Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure

Bring your favorite Hollywood blockbuster home.

A hodgepodge of mildly diverting arcade games and puzzles wrapped around an imaginary vacation trip, Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure is best suited for rookie players and young movie buffs. Parents should note, however, that cartoony gunplay in a couple of the minigames was enough to earn this title a "T" (Teen) rating from the independent Entertainment Software Rating Board.

After picking one of six rosy-cheeked middle-schoolers as the character you control and watching a brief cinema sequence in which Woody Woodpecker gives you the lowdown on the high times ahead, it's time to explore.

Points are the price of admission to the attractions. You score points by playing games, collecting tiny letter tiles to spell "Universal Studios," picking up and throwing away litter, shaking hands with costumed characters and helping a tourist find her cell phone.

You can go straight to the front of a long line if you're wearing the appropriate cap. The E.T. Cap, for example, costs 1,500 points. You can zip around the park quickly with the T-Rex Shoes (6,000 points) and even more quickly with the Hoverboard (40,000 points). There are three difficulty levels.

When you complete an attraction, you'll get a stamp on your card. The game's fixed perspective makes navigation difficult, so be sure to pick up a map. Your first stop should be Waterworld, a fairly close approximation of an actual Universal Studios show. After picking one of five seats, you'll view a plane's splash landing. That's it. Move along, kid.

The rest of the attractions are not rides so much as they are fantasy sequences based on famous movies. In Backdraft, for example, that's your character in knickers, dodging enormous explosions in a burning building. In Jurassic Park, you ride in the back of a jeep, shooting rampaging tyrannosaurs and velociraptors.

Bump into Winnie Woodpecker and she'll challenge you to a movie trivia quiz. Get eight out of 10 correct and you'll unlock concentration and a sliding-tile puzzle.

Once a game is unlocked in adventure mode, you can play it as often as you'd like in Attraction Mode. Winnie Woodpecker's minigames and The Wild Wild West shoot-out are available as two-player competitions.

Jurassic Park and The Wild Wild West both suffer from loosey-goosey play control. The other games are decent, but only concentration and the sliding-tile puzzle offer much in the way of replayability. Graphically the game is only so-so, with blocky characters and too much smog. There's lots of voice samples from Woody and Winnie. For a game based on big Hollywood hits, the soundtrack is surprisingly sparse.

This game is best for beginning gamers, or those ardently wishing to re-live last summer's big vacation.

Universal Studios Theme Parks Adventure is in stores now. One memory block is needed to save progress on a Memory Card 59 (not included).

Source:

www.nintendo.com