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Review
By: |
Hoover |
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Date: |
05/29/2003 |
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Released: |
03/09/2003 |
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Publisher: |
Sony |
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Developer: |
Idol Minds |
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Platform: |
Playstation 2 |
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Rating: |
 |
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Intro
You have to give the developers at Idol Minds credit for
creating a fresh new game that almost creates its own genre.
This neighborhood of games has multi-player mode and on-line
play, but what age group was this game designed for? I don’t
think this game will appeal to adults or even teenagers,
pre-teens is who this game was designed for, I think (I’ll
explain more later).
As I mentioned this game is a set of games within the game.
The premise is that you are on a street – “My Street”- with
houses, black top, playgrounds, a tree fort, grass and
streams. You move your avatar around the street interacting
with other characters who challenge you to games. The games
include: Dodge Ball, RC Racer, Lawn Mower Racing, Marbles,
Volleyball, Chicken Herding and Chemistry. Each game has its
own environment, controls and opponents. But first let’s step
back and see what kinds of play modes are available. |
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Play modes
There is a Play mode that just lets your character walk around
the street and play any game you wish. To begin a game you
need to “catch” the corresponding kid who will challenge you
to that game, or just press the start button and choose the
game you want from a diagram and stop wasting your time
chasing kids up and down the street. There is also an option
to create tournaments of games.
Story mode places you, the kid, in a new neighborhood after a
family move. The date is August 6th and you have until school
starts on August 24th to complete all of the tasks in the
neighborhood. In the beginning all of the games are locked
except Marbles. If you can win three games of Marbles you get
the ability to borrow Anne’s snorkel. You can then use the
snorkel to retrieve the volley ball from the water and play
Volleyball against Marcus. If you win three games of
volleyball you open up the next game and so on and so on. You
start to see the repetitive nature of this story mode. Time
moves pretty fast as you play games and you can only play
during the day. First of all you are a very lazy kid who only
leaves the house at 10AM and typically all of the other kids
in the neighborhood go home at 5PM. This leaves enough time to
play about 3 games a day which puts a little pressure on you
to finish the story in 18 days. On top of borrowing things you
also need to buy certain things to play other games, like your
own RC racer or gas for the lawn mowers. A young kid like you
doesn’t have a very steady income until the local farm needs
help – this is where the game gets very repetitive. If you
complete 3 tasks on the farm you get some money. In order to
buy the RC Racer you need to keep doing these 3 tasks over and
over to get your money, this is a pretty tedious part of the
game especially since the tasks aren’t fun to do at all. The
first task is to direct a stubborn cow out of the barn, the
second is to feed the chickens and the third is to feed the
pigs. There is nothing challenging about feeding the animals,
you just grab a bag or a bucket and deposit the food in the
troughs, just a big waste of time in Story Mode.
On-line play is pretty straight forward and after a quick
setup phase you can play all of the games described below
on-line against real competitors. The few times I ventured
on-line at different times of day I never found more than a
handful of players to compete against. It is pretty cool to
realize that all your practice herding chickens pays off when
you smoke a real person – too bad that is the only game I got
really good at. This game doesn’t support the available USB
keyboard so interaction is a little difficult with the code
wheel. To enter letters, numbers and special characters, a
wheel pops up with 4 letters in each section, you use the
directional pad to highlight a section and then press one of
the 4 buttons to choose the corresponding letters. This is a
very ingenious way to type and a lot faster than moving the
cursor around a virtual keyboard, like in some games, but real
keyboard support would have been nice.
Gameplay
Before you can play any of the games in either mode you need
to create you very own kid in “Create-o-kid”. This is a very
robust tool that lets you create and customize your avatar.
There are two panes in the tool, the left shows the actual
character and the right are all of the different choices. In
the left hand pane you can pan around, up/down or zoom in on
any aspect of your “look”. The choices on the right hand side
are endless. You can modify your hair/hat, face, eyes,
glasses, upper body, lower body, shoes, colors and even the
voice of your character. There are tons of options for each
category as well, from cowboy hats, to 3-D (red & blue)
glasses and even slippers and platform shoes.
Games
Dodge Ball
Dodge Ball takes place in the local school gymnasium and pits
4 kids against 4 other kids. The options include the computer
skill level and the number of games necessary to win. There
are power ups such as magnet, first aid and nuclear. Each
person on your team has a health meter that goes down the more
times they get hit until they are out and need to sit on the
bleachers to wait for the next game. Throwing involves locking
onto an opponent (R2) and throwing at the top of your jump for
most effectiveness. On defense you can catch a throw, dodge a
throw or just stand there and get hit. It is a little
difficult to manage the 4 players and there is no easy way to
switch between players. The power ups are pretty cool
especially the nuclear which drops a “bomb” on all of your
opponents. The trash talking in this game is pretty intense as
well.
RC Racer
RC Racer is just what it sounds like, racing remote controlled
cars on a track behind the mechanics shop in town. There are
nine different tracks to choose from with different vehicles
depending on the track including buggys, trucks and even
tanks. The game reminds me of the arcade classic “Off Road”
with the steering wheel and the nitros powerups. The tracks
are similar to that game with plenty of hills, water and sharp
turns. Power ups include smoke screen, oil slick, missiles and
the all important nitros. Steering isn’t as responsive as it
was in “Off Road” because of the lack of the loose steering
wheel, spinning the wheel to whip around the tight corners was
the only way to win in the arcade and the joystick makes this
game difficult to master.
Lawnmower Racing
This is a unique game unlike RC Racer with nothing to compare
it to. While it is another racing type game, this time on
lawnmowers, the goal of the game isn’t to come in first place
but to mow the most grass. There are 4 different lawns to
choose from and each lawn is broken into 4 different sections
and 4 different races. You chose the number of laps each race
will be and then you complete all 4 sections for that many
laps. The goal as stated above is to mow the most grass,
avoiding flowers and the other mowers. There can be up to 4
players total. As you mow grass you gain points, you can tell
the sections that have already been mowed so you need to find
a path around the course that still has grass to be mowed.
However you only get the points when you empty your mowing bag
at the end of each lap, so it is wise to complete as many laps
as possible, but also to have lots of grass in your bag.
Whenever someone finishes all of the laps the race stops and
everyone moves on to the next section of lawn. After all 4
sections are done whoever has the most points wins. Pretty
unique concept I think. There are power ups in this game too
including grow flowers, mower bags, and grass pile bonus. If
you ram you opponent they loose all of their grass and it
forms a grass pile that you can run over and get bonus points.
The lawn mowers move pretty slow, especially compared to the
RC Racers and this wasn’t a very difficult game to win against
the computer. Some of the computer opponents don’t even go
around the track in the correct direction. So this is a unique
game concept but not a very challenging game.
Marbles
Marbles is just what you think it is with shooters and peewees
and all that. Marbles is played in the local tree fort on one
of 10 different boards. There are 4 total competitors on the
board and the object of the game is to get your peewees from
the dispenser to the goal. Marbles come out of the dispenser
all game long and if you get near them with your shooter and
hold down the X button they will kind of stick to you so you
can move them around the board. The other opponents are trying
to do the same thing as well as knock you off the board to get
bonus points. You decide how many points it takes to win the
game and that is how many peewees you need to get through the
goal. Powerups appear on the board occasionally, things like
super magnet, paint bucket and un-magnet. The super magnet and
un-magnet do just what they sound like. The paint bucket
changes all the peewees on the board to your color. The camera
in the game is at a fixed angle above the board to try and
give the board some depth, however it makes it difficult to
line up opponents and typically I went flying off the edge
instead of knocking someone else off. The boards are
interesting with pinball bumpers and flippers, trap doors and
even a piece of cake.
Volleyball
Two on tow beach volleyball to be exact, with all the setting,
bumping and spiking you could ask for. All of the normal
volleyball rules are in affect including the three hit rule
and the nuance that you need to be serving to score points.
There are three different serving options; bump, toss or jump.
At the start of each game you play rocks, papers, scissors to
see who serves first – that’s cool. Spiking takes a lot of
practice, and while there is a color indicator to help you
time your jump it isn’t easy. On a set the ball actually goes
off the top of the screen adding an element of trickiness to
spiking. The trash talking in this game is pretty over the
top, depending on your opponents they say different types of
things: “You put the U in loooooser” and from the hillbilly’s
“Stuff a poll cat in you kazoo” – good stuff for the kiddies.
Chicken Herding
This is my favorite game out of the 7 because it is
challenging, fast paced and unique unlike some of these
rehashed games of the past. This game takes place over at the
local farm in a fenced in chicken coop area. Each of the 4
players has a coop in one of the 4 corners. Chickens, chicks
and pigs run around the board, but only in straight lines.
Your goal is to get all the chickens into your coop and send
all the pigs to your opponents coop. If 3 pigs (modifiable
default setting) get into a coop that player is out of the
game. To move the chickens and pigs around you need to put
down directional tiles down on the board, the board itself is
12x12 tiles square so 144 tiles can be placed all over the
board. The tiles tell the animal which direction to travel
until they hit the next tile, a wall or a coop. Chickens are
worth 33 points, chicks 8 and pigs -250. There are plenty of
chickens on the board at any one time so the action is always
fast and furious. You have to split time between sending
chickens to your coop, sending pigs to the others and guarding
against pigs. There are power-ups in this game too: fragile
tiles, pig shield, super tiles and reverse tiles.
Chemistry
This tetris like game has up to 4 players each working on
their own set of blocks in their own space. The biggest
difference between this and Tetris is that all of the blocks
are 2x1, no fancy L’s or T’s to mix up the pattern. There are
4 different colors for you totry and mix and match to create
groupings of blocks. A power meter on the side charges as you
drop more blocks. When it is full you get to use a laser to
zap sections of blocks, any similar colored blocks connected
dissolve with one laser shot. At the same time you zap you
opponents blocks too, freezing their blocks from their laser
shots. I never got into Tetris and this game is easier.
Graphics
The graphics are bright and vivid and are very eye catching.
The characters are a well detailed and the landscape is rich
with extras. Too bad you can’t do anything extra in the
neighborhood. You can’t climb on the tractors on the farm and
if you get too far off course your mother scolds you. This
makes the world pretty small so the amount of detail is
understandable in such a small environment.
Sound
The sound of the game is average at best and at some times
pretty annoying. Walking around the ‘hood all of the sounds of
a typical neighborhood can be heard; birds chirping, water
running, and children screaming. Then when the games begin
these cute little children turn into potty-mouth trash
talkers. This is where the audience for this game gets
confusing. If it was designed for adults then it doesn’t have
enough depth or replay ability. If it was designed for
children then why do the characters call each other panty
waste, loser and boo? Even the menus are full of slang. When
you are asked to confirm you entry the options are whatever
(for yes) and nah (for no). Sometimes the choice is Yeah
instead of Whatever. I wouldn’t want my young child talking
this way or hearing some of the slams, but the game is rated E
for Everyone!
Conclusion
In conclusion the game is a fresh and new idea that doesn’t
take advantage of it. Some of the games are just re-hashed old
games and others aren’t very fun. The couple of good games
doesn’t justify buying this game. The on-line play is an added
bonus that gives it a little better replay ability, too bad
there aren’t very many people on-line. The games and
environment look good and you can tell a lot of time was spent
on them, too bad more time wasn’t spent on the controls and
the story mode. Story mode is just plain tedious. Finally, I
can’t figure out who this game was developed for, adults,
teens or younger children it doesn’t fit any very well.
Hoover Rating:
2 out of 5 Planets
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My Street >> |
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