Portal Runner

Portal Runner is an action-adventure and platform game played from a third-person view. The player controls Vikki Grimm, a character from the Army Men franchise. The game also includes an optional first-person view for precision shooting with a bow and arrow, Vikki's primary weapon. The player has the ability to control a new character, a lion named Leo in some levels, he is also mountable by Vikki and can be given commands such as "sit", "stay", and "attack".

The Game Boy Color version is a side-scrolling platformer adaptation of the console version.

In this game, Vikki Grimm embarks on an adventure after receiving a mysterious package. Her quest takes her through various toy worlds, including a prehistoric jungle and a medieval castle. Along the way, she befriends a lion named Leo and rescues a wizard, Merlin. The villain, Brigitte Bleu, manipulates Vikki's boyfriend, Sarge, and plans to marry him using a love gun acquired from Martians in a Space World.

Vikki and Leo thwart the wedding, stop an inter-dimensional attack, and return home. Brigitte ends up imprisoned, sharing a cell with General Plastro.

Portal Runner is a spin-off game of Army Men video game series, starring Vikki Grimm, a character who had her debut in Army Men: Sarge's Heroes (1999) and was introduced as the love interest for Sarge. The game was tentatively titled Vikki's Adventures, and was meant to be its own thing divorced from the Army Men militaristic origins. According to Michael Mendheim, they wanted to move in "completely different direction" and both the storyline and gameplay were unrelated to the larger franchise. The development team constructed three new alternate worlds consisting of a prehistoric dinosaur world, a medieval world with a life-size chessboard and an alien spaceship in order to take advantage of the improved Playstation 2 hardware. Some of the artistic influences on the art design included Vincent Van Gogh and Salvador Dali.

The Playstation 2 version was developed and published by The 3DO Company and was designed for all-ages in mind. Unlike the other Army Men games, Portal Runner is rated E for Everyone by the ESRB. John Salera was the director on the game. A new game engine was built for the game.

The PlayStation 2 release holds an average aggregate score of 57% at GameRankings based on 25 reviews and received "mixed" reviews according to video game review aggregator Metacritic. The Game Boy Color version received its earliest review from Nintendo Power, which gave it a score of two-and-a-half stars out of five.

The PS2 version gained notoriety when it was panned by GamePro, which was the first to review the game, saying that it "looks like a late-generation PlayStation title rather than a second-generation PS2 effort." Trip Hawkins, then-president of 3DO and publisher of Portal Runner, sent an angry email to John Rousseau, who was president of GamePro. The email was published on the internet in its entirety. In the email, Hawkins told Rousseau that his customers were the advertisers, not the readers, and implied that the reviews should be written to keep the advertisers happy.