The Garfield Show: Threat of the Space Lasagna

The Garfield Show: Threat of the Space Lasagna
Worse than any monday.
Protagonist(s): Garfield the Cat Genre(s): Party Platform(s): Wii Microsoft Windows Release Date: Wii EU: June 23, 2010 NA: July 8, 2010 PC RU: December 2011 Developer(s): EKO Software Publisher(s): EU: EKO Software NA: Zoo Games RU: 1C Company Country: France Series: Garfield

The Garfield Show: Threat of the Space Lasagna (also known on the packaging of select European copies and Australian import copies simply as The Garfield Show) is a 2010 party video game developed and published by EKO Software in Europe and Zoo Games in North America for the Wii. It is based on The Garfield Show, which ran from 2008-2016, which in turn, is based off the Garfield comic strips starring the titular protagonist Garfield the Cat.

A PC port released around in December of 2011 only in Russia by 1C Company, however, it's hard to find information of it online, and can only be torrented.

Why It’s a Threat

1. The motion controls in this game are absolutely horrid, and half the time, they don't even respond to your movements, let alone consistently, making the game really hard to beat.
   • Sometimes, you are faced with minigames where you'd have a more likely chance to succeed by using your regular Wii Remote, others with a Wii Motion Plus attachment/a Wii Motion Plus Inside remote, or your Wii Balance Board to complete them.
   • Because of these unresponsive controls, it makes it very hard for you to actually score well enough to reach the goal conditions, causing you to lose several times.
2. Like with Garfield's Nightmare (despite being decent), once you beat a level, you cannot go back to it to replay it, unless you start over on a new save file. However, they can be replayed on the Multiplayer mode. Not only that, if you beat the game, your save data resets you all the way back to the beginning, and this is unlike the example provided, where that game replaces your save with the credits once you beat it.
3. The space lasagnas have a horribly racist-sounding Italian accent when they speak, and can potentially offend any Italian who plays it. It's so bad it makes even Mario's worst Italian accent sound normal in comparison.
4. Frank Welker doesn't even reprise his role as Garfield, instead, they hired a cheap soundalike, Jon Barnard to reprise his role as him instead, who infamously voices the character in all the Garfield PS2 games (especially the 2004 Garfield game). And this is despite the fact Welker voices him in the show, and almost all Garfield media since Garfield Gets Real.
5. This game, like the show this was based off, has a poor grasp on the Garfield comics.
   • Garfield, for whatever reason, is implied to still out loud in this game, where in the original source material, he isn't supposed to, but rather, he thinks his sentences.
6. Several of the game's music is reused from the TV show, including the main theme. This problem would later be seen in Garfield Kart and its 2019 remaster.
7. The cinematics that you get when you win or lose look like they have little to no effort put into them.
8. Throughout the game, the minigame where you shake the mice off Garfield is reused several times, unlike the rest of them, which are only seen once.
9. Missed opportunity: There could've been a bigger game that held all these minigames in something like a board game setting to make multiplayer more fun. In fact, 12 years later, they are making this concept a reality with the new Garfield: Lasagna Party game.
10. Overall, this game is nothing short of a shallow minigame compilation that only exists to cash in on the success of The Garfield Show.

Redeeming Qualities

1. It at least stays faithful to the non-sensical nature of the TV series.
2. Good story concept, despite the mediocre execution.
3. It allows for several different control methods to play the game, including a regular Wii Remote, a Wii Remote with Wii Motion Plus Inside, a Wii Motion Plus accessory attached to your remote, or the Wii Balance Board depending on the minigame.

Trivia

• It's the only Garfield game to ever see a Wii release, and it would've been the second and last had Garfield Gets Real on the Wii been made instead of being cancelled.
• Some copies produced for Europe and those that are imported to Australia are directly named after the show of the same name, though the subtitle "Threat of the Space Lasagna" can still be seen upon startup.
• There were rumours that a DS version was also made for that market, but there is no information online to suggest that this version have ever been conceptualized, and even if it was at some point, it has probably since been cancelled or is so obscure it's basically considered lost media, that, or it's likely a repackaging of Garfield Gets Real.
• A loose successor, Garfield: Lasagna Party, was released on all modern consoles on November 2022, following a similar gameplay structure to this game, where you play as Garfield and his friends in various minigames, likely taking place on a board-like setting, much like Mario Party.
• This was the last Garfield game to not be exclusive to and/or is playable on mobile (with the partial exception of the Garfield Kart remaster, Furious Racing, which in itself is based off a mobile game that got ported to the 3DS and PC), until Garfield: Lasagna World's release 12 years later.
• Like with Garfield's Nightmare, the European version has more language selections than the USA version.

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