03 - Otto's Ottifanten: Kommando Störtebeker (Game Boy Color)https://vgcollect.com/item/106270Hardware: Game Boy Color / Game Boy Advance w. Screen-Mod
Playtime: about 3 Hours
Highscore: 320
I bought this game in my favourite retro shop just a few weeks ago and went on a trip with a few cartridges to try out. Got instantly hooked by this little game due to it's simplicity yet mercilessly increasing difficulty.
Otto's Ottifanten: Kommando Störtebeker is an entry within the Ottifants-franchise, a franchise revolving around litte elefants with humanlike behaviour, originating in the artworks of reknown german commedian Otto Waalkes. I personally own a few other Sega- and Nintendo-games from this franchise. It even had a cartoon series back in the late 80s/early 90s.
This particular game was released in 2001 in Austria and Germany by publisher JoWood Productions Software AG. It was delevoped by a studio with the funny sounding name Kritzelkratz 3000, wich translates from German into something like "scribblescratch 3000". This Studio from Würzburg, Germany founded in 1996 mostly delevoped PC-games for cartoon-franchises in the german-speaking region, but also a few Game Boy Color titles, including this game.
Otto's Ottifanten: Kommando Störtebeker tells an episode out of the adventureous life of the franchise's protagonist Bruno Bommel, a litte diaper-wearing baby-ottifant. One day, he finds his teddybear sidekick Honk missing and embarges on to a search that leads him out of his parents house through various parts of his hometown to find him.
Fun fact: The term "Störtebeker" used in the games subtitle refers to a kinda legendary german historic figure: Klaus Störtebeker, an alleged pirate and mercenary born ca. 1360 and said to have been executed in Hamburg on october 20th 1401. When playing this game, nothing actually refers to him in any way or word, and I really can't tell why this particular adventure got this title in the 1st place. Only explanation I found might be the 2001 cinema-released movie with the same title (wich ominously has nothing to do with the plot of the game).
This game is an auto-scrolling platformer wich lets you control little Baby Bruno traversing 4 regions with 6 levels each, that are set up like obstacle courses. This doesn't just read itself like a Game Boy version of
Kid Klown in Crazy Chase, it actually plays like one also! You can earn points by collecting star-emblems scattered throughout the levels of by shooting enemies with peanuts you can pick up. Some star-emblems are hidden in little bonus-passages or only reachable when jumping on a skateboard. Obstacles or enemies are dealt with by jumping over them, avoiding them by slowing down, ducking them or destroying them with peanuts. All this starts very simple, but can get very frustrating quickly due to only 3 chances to get hit till gameover and rapidly increasing difficulty. I'd consider this game a tough one if it wasn't for the endless continues and for getting a password every 3 levels. This layout resulted in my low highscore of 'only' 320 points (1 point for every star collected, 2 points for enemies shot with peanuts, and 10to20 bonus-points when finishing a level with many or all stars collected) and made for a fast playthrough. Non-surprisingly, the controls are weak and it takes some getting-into-it for sure. Main-menu's options only let you mess with music and Sound, so the difficulty can't be altered.
The game starts with a few pictures of Bruno and a few lines of poetry (yes, all story of the game is actually delivered in little poems). Every area of the game (The Bommels' house, suburbs, city park, and zoo) is divided by such a poetic story-intermission.
Graphically,
Otto's Ottifanten: Kommando Störtebeker isn't bad at all, using many colourful sprites and diversing backrounds even within the same areas. For a game out of a franchise this regional and specific and given the underdog developer, this is kinda impressive. Animations are a bit dull and simple though.
What definetly impressed me, was the game's musical score: Although the Soundtrack offers only 7 pieces (including one unused and the short gameover-jingle), all of them are quite good and 1-2 of them actually sound really cool, especially the zoo-theme. All music in
Otto's Ottifanten: Kommando Störtebeker was done by a guy named Stilianos 'Stello' Doussis, who seems to have worked for or collaborated with Kritzelkratz 3000 and JoWood Productions for at least two further projects. This dude really knew how to get some bump out of the Game Boy Color!
I think even if you don't know the franchise or creators of this game and it's story,
Otto's Ottifanten: Kommando Störtebeker made a fun and challenging short game to play through while traveling. It gave me headaches and frustration in a few unforgiving moments, but that's actually the kind of challenge I want to deal with when playing Game Boy.
3 games finished in 2026 - on to the next one
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