Barbie Beach Vacation

Posted on January 12, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

I do apologize for this brazen oversight — my master spreadsheet claimed that Barbie Beach Vacation already had corresponding screenshots in MobyGames when it clearly does not. That means I have to extend the Barbie coverage another night.

The first thing I notice about Beach Vacation is the different — and dare I say, creepy — art and animation style:

It's Overtly Sinister Barbie! New from Mattel

I’m a little surprised that Barbie’s appearance varies so widely between the assorted titles in her gaming oeuvre. This is the kind of thing I would expect Mattel to keep tight control over. But maybe only Disney is that strict, which is perhaps why they keep most game development in-house nowadays.

Barbie and her friends hit the beach, apparently one on a remote, private island. As I was jotting down notes to that effect, it dawned on me: Isn’t Barbie’s canon backstory that she lives in Malibu, California? Is it really necessary to cruise to a remote island to catch some rays?

Moving right along, the game is a collection of 7 minigames/activities. Actually, “minigame” pretty well describes all of the components since there are usually very concrete goals and you are basically prohibited from proceeding until you satisfactorily complete the task at hand. Tasks include surfing, water skiing, diving, and photographing marine life.

Barbie Beach Vacation -- Building sand castles to spec

In the foregoing activity, Barbie — and when I say Barbie, I mean you, the player — is tasked with creating sand castles for a sand castle competition. At first, I tried to let my limited creativity flow with the tools at my disposal. That effort was dashed when Barbie kept reminding me that she didn’t think what I was doing was a good idea. You see, on the top of the screen are the components you absolutely must use to create a castle during this round. Look, Barbie, let’s not forget who’s helping whom here. If you tell me exactly what components I need to use in the sand castle, then you’re going to get letter-of-the-law nonsense as shown above so that I can keep the screenshot recon moving.

Barbie's evil friend practices her dance

After winning the grueling multi-round elimination sand castle tournament on the beach, Barbie walks in on her similarly malevolent-looking pal practicing her dance moves for the big party. Barbie dons a new outfit (it’s important to note that Barbie gets to choose from a selection of new outfits prior to embarking on any activity) and practices her own dance. As she shakes it, it is your job to… I’m not sure, something about clicking on the left and right mouse buttons as musical notes move in to assault Barbie.

Barbie Beach Vacation -- Barbie practices her dancing

This minigame baffled me more than perhaps any other game played for this Gaming Pathology effort. But the game was sympathetic to my plight as it chose to just randomly end the dance after awhile.

Then it’s on to plan the big beach party. Choose from 2 locations, a number of hanging decorations, as well as a number of sitting decorations that were hidden in bottles recovered throughout other activities. Decide where to place the DJ and every single one of your friends. Be sure to place Ken near you and not near one of your girlfriends, and press the button to make the party transpire.

Barbie Beach Vacation -- Making the party happen

I have heard the horror tales about brides who try to micromanage every finest detail of their weddings. I think it’s obvious that these women got the idea that such fine-grained control over a party is even possible: they played computer games like this.

Tanned, rested and ready to tackle another wild adventure, Barbie and her friends depart from the island. I can’t be sure, but I think that this crab — an extraneous prop that is generally a filmmaker’s shorthand indicating that the action takes place on a tropical island (see also: scorpion as shorthand for desert) — is actually flipping them the claw.

Barbie Beach Vacation -- Crab flipping them off

See Also:

At MobyGames

Barbie’s Beach Vacation
Every Barbie game that MobyGames knows about

Metal Gear Barbie

Posted on January 10, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

You’ll be happy — or saddened, depending on whether you have the same twisted idea of entertainment that I do — to learn that tonight’s game will be the last Barbie game for awhile, until such time that I happen to procure another Barbie game that A) is not yet in MobyGames, or B) is already in the database, but that I genuinely want to play. What?

Yeah, you read that right — unless there’s a Barbie game that I actually care to try my hand at. Tonight’s game — Secret Agent Barbie — already has a very complete record with a good description, diverse set of screenshots, and complete credits. But I admit that I want to see what this is about. After all, I’m a moderate fan of sneaking games like Metal Gear Solid. And after a week of metaphorically eating my vegetables by playing Barbie titles for MobyGames, I hope this tastes like dessert.

It's Sky Diving Secret Agent Barbie! New from Mattel; seriously, though, the game implies that Barbie deploys to all of her secret missions via parachute, in broad daylight, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower

As the name implies, Barbie does a stint at an espionage agency. The agency goes unnamed. And they don’t really fight international threats. Mostly, they seem to investigate theft incidents that occur in the world of high fashion. Really, the organization seems more like a private investigator’s office with an extravagant clothing budget.

Clothing, you should know, plays a significant role in anything Barbie. This game is no different. Barbie has to change clothes every time she switches into a different game mode. There are 3 such modes — action (where Barbie can run and jump, onto crates, for example), adventure (where Barbie can walk casually and talk to people), and stealth (where Barbie can crouch as she walks and can also do a roll).

Clothing and guards– guards also play a significant role in the game. The game features extensive VR training for all 3 modes in which much of the focus is how to deal with guards. In stealth mode, the player is taught to perform a tumble-roll directly in the guard’s field of vision. Sure enough, he doesn’t notice you. In the adventure/talky mode, the player is instructed to use the makeup compact. After the guard gruffly warns that you are not allowed to pass, take out the compact and blow the contents in the guard’s face. Then casually wander past him. I guarantee that Barbie has never been more reprehensible than when she executes this maneuver.

Secret Agent Barbie -- Giving a guard the compact treatment

But I wanted to give this game the old college try. After the cursory, hand-holding training, the agency receives word that a famous fashion designer has had her designs stolen from the major New York fashion show, apparently held in Central Park. So Barbie ‘chutes in to investigate. The game immediately goes to action/jumping mode. In Central Park. Why?

Yep, crates in a park

Crates, that’s why. Stacked meters high in central park. Amidst fields whose “keep off grass” signs must be backed with deadly force. Old Man Murray would be proud (see Crate Review System).

So I wandered around the high fashion tent in Central Park and immediately found an invitation to a fashion show in Paris. This meant that Barbie had to go make a trip to that fashion mecca. Which is about the time that the banality thwarted any further interest. Obviously, all the missions are going to be extremely cut & dried– go to this location, avoid guard, find item; go to that location, use gadget, distract guard, find code; keep repeating. I mean, this is is so unlike Metal Gear Solid where Solid Snake is instructed to go to some location, avoid the guards, gather some item; then go to another location, use gadget… wait… ummm… well, at least Solid Snake doesn’t change his outfit all the time… no, wait, in parts 3 and 4, he is constantly changing camouflage as a key aspect of the game.

Look, at least the Metal Gear Solid series has big, cool robots, a feature notably missing from this game… probably. I didn’t really play far enough. Frankly, if this game featured a final fashion contest against a giant fashion robot, I might have to qualify it as being even better than a Metal Gear Solid game.

See Also:

At MobyGames:

Secret Agent Barbie
Every Barbie game that MobyGames knows about
Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes, my personal favorite stealth action game

Barbie Storymaker

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

You think I have depleted my Barbie stock? Goodness, no. Tonight’s title is Barbie Storymaker. I have my doubts that this is actually a game, though. But I must dutifully delve deep, daring to discover any evidence of gaming content.

The action starts on the faux-Hollywood studio set show above. Barbie patiently, squeakily describes all of the activities at hand. Mercifully, this brief introduction confirms that there are absolutely no gaming activities. This effectively eliminates my motivation to investigate this title at any reasonable depth.

The game allows you to create and edit animated stories, with music and recorded dialog (yours). To be honest, my creative juices ran dry after placing a fishbowl on the mall set. I tried to place Barbie on the set as well.

I got confused when it turned out that I was supposed to place Barbie on some sort of animation path. I couldn’t figure out how to terminate the path, save for maxing out the number of animation waypoints, which only removed Barbie from the set.

Barbie Storymaker -- maximum animation points

See Also:

Terk & Tantor Power Lunch

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

I’m not familiar with Disney’s 1999 animated feature film Tarzan. But that turns out not to be strictly necessary in order to follow Terk & Tantor Power Lunch, another in Disney’s Hot Shots series of casual games. Terk is a gorilla and Tantor is an elephant; they are your hosts for this game, only present to do their best to explain the gameplay and then crack jokes at the start of each level. I say “do their best” because the gameplay is just a tad baffling.

What we have here is a block smashing game of a type that I have never seen before. It works like this:

A particular board has, at the very least, some number of animals along with food items that that particular animal eats
The player begins with 8 chameleons
A chameleon takes the field and rolls into a ball, initially white
The chameleon bounces up and down between the boundaries
The player presses left or right to alter the longitudinal path along which the chameleon is currently traveling
When the chameleon touches an animal, he turns the color of the food that the animal prefers (monkey turns the chameleon yellow)
When the chameleon turns a particular color (like yellow), he can then touch and collect blocks containing the same colored food (like banana)

Got that? It didn’t make much sense to me at first. But I kept at it, mostly because there is nothing really to stop you throughout the first 5 or so levels. Like any casual game, I eventually got the hang of it and even started to wonder how far I could possibly get. Hey, it takes some strategy after awhile. Turns out that 23 levels (out of 50 total) was my limit when Kerchak (a gorilla antagonist from the film) puts an end to my remaining chameleons:

The boards also have cheetah and sloth powerups (or powerdowns, depending on what you need at the time) that speed up or slow down the chameleon, respectively. The there is the butterfly block which, when used properly, can eliminate a lot of food on the board at once.

So that’s the game portion. Tech support time. Installing this game was a comedy of errors, which is especially strange since the Lion King Hot Shots games seemed to work quite well, and they were released before this game. First, it presented me with this dialog upon installation, demanding to know the region in which I purchased the game:

Terk & Tantor Power Lunch -- region select

Note that the default selection is blank. Thus, the game feels it only appropriate to respond with a blank dialog message:

Terk & Tantor Power Lunch -- non-informational information dialog

After I got past that, I encountered this minor incongruency between operating systems:

Terk & Tantor Power Lunch -- Windows 95 dialog

See Also:

Cub Chase and Swampberry Sling, 2 more games in the Hot Shots series

At MobyGames:

Barbie Magic Genie Bottle

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

This is an exceedingly bizarre Barbie title and I think you know that that’s saying something. You see, Barbie Magic Genie Bottle actually requires a peripheral that was packaged with the game. Much like the Steel Battalion series for the Xbox which featured its own custom controller, this game is not very useful without its special attachment.

The Magic Genie Bottle is a curious artifact that is surprisingly easy and relatively cheap to procure via eBay. Not that I have tried. Until tonight, I wasn’t sure if it was strictly necessary for playing the game. Further, you would be hard-pressed to find a modern computer that is equipped to use the device. The Magic Genie Bottle interfaces via the classic-style 15-pin PC joystick port.

So I fired up the game, hoping for the best, where “best” in this narrow case translates to “playable without offbeat peripheral”. The first screen is the one shown above and instructs me to wave my hand around the bottle. The game asks if I can see an animation (to be triggered on-screen, I presume), and has yes or no buttons to click. I thought I was sunk until I realized I could easily lie to the naive machine. So I got to the start of the game, where the player is walking into an antique shop holding the bottle. The storekeep asks if you know the secret of magic bottles, implying that all bottles are magic. She encourages me to rub said bottle. Uh-oh. Looks like I’m sunk. As I was scribbling notes about how much this game disappointed me, Barbie-Genie pops out of the bottle anyway, advancing the setup. We are then transported back in time to wherever it is that genie stories take place.

Barbie Magic Genie Bottle -- Magic flying carpet

The thrust of the game is that Barbie is a genie who had her powers stolen by some evil genie in the employ of a rotten sultan. You are to assist her in getting her powers back. This involves visiting 5 lands and procuring 5 gems. Each gem requires solving a puzzle and to solve a puzzle, you must find 5 puzzle pieces scattered about the land. Fine. At least this game exhibits a slightly more competent 3D engine than seen in the maze portion of Barbie as Rapunzel, which was developed sometime after this game, by a different house. You can walk around and mount your trusty flying carpet to fly on a slightly higher plane as shown above.

Barbie-Genie is always in tow, squealing instructions in your general direction.

It's Severely Aliased Barbie! New from Mattel

Indeed, she can get a little too close.

So, great, it seems that the genie bottle peripheral is optional. Well, no, not quite. I spied this shy puzzle piece hidden behind a barrel:

Barbie Magic Genie Bottle -- Obscured jewel

Clicking on it only earned an explanation from Barbie-Genie that the player needs to rub the magic genie bottle in order to get heavy objects to levitate.

Game over. At least until such time that I can perhaps figure out how to dupe the input logic. I know a bit about how those old PC joysticks operated and they don’t have a lot of bandwidth for a complicated protocol. A project for a day long from now. I have plenty of data for a MobyGames entry.

See Also:

At MobyGames:

Barbie Magic Genie Bottle
Every Barbie game that MobyGames knows about
The Steel Battalion series is similar to Barbie Magic Genie Bottle in that both required limited-use controller peripherals, packaged with the game

Fairy Boss Battle

Posted on January 6, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

Why, yes! I do have more Barbie fairy tale remakes! Thanks for asking. I know you enjoyed reading about the last two, almost as much as I enjoyed playing them and writing them up for MobyGames. I’m sad to report, however, that Barbie as Sleeping Beauty simply is not as engrossing as the previous 2 fairy tale adaptations. And how could it be? The protagonist is supposed to sleep through much of the tale. So, all in all, not terribly interesting… save for the boss battle against a fairy! More on that later.

The developers had to reach a bit for ways to turn this into a game; several of the activities just take the form of “click here, here, and here on the screen; okay, next activity.” This minigame was decent, though: Barbie has to wake up her forest friends by delivering a unique wake up call to each using her magic flute. The birds above show the way.

Barbie as Sleeping Beauty -- Woodland flute concert

Of course, it’s not Barbie, it’s Barbie in her dramatic turn as Princess Rose. As a brief refresher, the princess is born and a bunch of nice fairies come to bless the child with gifts. But there is one malicious fairy who — same as in the Rapunzel tale — felt that she was snubbed (dang, fragile egos and dark magic do not mix) and curses the child such that if she punctures her skin on a sewing spindle prior to her 16th birthday, she will snooze for 100 subsequent years. Another fairy is able to soften the curse somewhat by adding the stipulation that a prince can wake her with a kiss.

As the story goes, the king orders all sewing spindles in the kingdom destroyed. Good thing that the curse is restricted to sewing spindles and not all sharp objects, because look at this crown I made for the princess’ 16th birthday:

Barbie as Sleeping Beauty -- Spiked crown

Yes, there are create-a-dress and create-a-crown activities as can be expected from this type of game. Anyway, one thing leads to another and the evil fairy shows up and whips out a sewing spindle and Princess Rose can’t wait to prick her finger on the needle. The fairies put the rest of the castle to sleep while they work out a solution (was that part of the original tale?).

So they find a nearby prince and encourage him to lend his lips to the situation. The bad fairy, however, foresaw such a threat and summons thorny bushes to surround the castle. The prince must first slash through the thorns and then rotate pieces of the path to allow passage to the castle gate, in the game’s other halfway novel minigame.

Barbie as Sleeping Beauty -- Thorn brush maze

The prince/princess kiss takes place — thank goodness that wasn’t some kind of minigame — and the princess faces off with the fairy in a first person fairy boss battle:

Barbie as Sleeping Beauty -- Boss battle against a fairy

I’m hard pressed to think of another game where a fairy is the lead villain and must be dispatched in a first person battle. Actually, this battle just involves deflecting her evil magic with your wand using a mouse until you can get close enough to… turn her into a butterfly and reclaim your magic flute.

Don’t worry– more Barbie games to come!

See Also:

At MobyGames:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Month: January 2009

Barbie Beach Vacation

Metal Gear Barbie

Barbie Storymaker

Terk & Tantor Power Lunch

Barbie Magic Genie Bottle

Fairy Boss Battle