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

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:

Wendy’s Arthur

Posted on October 13, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

I picked up Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue at my favorite thrift shop, still shrink-wrapped. While originally published in 2000, this was distributed as part of a nutritious Wendy’s kids meal earlier this year. I really need a better way to keep on top of these fast food/video game promotions. I honestly don’t want to be eating at all the popular fast food restaurants on a regular monthly rotation just to be able to catch these. And don’t even get me started on the breakfast cereal promotions.

Moving right along, this is my first experience with the Arthur series, of which I already have several other titles. Only 2 Arthur games are presently in MobyGames, so guess who gets to fill in the rest of the series? This, like the insufferable Mr. Men and Little Miss series, are aimed at a very young set. Ordinarily, that would bother me. Thankfully, this game can be made to move along a little more quickly with extra mouse clicks.

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — teacher breaks a leg

So Arthur’s teacher, Mr. Ratburn, takes Arthur and his various anthropomorphic classmates on an educational camping trip to scenic Mt. Rockslide. The hands-on learning begins in earnest when old man Ratburn trips over a log and becomes incapacitated. Arthur is the one in the big glasses. You might be tormented as I was at the question of what animal Arthur was supposed to be– sort of a Goofy-type conundrum. In turns out he is supposed to be an aardvark.

Anyway, the schoolchildren, perhaps not fully understanding the peril of their situation, nonchalantly put their heads together and come up with 3 separate ideas for how they might possibly alert the outside world of their predicament. The player gets to select one of the ideas and then carry it out, exploring the wilderness to try to piece together the plan and accomplish a number of secondary goals along the way.

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — wild berries are obviously safe

Meanwhile, there is learning afoot. The above screenshot depicts Arthur and his bunny pal Buster finding a bush of wild berries. Apparently, it’s quite safe to eat wild berries, and delicious to boot (for the record, not where I grew up). For our next lesson, we’re going to go over the cliff clearly marked with a rockslide warning sign:

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — rockslides are a blast!

Whee! Such fun, remark the children at the bottom. Later, Arthur and Buster find a shack that has a fallen tree in front of it. After procuring a saw that happened to be laying about in the wilderness, they remove the tree, enter the shack and practice the time-honored “finders-keepers” ethos:

Arthur’s Wilderness Rescue — breaking, entering, and theft

Do breaking, entering, and theft count as separate merit badges, or are they combined into one? It’s interesting to note that you don’t actually need all the junk on offer. I surmise that if I try to approach the game using another solution, other items in the shack would be applicable.

Irresponsible wilderness lessons aside, I have to give the game credit for its marvelous art style. Look carefully– all of the scenery is crafted to appear as watercolor paintings. There is also a trove of information to be unearthed as you photograph the sundry flora and fauna. After doing so, the game regales the player with trivia regarding the subject of the photograph.

Dog Odyssey And Fisher-Price Wild West

Posted on July 23, 2008 by Multimedia Mike

As always, I have a huge stockpile of educational games that are conspicuously absent from MobyGames. DJP Mom and I continue to answer the call. Tonight, I attacked 2 different, early Macromedia Director games. In both of them, I felt that something was missing. Like, animations. Both games wanted archaic versions of Apple QuickTime that I was unwilling to install. Some games fail to run if they don’t get their desired versions of QuickTime. Tonight’s pair just silently refuse to play animations which makes certain junctures a bit confusing.

The first of the pair is Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey. Wishbone — apparently the canine star of a late-1990’s, PBS-produced TV show — finds himself washed up on an island where a city is burning in the background (turns out to be Troy). Pieces start falling into place and he figures out that he seems to have taken on the role of Odysseus in Homer’s classic epic.

Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey — Wishbone wonders

This could have proved to be quite an educational experience (I don’t know much about the literature). However, the game kept throwing this error:

Wishbone and the Amazing Odyssey — Script error

That’s “Script error: Handler not defined … #FileIO” (reproduced textually for the benefit of search engines). That prohibited me from getting too far into the tale. Too bad, too, because the credits go on for pages. A lot of people really wanted to make this game successful.

The second game is Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town. It’s by Davidson & Associates, which strikes me as familiar. Ah yes: They were responsible for another Fisher-Price licensed title: Learning in Toyland. The first thing to understand about this game is that the game assumes that you might not know how to read. Also, the installation process offers an fascinating bit of nostalgia:

Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town -- Modem registration

Ah, modems; remember those? Anyway, you’re a deputy, the bad guy goes by the name of Bandit Bob and his dastardly crime is hiding gold bars all over town. Your job is to find the gold.

Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town — Finding gold bars

Along the way, there are a number of minigames and other activities, as is customary. This one is the Barrel Boot:

Fisher-Price Great Adventures: Wild Western Town — The Barrel Boot activity

You get to drop barrels into this automatic boot device and launch them at random citizens — and you’re the deputy lawman, remember. Hitting a target always has comical, good-natured results in this kids’ game. I didn’t get the full effect with a number of the targets. The screen would temporarily blank and I could tell that the game was trying to invoke the QuickTime Player to handle a more detailed animation.

See also:

Fisher-Price: Learning In Toyland

At MobyGames:

Gaming Pathology

Piles Of Games, Copious Free Time, No Standards

Category: Childrens Games

Barbie Beach Vacation

Fairy Boss Battle

Barbie as Rapunzel

Barbie as Princess Bride

Wendy’s Arthur

Dog Odyssey And Fisher-Price Wild West