DS Review: Emma at the Farm

You know, I grew up a farm girl. (Horse ranch to be exact, but I digress. We always had lots of animals around.) Even though this game was probably meant for, oh, I don't know... 3 year olds probably, I decided to give it the benefit of the doubt and try it out anyhow. Free import from the UK to review. Why not?

Observation number 1: The girl on the cover of the box doesn't even look like the girl in the game, strangely enough. What's this? False advertisement already? The guard is going up, and the game hasn't even begun yet. But the music sounds nice enough, so I'm still keeping an open mind.

There's three difficulties on which you can play this game: easy, medium, and hard. (Truth be told, with the exception of about 2 activities, it's exactly the same thing and difficulty on each difficulty level.) You have to play through the game to unlock each of the upper levels above it... Which wouldn't seem to bad IF THE GAME WERE DIFFERENT ON EACH DIFFICULTY! Seriously, would it have been that hard to give Emma three little adventures instead of...well...one?

Oh yes. You heard me. You play it through just to find out YOU GOT CHEATED. Who wants to play the same fairly-lame game through more than once? Not me, but for you lovely people, I did it anyway. The plot essentially is that Emma has come to visit her Uncle Jules (whose laugh makes me think of Charles Aznavour big time - he seems to be the lone Frenchman in this otherwise very British game) on his farm, and that while she's helping him tend to the animals, one of the mother hens has lost her chicks and needs Emma's help finding him. There's more emphasis on finding the chicks than the chores. The storyline is VERY short, even for a little kids' game. You could seriously complete this game on any difficulty in half an hour, tops. The lasting appeal for re-playing is not very high.

The dialogue in the game is almost laughably English. I keep getting mental images of all these animals (plus Emma) being uppity, snobby characters with the highly upper crust British accents. For example, my favorite line in the whole game is said by the noble horse: "I'll greet this fox with a firm hoof! A good thump with my iron shoe and that will be the end of him!" A close second would be the donkey's poem:

Oh sweet grass on the path of the barn!
You are so nice when I eat you!
When I look at you,
my soul is at peace!
Ah, how lovely it is to graze near the barn!

I don't know, maybe it's just me, but I giggled over it. Anyway, throughout the game you go through a sequence of chores: you must collect eggs from the henhouse, catch falling eggs in a basket before they hit the ground, call the donkey to you, collect bundles of hay and place them in a cart, race a bunny against a fox, blow dandelion fluff into the wind, milk a cow, match animal sounds with the animals that make them, feed the animals, round up piglets and sheep, identify different vegetables, water the garden, shake apples out of the trees in the orchard, collect ripe tomatoes, and build a scarecrow.

All of this builds up to a very moral-ish ending of that it's bad to run off to play and leave for somewhere without telling your parents because it will make them worry. (Told you it was aimed towards little kids.) The opening and ending videos aren't the best quality I've ever seen, but they're not too bad, all things considered. It looks really low-budget, but if they'd had more money to play with, they might have been pretty nice.

I'm pretty sure the bonus features take longer to completely play out than the actual game. There's an Animal Families game (which has nothing whatsoever to do with actual animal families - it's a typical memory card matching game), a Dress Up Emma screen (which makes absolutely no impact on what Emma wears in that actual game at all...that was a letdown to me), real life recipes, and a virtual vegetable garden to water and grow. The best of of these is probably those real life recipes, which include:

- Grapefruit cup
- Potato pancakes
- Fruit ice cream
- Pound cake
- Quiche
- Steamed fish in foil
- Orange salad
- Apple tart with a moustache
- Tomato soup
- Beefburgers in breadcrumbs
- Mini-gratin
- Chocolate cake with glasses

Overall, I'm pretty sure I'll rate this game a solid 4 milking cows. Not too strong, but the bonus features are at least a little bit redeeming.