
4. The GameCube version fixed the loading glitch that was noticeable on the PS2 version.
5. The game looks slightly better on PS2, mainly in level models looking noticeably smoother.
6. The Game Boy Advance version is actually decent and better than that game as it's a simple 2D platformer.

## Trivia

1. According to the Cutting Room Floor, the reason for the loading glitch in the PS2 version was that Sony had a policy about load times; due to this, BigSky used a trick to shorten them, however later PS2 models made this trick incompatible; due to this, early PS2 models and emulators don't have this bug.
2. It was originally thought that the loading glitch in the PS2 version is what caused BigSky to shutdown, however it was later revealed THQ blacklisted them following its release.
3. The lifeguard became a huge meme.
4. SHIFT, a speedrunner of SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom, has given these games a cult following by doing "meme runs" of the game.
	* Speaking of speedrunning, several people have been speedrunning the game to complete them in 2 hours due to how broken it is.

Videos