As the rainy winter months continue to drag on, I find myself trying out more and more of these silly equestrian games...mostly because I wish like anything I could be out riding in real life. But, as that is not an option, I go for what, logically, seems more or less like the next best idea. This time, it was with My Horse & Me 2: Riding For Gold.
The storyline is fairly predictable and typical. You're playing a girl who's visiting her uncle's ranch (why is it always a grandfather or an uncle? Just wondering...) and, of course, things can never just be. There's all this drama that the ranch's horses are all getting sick, and the ranch itself is in danger of being shut down and your character is its only hope, blah blah blah... you can see where it's going. You have to start riding so you can enter competitions to try and save the ranch. (Who didn't see that coming from a mile away?) And, of course, more in the style of any TV drama involving a ranch rather than most games, there has to be the one token hunky guy who's interested in your character from the get-go. (I'm sure my own sexuality has something to do with this, but every time the guy showed up, I just rolled my eyes and groaned. Can't STAND that skeeve. You know as well as I do he's only interested in one thing. :p)
So, what's a girl to do? Well, you train your horse and compete all around the world, of course! Each competition has a dressage, jumping, and a cross-country obstacle course. You get to train for each of these at your own ranch before traveling to remote locations all around the globe (many of which I wouldn't associate with horse showmanship, but whatever) to compete in each competition. I do like the fact that it's only very rare that you end up doing anything at a galloping pace. More typically, you use either a trot or a canter...which is far more true to real life than most horse games assume things work, where everything is all, 'THIS IS YOUR HORSE ON STEROIDS. NEED FOR SPEEEEEEEEEEED!' No. Just, no. And this game respects that, so I'll give it a bonus point for that.
In between competitions and training sessions, you must care for your horse. Sounds typical, I'm sure, but so far this is the only games I've ever seen thus far in the genre who've gone to the lengths of detail that this one has. Even the more common practices, they put their own spin on, which makes this game a one of a kind in the field. First, you must bathe your horse. You take a round brush and break up all the clumps of dirt in the horse's fur (which, unfortunately due to the animation style used, results in the dirt looking like flanks of meat hanging off the poor animal), then lather it up with soap, rinse it off with a hose, and try is with a towel. Funny thing about rinsing the horse....after you do so, there's streaks of neon blue left behind on the horse that make it look like a zebra. (They don't entirely disappear when you dry it, either. They just fade a bit.) Then, you must clean the horse's hooves. (Ah, caught you off-guard, didn't it? This is something new to horse games!) You get a hoof pick, and just like in real life, you have to pick all the clods of dirt out from the hooves. But then they take it a step further by requiring you to fill the cracks left behind in the hooves with grease. (They could have only topped this by requiring you to change the horses' shoes from time eto time as well. Maybe in a future game someday.) Then you have to take care of the horse's legs by massaging and wrapping them (another feature I've never seen used in another game), and, although I felt they may have been reaching a little bit on this part, give the horse massages patented to their moods. This only proves to be educational in the fact that it forces you to pay attention to your horse's body language, which exhibits subtle signs of different moods that real horses display as well. (Growing up around horses my entire life, this wasn't even a challenge for me.) Then you get to clean their stall, which is about as tedious (but luckily not as backbreaking) as it is in real life. Collect up all the dirty straw, get rid of it, wash away the poop with a hose (although they say it's dirt....c'mon. You wouldn't be cleaning it up if there weren't poop everywhere. I'm guessing they just didn't want to disgust the kids by calling it what it really is), and then scattering new, fresh straw all over the floor. And then, of course, you have to feed your horse. This part, they took some creative liberties on, because you have to combine 6 different pieces of food (of your choice) with a supplement, add water, mix it, and see if your horse likes it. (I was only able to come up with one combination that my horse didn't hate.) It's not nearly so complicated in real life.....nor even vaguely similar to this process.
Now, with all that said, I do have some complaints. (Then again, when don't I?) If the 3-D animations weren't so horribly grainy, they might actually be decent to look at, but in the shape they're in, they're just hideous. (What a waste.) Yet, in the actual dialogue scenes, they're horribly cartoony by comparison. There's no real set style throughout, which annoys me. Also annoying is all the in-game advertising for Atari, especially during competitions. It makes it VERY distracting while you're trying to concentrate on what's going on, and then suddenly there's a huge Atari logo dragging your attention towards it. They should've made these more subtle. The controls themselves are iffy.... When they want to work correctly, they're fantastic. But, they're very finicky and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to when they will and won't work, and then you're about a mile off from where you need the controls to be picking up at. This makes trying to get gold in any competition almost impossible. You'll be lucky to see silver. But, the absolute #1 biggest gripe I have about this game is that there is NO way to speed up the dialogue. It scrolls past irritatingly slowly, and it doesn't even stop between messages for you to have to tap the screen, signaling that you've finished reading this part. It just keeps going. So you can't even try to multitask while playing this to have something to do during the aggravatingly long waits for the dialogue to finish popping up. If it weren't for this, I'd be liable to give this game a considerably higher rating than I'm about to. Potential improvement for if you ever make a sequel to this, Atari. Heed your players' suggestions!
Overall, the game length isn't that long. In one sitting, I'd venture to say that one could easily complete the game in about 4 or 5 hours, tops. But, because of how aggravatingly slowly things go, I couldn't play it all in one sitting, I had to keep taking breaks between each competition and coming back to it later; playing it in only small spurts. (I'm sure I can't be the only one to have felt this way about it.) So it ended up taking me about a week or so to complete it, playing through a couple of competitions per day. I think this speaks volumes both about its lasting and replay appeal. I'm going to rate this title a 6.5 out of 10, and I feel that I'm still being generous with that. The negative points should've forced it lower, but with so much uniqueness in the horse care department, I did have to take that into consideration when rating this.
Keeping in step with the stereotypically female aspiration-inspired video games, Imagine has topped itself this time in trying to crank out another extremely girly video game. This time, they took on cheerleading.
...CHEERLEADING.
As you can imagine (pun intended), there isn't a whole lot somebody can do with this. If this didn't have the Imagine brand tied to it, I would be convinced that this was an absolute scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel budget to even produce this game in the first place. The graphics look both as though they were drawn in MS Paint and drawn in one of the shoddiest anime stylings I've seen in a long time. They have to distract the little girls from the terrible quality of this game with making sparkly fireworks explode any time they tap the bottom screen. Then you get into the actual gameplay...
All you end up doing is copying what the opposing cheerleading squad does. How this is supposed to lead you up through the ranks in "beating" the other squads, I don't know. But you either swipe your stylus up, down, left, or right....that's it. That's what you do the whole game, through every routine. Can you imagine just how quickly that gets old? Ugh. I kept waiting for the game to become fun, but it never happened. Thankfully, it only took about two hours, total, to complete the entire game. The only requiem you get from the monotony of the game is a small minigame you get to play a grand total of twice throughout the course of the game; a bake sale where you have to hurl your baked goods at your customers from a distance. ...It didn't really fit in with the rest of the game, but I guess they had to make some attempt at fleshing this out into a semi-playable game.
About the only thing I liked about this game, albeit predictable, were the Showgirls. VERY Broadway-esque, thus why I loved them. They should've belonged to dance troop rather than the cheerleaders, but that's neither here nor there. You can also purchase their dance styles (along with any of the other troops' dances as well), but I personally feel that you should just level up through the game and earn the dances with higher levels. Have it built in to simplify things, y'know? But the only drawback to that would've been that a.) it would have felt like that much less that you could do and b.) you'd lose that customizable quality to your troop to give it its own flavor. So I guess it's good and bad at the same time.
I feel that this game is really rather forgettable. It gets a measley 3 out of 10 pom-poms.
When dealing with typical colored block puzzle games, there's only so many possible ways to try and change the game up. While this one tried its best to do so by adding many intricacies to create a deeper game, it fell flat in the shallow end of the pool.
The game opens with an ominous storyline about how a far off, distant (and imaginary) land is perishing to death and pestilence, and that your hero is the only hope that can even try to save it. You have to assemble teams of fighters to come along with you on your "epic quests", attempting to regain everything that once belonged to your people.
To do this, you'll have to battle through colored block puzzles. Oh, yes. Colored blocks on a grid, and you get to slide them around, one block at a time, to try and connect three of the same color. Doing so will help you to power up your fighters and attack the opponents, as well as vice versa. Whoever has more fighters still alive at the end of the fight wins.
There's just one small problem with this game: There's relatively little to no explanation of how to play. You're expected to figure this part out more or less all on your own. While not impossible, it leaves you feeling very confused, trying to figure out what the hell to do while getting your rear end handed to you on a plate in the meantime. It's definitely harder than it initially seems going into it. But it's not just the puzzles that aren't really explained to you. It's not very well explained in how to conquer the different kingdoms, other than to 'win battles'. Well no s***, Sherlock. Ugh. And then it takes trial and error to figure out the right way to even assemble your troops.
In my opinion, if a company's going to make a game with a complicated premise like this, wouldn't it make more sense to at least include a tutorial level to show you what you're supposed to be doing, rather than either figure it out for themselves or get ticked off and return it? It just makes no sense to me. For this, as well as the game looking to be seemingly very low budget, I'm going to rate it a 3 out of 10 vassals.
I won't lie, I don't have much personal interest in monsters. Go ahead, blame it on me being a chick, but I just don't, no matter how hard I try. Still, I decided to at least try this game out and see how it went. You never know, sometimes odd things end up surprising you!
While this game initially seemed like it just might become one of those titles, it didn't end up panning out. You get a set number of stat points with which to build and customize a monster of your own design, which, while destructive in nature, is sent to protect the town in which it lives, not hurt it. To gather the strength it needs, unfortunately it must destroy inanimate objects such as dumsters and cars, but the locals won't mind - it's for their own protection, you know. You have to chase down the bad monsters in town into caves and then fight them.
I only got to the third monster of the game before realizing that I must have failed in building my monster strong enough, and for that, he wasn't strong enough to beat it, no matter what I did. After wasting nearly a week just to keep re-affirming this fact, I finally gave up. All the nice graphics and sound effects....down the drain. All because I couldn't level up quickly enough. What a waste, no?
I'm going to try and give the game the benefit of the doubt in thinking perhaps it's not bloody awful, because the quality seemed good, and perhaps it's just the fact that I'm not so accustomed to this particular genre of game that it didn't turn out all too great for me, so I'm going to be generous and rate it a 6 out of 10 monsters.
Ever since Maxis released the first of the Sim City games, I'm sure they had no idea just how much of a genre that they'd be cornerstoning by doing so. There've been tons of city simulation games, home simulation games, and of course, the whole gamut of Tycoon simulation games. One of these, the one which I'll be focusing on here, is Sea Park Tycoon.
The premise itself seems simple: Build a sea park, keep your animals and visitors happy, and turn a profit. Seems simple, right? Not so much. Not only are there numerous goals that you have to reach (well okay, in scenario mode anyway), but keeping your assets afloat doesn't prove to be as simple as it seems at the start. This is good training for real life money management skills, I suppose, but at the same time, it does get really frustrating, going bankrupt so easily so often.
There's two types of gamers in the world; the experts at these type of games, and the rest of us. The experts can cruise right through like they're nothing, and the rest of us are practically reduced to tears of frustration. It's like Zoo Tycoon all over again, except with clearer controls and better graphics. The one main difference is that when your animals get sick, you have to play minigames to heal them, and there's other mini-games for whenever you want to hold a park animal show with, say, the dolphins or sea otters.
The 3-D graphics aren't the typically horrible quality that we're so accustomed to expecting from Nintendo DS games, but it's nothing spectacular on the other hand, either. Definitely a little on the better side of the line, if anything. This helps bring up the points a tiny bit on my scoring for the game, as does all the detail put into most aspects of the game.
Overall though, this is an easily forgettable game. Chances are, at most, you'll spend a few weeks playing this, put it down, and never think about it again. Rating this a 6 out of 10 zookeepers.
Remember how a while back, the MySims line already ripped off one of the Mario series titles when they released their game MySims Party? Well... looks as though they've done it again. This time, however, they've gone and done it with MySims Racing, and, as you may have already surmised, it's basically a complete and total rip-off of Mario Kart... right down to the fact that you don't even race in regular cars; you are, indeed, in a go-kart.
You still have the typical cutesy MySims style characters and animation the whole way through, which is a redeeming factor I suppose - it at least keeps some degree of stability throughout their series, much like the Legos games all having the same animation style - but at the same time, I do realize that there's only so much you can do with this style. Still... One would think that a company like EA Games would be able to think up something a little more original rather than rip off the competition so blatantly, right?
No matter what game mode you play, it's really not much different from Mario Kart Racing. You drive around, do races (obviously), but the one difference is that as you drive around the streets, there are also a great number of characters littered along your paths, who you have the option of helping on mini-missions to earn points that you can upgrade your car's parts with. So, if you want a good car capable of leveling up, not helping these characters is not an option; you'll have to at least do a few. As I don't believe there's any of this in Mario Kart, this is the only thing that really sets it apart as being unique.
My own personal opinion here is that EA Games should ought to set forth to try and come up with more original ideas instead of just copying NIntendo's. Just a thought. Should they do that, I feel their games will improve exponentially. Rating this a 6 out of 10 go-karts.
I know what you must be thinking right now: Jeez L.L.P., first you attacked the Imagine series, and now you're going after the Dreamer series? What's wrong with you? Well, while I'll definitely agree that I assumed that this game was going to be a cheap knock-off of the Imagine games (I mean, just look at the cover...), I was actually surprised that it was not very akin to its predecessor.
What I can compare this game to is if and Hannah Montana: Music Jam and Rockin' Pretty somehow spawned a game together, this would be the result. And it's not necessarily a bad thing.
I needn't even explain the premise; it's very straightforward in what you'd assume it to be: a girl band trying to rocket their way to super stardom fame and fortune. You start out playing very MIDI-esque sounding random songs that were obviously made up for the game, as they sound like they were demo songs off an old Yamaha keyboard. But as you progress through several rounds, you find that suddenly, you start beginning to recognize the songs. Lily Allen's "Smile"; Sugarbabe's "About You Now"; Britney Spears' "Toxic"....the list goes on. Suddenly, the game becomes a lot less tedious when you actually know the songs that you have to play 5 times over each. Oh, did I mention that part? Yes. You'll be playing each song at least five times. You have to practice it on every instrument in your band, dance to it, and THEN you finally get to perform it.
Even so, the game isn't particularly lengthy. I finished it in under a day. The graphics are nothing to write home about; the backgrounds aren't bad, they're actually pretty good. But the characters are done in HORRIBLE 3-D graphics that make you cringe a little to look at them. Your main character's face will more likely than not look deformed, no matter what you do with it. And even in the songs you know, they're still played in MIDI-format, so... This is another area that could've been improved upon.
Overall, I think I'm going to rate this game a 6 out of 10 pop stars.
As the rainy winter months continue to drag on, I find myself trying out more and more of these silly equestrian games...mostly because I wish like anything I could be out riding in real life. But, as that is not an option, I go for what, logically, seems more or less like the next best idea. This time, it was with My Horse & Me 2: Riding For Gold.
