What is GamerDad?
Games are fun and excellent bonding tools. At GamerDad, we believe in Gaming with Children.
Note: GamerDad is intended for Parents.
Email Us, Visit our FAQ, learn About Us, Bookmark us now and join our message board. We update daily!
|
Buy something from Amazon using this link, and GamerDad gets a percentage!
|
|
Home >
Review Archive >
Video Games
> Results: Carnival Games
|
by Dr. Matt J. Carlson
October 29, 2007
Now you can play all those impossible Carnival games on your Wii!
Reviewed for Wii.
|
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us
| Buy This Game
Scroll down for our Kid Factor.
Carnival Games brings all the classic carnival style games into your living room. Playing solo trying to collect prizes or playing competitively with up to four players, Carnival Games allows players to attempt to knock over milk bottles, pop balloons with a watergun, toss rings around bottles, play Skee-ball and more. In solo play, points are earned during the game and a prize is awarded based on performance. By playing multiple times and upgrading, players can collect a wide range of prizes to put in their virtual display case or to display on your custom character. While collecting items is a nice feature, most of the games are too simplistic to keep players' attentions for long in solo play. This game is best played with a group. Two or more players can compete head to head in any of the 25 carnival-themed games.
Of the many games available, those that are played directly head to head are best. Games like Skee-ball (called Alley Ball to avoid any copyright issues) and horse racing (where you roll billiard balls into various holes to make your horse move forward) are great with four players as everyone gets a chance to play at once. However, many of the games are designed for each player to attempt in turn. Frog Leap, for example, requires players to first aim and then hit a catapult to launch their frog in an attempt to get it onto a lillypad. Each player has several tries, but rather than giving one player several chances in a row, players take turns and must cycle through several menus to continue. Thus, far more time is spent cycling through popup screens than is spent actually playing the game and downtime for each player is high. As a result, the games where everyone plays at once are great, while the games where players take turns in sequence are slow moving. The two styles tend to balance each other out making this an adequate title that should interest casual game fans on the Wii but isn't enough to pull in anyone not already interested in the game based on its theme and genre. If Skee-ball, balloon busting with darts, etc... isn't enough to pique your interest, the rest of the game won't either.
The games are all based off of classic carnival games, notorious for their difficulty. This comes through in the video game as well, a few of the minigames are quite difficult to master or even reach a reasonable level of success. However, the controls are simple enough for young gamers to play and most games allow even poor players see some measure of success, and no reading is required. The difficulty of some of the games makes the solo section of the game less interesting for easily frustrated gamers, so the game works best in a multiplayer family setting with head to head competition on the games where everyone gets to play at the same time.
Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us
| Buy This Game
Home >
Review Archive >
Video Games
> Results: Carnival Games
|
Best Games of 2006!
Read the GamerDad 2007 Holiday Guide!
Visit the GamerDad Store and Buy Stuff!
Advertisement
|
|
