Acclaim has finally officially announced the development of ZooCube – a new, innovative, sweet, cheerful game full of penguins, frogs, turtles, beavers and a load of other playful animals. What those inventive game developers come up with nowadays…

Amazingly, it appears as Acclaim is trying to broaden its target group, as it usually brings out games like Turok, Legends of Wrestling and Aggressive Inline. Acclaim is now probably also trying to find the attention of the more “soft-gamers” and lower age groups.

Acclaim's and PuzzleKings' idea behind this game was to produce a game which takes puzzlers to a whole new dimension. It is not a game with fancy graphics, and that rely on them, but it is going to be a game that – for once – relies on addictive gameplay and replay-value. The brilliant balance between the 'easy-to-use' and 'difficult-to-master', an the promised “100 hours of fun” confirm the ideas.

Be warned, you do need a lot of fantasy and light-heartedness to actually like the story behind the game. You know what I mean when you read it. It's all about the very, very evil Dr. Buc Ooze, who – unfortunately – came to power several years ago. He did incredible research on animal shaping. After a year or so, however, he went mad, transforming animals into incredible shapes and hilariously unnatural forms. In the last few stages, he didn't even want to do research. He just wanted to transform every living animal on the planet. Evil, ey?

Then the good guys came in. The “ZooCube” was developed, some kind of flying ark, which the deformed animals could enter. When they came out, they were all perfectly normal again. In some way or another, the ZooCube appeared to transfer the poor animals back to their original shape again. As in not very many Acclaim games, you play the good guy, and have to rescue the animals from the mad, mad doctor with his hideous and … experiments. Do it quickly though, you don't have much time! The future of the whole animal-community relies on you. Yes, on just you.

Acclaim claims that this game is “addictive, engaging, intoxicating, heart-racing puzzle action”. Thanks to a load of special power-ups and bonuses, this game is guaranteed to be “a hell of a lotta fun”. Acclaim has confirmed multiplayer mode – battle and cooperative mode – and 12 different modes, guaranteeing an amazing 100 hours of gameplay.

ZooCube isn't only going to be released on the Nintendo GameCube; it will also be released on the Nintendo GameBoy Advance. We thought that this might be hinting at a possible NGC-GBA linking feature, but until now, Acclaim has only officially confirmed a two-player linking function on the GBA.

If you like fast, happy, colourful and immensely immature fun, this is just your GameCube game. With a nice price tag of $49.99 (RRP), you can't really leave it out of your GC games collection. Unfortunately though, Acclaim has not yet announced an official release date for Europe. The only thing they did say, was Spring this year for America. So I wouldn't count on it before September 2002. After seeing the screenshots and the movie though, you won't mind waiting.