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:

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:

Barbie as Rapunzel

Posted on January 5, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

Let’s keep this Barbie kick going with another game based on the alpha doll appropriating another classic fairy tale (a somewhat profound proposition to be sure, since Barbie is, herself, the modern embodiment of a fairy tale). Fortunately, Barbie as Rapunzel is already in the database, so this is just a screenshot recon effort (and credits entry, and I see that the description could use a touch-up).

In the story of Rapunzel — or at least in Barbie’s version of it — Rapunzel and her Prince Stefan are going to throw a masquerade ball. An evil witch named Gothel grows indignant that she did not get an invite. So she casts a spell on the castle, throwing it into immediate disrepair and the prince is turned to stone while 6 stones from his crown are scattered about the castle grounds. Gothel seems to have exacted the perfect revenge in response to the snubbing.

But there’s one doll she didn’t count on…

Barbie as Rapunzel -- in the damaged hallway

Barbie/Rapunzel’s task in this game is to move about 6 rooms in the castle, clean them up, find 1 stone in each, and then rescue the prince. Simple, concrete goals, and this definitely qualifies as a game. Above is one of the rooms that Barbie must restore. Each room has a number of areas which can be magically renovated by using a magic wand or paintbrush from the magic toolchest. But each room also has a creativity exercise. For the hallway shown above, the creativity exercise is the painting:

You get to select a painting design, color it as you see fit, and select a frame. Printing afterwards is optional. This is an interesting activity, algorithmically, because, rather than a freeform brush or area fill method, the paint brush only works on a particular layer as the program makes you work across sections of the painting.

After the room has been completely revitalized, you get to use a magical magnifying glass to find one of the stones in the room.

It's Big Head Barbie! New from Mattel...

Then it’s on to the other rooms to repeat the same process, only with designing a floor mosaic, a carpet, a mask for the ball, matching thrones for the throne room, and customizing (pimping?) flowers for the flower garden. It became a bit rote after awhile and I developed a pattern for just getting through the activity (the game wouldn’t let me pass until all the areas were colored; I couldn’t even leave the clouds white). I was reminded of Mike Judge’s restaurant manager character in Office Space; I could envision him asking, “What do you think about someone who only does the bare minimum?”

After all the stones are collected, it’s time to hit the hedge maze– real 3rd-person 3D action! At various junctures, that evil witch has thrown up strange obstacles that can easily be overcome by items in the magical toolbox:

And, long story short, the prince is rescued and the masquerade ball proceeds as planned. And the final insult is that Gothel’s evil spell was completely undone in less than a half hour.

See Also:

At MobyGames:

Barbie as Rapunzel
All Barbie universe games in MobyGames

Barbie as Princess Bride

Posted on January 4, 2009 by Multimedia Mike

I’m still working on a good system for capturing screenshots from console video (so very close to solving this problem after all these years), but I had an itch to process at least one game today. I remembered I have a large pool of Barbie games that has gone completely untouched up until now. Even though MobyGames enjoys good coverage of Barbie titles, I still have quite a few that don’t show up. There is really nothing to fear– I’m quite confident that these are well-engineered (i.e., won’t crash or screw up my system), colorful, and above all, easy games that will take no more than a 1/2 hour to breeze through. In fact, I almost feel like I have an unfair advantage at gaining MobyGames points because I have access to such a large pool of games like this.

So I decided to go with Barbie as Princess Bride today. The story unfolds with Princess Barbie and Prince Ken growing up in a kingdom somewhere “on the other side of the world”. They are really quite keen on each other and have every intention of marrying when they become the appropriate age. It’s not explained whether or not the prince and princess are actually siblings, though per my understanding of royal traditions, that would not be entirely unexpected.

When Prince Ken is old enough, he sails off on a vague, undefined journey, as princes are wont to do. After patiently and optimistically waiting for many years, Butterfly Fairy shows up to assure Princess Barbie that Prince Ken is on his way back and that she should prepare for the imminent wedding.

So what kind of game is on offer here? Why, it’s a wedding planning game! If there’s anything this gaming blog can claim to specialize in now, it’s wedding planning games. All 12 of the minigames/activities (even one completely non-interactive musical interlude) revolve around the princess’ upcoming nuptials. The first 2 activities pertain to delivering wedding invitations to all of her woodland friends. Whether she consorts with any humans instead of just fairies and forest creatures is left unexplained.

Barbie as Princess Bride -- handing out invitations to woodland creatures

Note that “woodland friends” includes skunks. Ah, her wedding, her guest list.

Then, Princess Barbie has to bake a cake using such off-the-shelf ingredients as flour, sugar, eggs, butter, and — according to my notes — harmony and the gift of giving. They’re both right there in her pantry. While the cake is in the oven, the princess visits the Butterfly Fairy’s garden of statues and edible plants to find suitable decorations for the cake which she will apply in the next activity:

Barbie as Princess Bride -- Baking and decording a cake while wearing an unnaturally glassy stare

Fortunately, so strong is the love between Ken and Barbie that Ken is likely to overlook the abomination I decorated on his bride’s behalf.

As alluded previously, one of the activities (#6) is actually a musical number. Princess Barbie hops up on a bridge, hopped up on the love she feels for her dear prince, and sings a song.

Barbie as Princess Bride -- musical interlude on a bridge

The music in question is stored on disc in MP3 format. And for this occasion, I’m experimenting with embedding an MP3 file directly in a blog post. Give it a try:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Hey, it worked! Thanks, WordPress Audio Player plugin. Oh, the possibilities. Back to the game, though, as soon as Princess Barbie steps off the bridge, she meets a boy by the town well. The dunce has gone and accidentally dropped a bunch of rather important stuff in the well and the activity is to fish it back out with the bucket.

Barbie as Princess Bride -- Crown and wedding ring in the well

Look at that! Both the crown and the wedding ring took the plunge. I can’t help but think that this would be a beheadable offense in a real kingdom. But there are apparently no hard feelings as the kid shows up as the ring bearer in the final wedding:

Princess Barbie and Prince Ken -- wedding photo

So yeah, Princess Ken makes it back safely (one of the later activities is to help sail Ken’s boat back through severe ocean weather and dolphins) and finally, formally proposes to Princess Barbie. The proposal wasn’t even a lock as the Barbie was making all of these preparations. Wow, that could have been one heck of a plot twist for a fairy tale video game if Ken found another princess abroad.

See Also:

Barbie as Rapunzel
Barbie as Sleeping Beauty
Barbie Magic Genie Bottle
Secret Agent Barbie
Barbie Beach Vacation
My Fantasy Wedding, perhaps the authoritative wedding planning game

At MobyGames:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Barbie Games

Barbie Storymaker

Barbie Magic Genie Bottle

Fairy Boss Battle

Barbie as Rapunzel

Barbie as Princess Bride