Garfield: The Search for Pooky

Not all the Mondays in the world can be worse than this Garfield game.

Garfield: The Search for Pooky is a 2004 platform game developed by InterActive Vision and published by The Game Factory for the Game Boy Advance. It is based on the Garfield comic strips by Jim Davis.

## Why It's An Eternal Monday

1. Poor graphics and animation, even for 2004 standards.
2. Horrible 2D animation with very few frames of animation for Garfield, or any character in fact.
3. Trying to do anything in this game with Garfield will feel really awkward. Especially considering that the other Garfield GBA game, Garfield and His Nine Lives, which released 1-2 years later, had much more expressive character animations.
4. To pad out the runtime, all the levels are split into 3 screens. On some of these levels, the difficulty, even on Easy Mode, is often comparable to other hard Garfield games, like the Japan only game A Week of Garfield.
5. Clunky controls.
6. It contains some of the most broken and lazy level designs in any Garfield game made to date. It's worse than even Garfield Gets Real's studio level. This can result in a lot of cheap deaths. This is one of the worst ways of implementing artificial difficulty in a Garfield game possibly ever, even more so than Garfield Gets Real or A Week of Garfield.
	* Speaking of which, the way that enemies and obstacles are coded into the game is so lazy that it can result in many, many cheap hits and instant deaths.
	* In the second screen of Level 2, a butterfly will instantly hit Garfield no matter what. This can result in one of, if not, the cheapest deaths in the game if you have one bit of health left. Even worse, this may even cause a game over if you only have one life and one bit of health left, forcing you to start the whole level again, or even the entire game from square one if you don't have the password on hand.
	* The liquid textures are so lazily placed into the game that it may even dangle over edges, and if you were to even attempt walking over them, you would fall anyway. One of the butter textures is placed so badly it doesn't even affect Garfield at all, so removing that particular one would not change anything in the slightest.
	* Also, it is so nonsensical with the liquid textures and glass shards being randomly placed out of nowhere in every platforming level that it makes the Garfield world unintentionally look more polluted than the real world.
	* Sometimes, Garfield may fall through the floor and fall onto a lower part of the platform.
	* If you finish the final screen on the third last level of the game on the bottom floor, you will most likely lose a life while Garfield does his victory dance no matter what. We're really not joking. Also, if this were to be your last life, you'd have to do the entire level over. If you have more than one life, the animation will play twice.
	* In some areas, you can't even reach the food, making it impossible to 100% the game (more on this later).
7. What should've been a simple story is dragged out to contain tons of filler, like Garfield catching some chickens.
8. The fighting mechanic is so flawed that you may end up taking damage before killing the enemies.
9. For some reason, the enemies make dog barking sounds when they die.
	* All the other sound effects are either serviceable at best or just plain awful at the absolute worst.
	* What's more, is that sometimes, certain sounds don't work as they should.
10. Mediocre music most of the time.
11. For a 2004 game, it heavily relies on password saving, despite first party GBA games that have been around as long as the actual console itself using flash saves, or even games as old as the original The Legend of Zelda on the NES using button cell battery saves. If you didn't write the password, lost, or forgot it, if you get a game over, you would have to start the entire game over from the beginning.
12. It is very hard to gain lives in a single run, even for a kids game in the 21st century. The easiest way to replenish them all would to exit out of the game by losing all your lives or resetting the game, and follow the instructions found on in the "Tips" section below. Another way this can be done is to grind and collect all the food in a very easy platforming level of the game, as for every 100 bits of food you collect, you get 1 life, for a maximum of 9 lives.
13. Horrible boss battles. They can be too easy or too difficult depending on whether you know what you're doing or not. In fact, they don't really qualify as bosses at all, let alone good ones. To add insult to injury, there is no boss music at all, not even for the final boss at the end of the game, despite an extra cutscene playing right before the final boss.
14. The fetch quests are tedious, as it requires you to go through the entire level and back several times to collect animals, one at a time, and then put them in the cages, while trying to run across the abysmal level design without dying up to 9 times through 3 different screens of each of these levels. In the second last level, you have to collect bones scattered throughout the level for the dog on the third screen in order to escape.
15. The game is very poorly rendered sometimes, in which case the animations and graphics don't load properly and glitch out, even during cutscenes. For example, after you beat the chicken level, part of Jon's head is missing in the first part of the cutscene.
16. Poor logic: Why do some of the women in the car levels carry bombs? Are they supposed to be terrorists in disguise?
17. When you beat the game, all you get is an ending cutscene where Garfield retrieves Pooky. No credits. No post-game content at all. Nothing. Even Garfield's Nightmare has three minigames you can play at any time despite you not being able to replay any of its 20 levels without starting over on a new save file even when you beat it.
18. In some of the areas, the level design is so bad you can't even reach the food, making it literally impossible to 100% the game under any conditions, let alone legitimately. It's anyone's guess at this point on what the game does if you ever collect every bit of food in the game, as no single person, not even the absolute masters of this game can actually do it. Even if someone invented a "Flying" cheat for the game and somehow managed to beat it 100% with that, or figured out how to access a 100% completion password via guessing one of the millions of possible combinations, you'd still be likely to get zilch for it, making it completely pointless.
19. The character sprites are lazily copied and pasted, including the background people, and enemies. This results in them looking completely identical to each other.
20. The use of the famous quote "I hate Mondays" by Garfield feels very out of place in this game because of how this game implements such quote.
21. It has one of the worst level select UI's to date.
22. The coins found on the left side of the level select UI means absolutely nothing. Why put it there if it does literally nothing to help the player?
23. The second last level tricks you into thinking that its entirely a standard platforming level, but on the last screen, its actually a collectathon, as you will eventually find a bone, and realize that you have to take it all the way to the end of the level to give to the bulldog, and then repeat that a few more times until the bulldog breaks the gate open for you.
24. Spelling mistake: When you beat a level, the game is supposed to tell the player congratulations, but the real issue here is that they spelt it as follows: "congratulattions", with an extra t near the end of the word. This further proves that the game is incredibly rushed.
25. On the second last level of the game, it tricks you into thinking that its a standard platforming level. Once you get to the last screen, it makes you collect several bones, one at a time, and you have to give them to the dog to complete the level.
26. Every time you boot the game up, you are forced to sit through the opening cutscene, even if this is not your first time playing the game. However, this can be skipped by pressing Start, not that the game lets you know mind you.
27. Some parts of the level music is reused during the password/game over screens. To add insult to injury, instead of looping the music, it immediately skips over to the next track.
28. Speaking of the chicken level:
	* The fetch quests here are at its absolute worst, as the level design is so poor that Garfield will have to make leap of faith jumps over the void.
	* On that topic, you have to traverse through these screens 8 times each, going all the way to the end of the level and back again, while trying to avoid death (most likely by falling into the void).
	* Like with all the other levels, you are not able to see what is below you at high places.
	* The way the obstacles are placed here does not make this any better, it makes it worse than it has any right to be.
	* The enemies found below the floor are almost invisible, to the point where Garfield may get hit by one for no reason.
	* The sunflowers on the final screen look like they were ripped straight out of the Sonic the Hedgehog games.
	* Also, this has zero context of the story and exists to pad out the game.
	* This is the level that has the infamous cutscene where part of Jon's head goes missing if you somehow win on this level.
	* To put the final nail on the coffin, you get a garbage boss fight at the end of the third screen.
	* Because of these points made, this level makes the game so much more tedious, to the point where it can qualify as the definition of artificial difficulty. Get a game over on this level, even on the boss, and you have to go through the entirety of this hellhole of a level all over again from the first screen. Therefore, its the worst level in the entire game, and even the Garfield video game medium as a whole, right next to the studio level of Garfield Gets Real: The Game.

## Redeeming Qualities

1. Passable cutscenes that in some ways resemble the comic strips, except for one where part of Jon's head is missing.
2. The music is easily the best part of the game, especially the two mall themes, as those are the best songs in the entire game.
3. Some platforming levels (case in point, both Mall levels) work just fine as they should when it involves going from point A to B, without the endless pits.
4. The car levels are some of the best levels in the entire game, as it is really easy to pick up and play if you know what you are in for.
5. Some of the levels are visually appealing, especially the first level, if you ignore all the hazards placed in the level.

## Trivia

1. This is the first of two Garfield games on the Game Boy Advance, with the second, and last one being Garfield and his Nine Lives.
2. This is the third Garfield game to be released on a Nintendo console, after the Japan only Famicon game, A Week of Garfield on the Japan, and the Europe only Game Boy game, Garfield Labyrinth. This is the second Garfield Nintendo game to be released in English, and the first one released in the United States and in more than one country.
3. This is one of the few Garfield games to never officially release in Oceania, not even through European imports like several other Garfield games like Garfield's Nightmare and The Garfield Show: Threat of the Space Lasagna.
4. A Garfield graphic novel coincidentally named after the game of the same name, released in 2018, 14 years after this game released. It follows a similar premise from the story of this game.
5. The spiders found at the last level of the game is coincidentally similar to the ones found on the first world of Garfield's Nightmare. Also, Garfield's hit sounds in both games sound very similar to each other.

## Tips

1. To replenish your lives without grinding, click here, and then type in a code according to the level you are currently up to to replenish most, if not, all your lives.
2. If you somehow get a password with a save that has less than 9 lives, the fastest way to grind for lives manually is to go to any of the 2 Mall levels (have you got this far into the game), and grind for lives there by collecting all the food across 3 screens.