Nickelodeon Splat Pack Review - I Double Dare You to Play This

Ole Gamer Joe
a few seconds ago
6 min read

Nickelodeon Splat Pack

PC/PS/SWITCH

1/30/26

Mighty Rabbit Studios/Limited Run Games

I was that unfortunate soul at school who couldn’t get cable because I lived in the middle of bum‑fuck nowhere, so it wasn’t until satellite TV became an option that I finally got to enjoy all the awesome cartoons my friends were talking about. That meant a whole lot of Fox Kids Saturday‑morning shows and whatever else local TV had on offer during my formative years — not so much Eureeka’s Castle, Rugrats, Ren & Stimpy, or any of the other classics I was always jealous of hearing about on the playground. On the plus side, I did get plenty of Ninja Turtles and X‑Men… assuming my rabbit ears actually worked.

All of this is to say I didn’t grow up as much of a Nickelodeon kid as I wanted to, but over the years I’ve made up for it by watching plenty of reruns from the late ’80s and ’90s. My watch history has no shortage of Double Dare at this point, among other Nicktoons, and I do have a real reverence for Nickelodeon as a brand — I’m glad it’s still around today.

What I did get to experience more of as a kid, though, were all three games in the Nickelodeon Splat Pack — mostly by renting anything my parents would let me walk out of Blockbuster with. People talk about how expensive games are today, and they’re right, but they weren’t exactly cheap for a broke 10‑year‑old either. This collection brings together three retro Nickelodeon titles — and notice I’m not calling them classics. Has time been kind to these forgotten games, or did they leave me feeling like I was covered in GAK? Let’s find out in our full review!

The Nickelodeon Splat Pack collects three 16‑bit era games into one very strange package. It features not‑so‑classics like AAAHH!!! Real Monsters, Rocko’s Modern Life: Spunky’s Dangerous Day, and GUTS. GUTS, based on the ’90s kids’ sports‑action show, has you competing in various events to reach the Aggro Crag — that massive, glowing, fake mountain some of you might remember. Rocko is one of those nightmarish puzzle‑platformers where your main job is to clear a path for Spunky to make sure he reaches the exit of each level. And AAAHH!!! Real Monsters? A bizarre 2D platformer with a clunky character‑swap mechanic. At least both the SNES and Genesis versions are included… though each one has its own problems. So what do all these games have in common? They’re all terrible — and somehow even worse in 2026.

This collection doesn’t feature a ton of bonus content, though there is a small smattering on offer. Players can listen to music from these games via a built-in music player, a rewind feature is available and you’ll need it if you want to see past the first few levels without cheat codes, there’s the option to save anywhere now, and a few image scans such as original booklets have also been included. Outside of that, a few visual filters and borders are also optional, though not exactly earth-shattering nor unexpected features. All in all, nothing special that goes above and beyond has been included here. Limited Run Games certainly haven’t gone out of their way to pack in any sort of deep history about these games — or, for that matter, Nickelodeon in general, which is a shame for a brand that has so much of it.

Let’s start with GUTS, which can be played with up to 2 players if you know someone you absolutely hate. That’s right — fans of the show will remember it featured three competitors, but you won’t get that here. Even worse, while I know kids can be full of energy and a bit tough to control at times, playing as any of the selectable, nameless children in this version of GUTS feels like trying to steer a cheap knock-off action figure that’s been dropped into a cinematic platformer through an obstacle course that feels like a rejected set piece from Pee Wee’s Playhouse. The game visually does a halfway decent job of looking like the show, but its stiff, unresponsive controls had me reaching for the exit menu faster than it takes Tommy Pickles to get into mischief. This game was bad by 1994 standards, features just a handful of barely functional events, and might be one of the worst SNES games I have ever played. I said one of, because yes, despite it being my favorite console of all time, it has no shortage of stinkers.

Not to be outdone, AAAHH!!! Real Monsters — a game based on the 1994 kids’ show that I have no real attachment to — is a slightly more playable experience than GUTS, but I do mean slightly. This one kinda-sorta aims for Lost Vikings vibes, letting you swap between three different monsters with unique abilities, but it fails miserably in its attempt. Bad level design, cheap enemies, and an annoying control scheme — particularly on the Genesis version — will leave you screaming “AAAHH!” for all the wrong reasons.

Playing as Ickis, Oblina, or Krumm (who I still maintain looks like a nut sac), you’ll hurl trash at enemies, use special team-up abilities to reach higher areas or peek ahead in levels, and collect random trinkets of garbage as you try to reach the exit. You can also scream at humans to scare them away, which is probably the most accurate part of the adaptation.

Originally released in 1995, less than a year after the show debuted, AAAHH!!! Real Monsters is your typical low-effort ’90s tie-in — rushed, clunky, and aggressively awful to play. If you have some reverence for the show and feel compelled to suffer through this thing, I’d honestly sacrifice the controls and go with the Genesis version, because the SNES port runs like doo-doo despite having a slightly more accessible button layout. You would think at least the ability to re-map controls would be included, but at the time of this review even that wasn’t an option, and that goes for all games included. The only real positives here are that the pixel art does capture the look of the show, and the soundtrack is… fine. But the game itself? It’s scary how bad it feels to play, and should be avoided by just about everyone. Even the cheat code is miserable to enter.

And Rocko’s Modern Life: Spunky’s Dangerous Day? Yeah, sorry, this collection goes 3 for 3 because it's not good either. The goal of this 1994 release based on the popular cartoon series is to guide Rocko’s companion Spunky to a fire hydrant located at the end of each level, and you do this by clearing out enemies and other obstacles that stand in your path. That’s all good, except that Rocko controls much like a drunken Sonic the Hedgehog. He has a few attacks for fending off foes, and will mostly need to manipulate the environment to ensure Spunky’s path remains clear. It’s an escort mission from hell, and one where you don’t even get to kiss a pretty girl at the end. The game plays like mud, has horrid level design, and despite some decent visuals and sound design, is the opposite of having fun. It’s funny because going into this collection I could have sworn that I had positive memories of this game, but my brain was lying to me, and I can’t believe how much more patience I must have had as a youth to make any progress.

And so, as you can see, this set of games is a complete splat — just as the title implies. I’m all for a bit of Nickelodeon nostalgia, but the three games chosen for this bundle simply aren’t very good. Game preservation is important, absolutely, and there are lessons to be learned from the past… but with so many genuinely great titles still waiting for a proper re-release, it’s hard to get excited about any of these. The difficulty across all three is way too high for new players, the controls feel ancient and janky, and while there’s a tiny bit of nostalgic charm buried in here for those that grew up when releases such as these were the norm, I’d still recommend getting your Nick fix somewhere else.

BROKEN LAMP

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