Tweety and the Magic Jems
Reviewed by MaxH
Kemco are at it again! Not happy bundling me with
their Crazy Castle 4 game (All I wanted to do was buy
Wario-Land 3) they've given me another! The store
that sold me my Gameboy Advance gave me ANOTHER Kemco
WB title free. 'Here take it, and may the curse go
with you' is what the store owner said. Well o.k,
maybe he didn't say that for fear of being thought of
a freak. But since I have no such fear, I'm happily
saying that to the next Game Boy Advance owner I come across.
But this isn't story-telling time, this is boring old
review time. So let's see what cretinous mistake
Kemco's lumped our WB character this time, hm? Tweety
goes deep into the forest and gets lost. Instead of
finding his way home, Tweety finds a magic box and
the fool opens it! His feet turn to stone, then the
witch jumps out! Oh dear she says, you opened the box
that stores all the evil forest magic (Well, you'd
think they'd lock a box like that). so the witch (who
looks suspiciously like Grandma) calls upon 6 famous
WB characters (except for Marc Anthony, I don't have
any idea where the hell he came from, but it
certainly wasn't any WB cartoon I know). She then
asks these characters to journey around the world to
find gems to save Tweety.
I realise I've taken an early cynical turn in the
review, but let's not forget I've played this game,
and it's not pretty. I feel I should commend Kemco
for not just doing a platformer. You see Tweety and
the magic gems is a board game of all things, and
instead of being as fun as Mario party it will make
you very 'bored' (I had to do it, sorry). To search
for the magic gems you must travel around a board
which is barely animated and consists of the world.
Each time you reach a city or country you enter it
and in there find ANOTHER board. To finish the game
you must go all through ALL of the boards. There are
a ridiculous thirteen boards and they aren't tiny.
You cannot pause the game, you cannot save the game,
so you MUST play to the end.
The boards are broken up by various 'events' (Miss a
turn) and there are also 16 mini-games to be played.
Some of the mini-games are good for a quick spin, and
some of them are identical (I dare you to find the
difference between 'crush hammer' and 'crush ice').
And some of them are utterly unplayable, like the
flag game. The explanation for the flag game is as
incompetent as it is for the rest of the games, so
after 'Hold up the right flag to win!' I was thrown
into a screen where coloured flags came up 3 or so a
second in a list of about 7, two seconds later a
'loser' cross came over my head. I played again,
exactly the same thing happened again, even if I got
it I don't think I'd have been having much fun. Other
games like the whack -a-mole rip-off have some replay
value, and are even *gasp* fun, but even they have
stupid flaws. For instance in that very game, if you
are standing at the first 'row' on the first 'column'
and a monster appears one space below you and to the
left, it will be impossible to get it in time,
meaning that most of the monsters that appear you
won't even be able to get. I know you probably didn't
understand what I said there, but I'm basically
saying none of the games are great, and very few are
even good.
I can't really comment on the multiplayer, because I
haven't played it. This is because of my friends who
have GBA's, none of them got theirs bundled with
Tweety. And, frankly, I don't think anyone's dumb
enough to actually buy this game. But in one player,
as I have experienced it, it was dull, unoriginal and
had no clues apart from the characters, that I was
playing a WB game. Kemco once again demonstrate an
utter lack of knowledge that these stars are in some
great cartoons, you might even stretch to say
classics. Even where there are chances at showing
personality in this game, they fail. Choose a
character at the beginning and watch them blather on
with generic phrases 'I'm going to win!' Yawn.
A couple of graphical touches, like animation, are
nice. almost enough to make you think this was a
generally good-looking game. But the intro and
menu-screen aren't enough to fool anyone. Because
aside from them you could be playing a gameboy colour
game, you really could. There aren't even any voices.
I wouldn't exactly be shocked if I was told that this
WAS a GBC game originally, but they touched up a
couple of screens and hurried it out for GBA launch.
There's nothing wrong with the graphics, they aren't
ugly, they just don't make good use of GBA's power AT ALL.
The sounds aren't actually that bad, I liked the
intro music. the rest of it is also good enough to
live with, shame it's repeated on and on. As with all
Kemco games, Tweety is a little short on sound
effects, sometimes lacking from where you really
think they should be.
The game takes a long time to finally finish, but you
will never EVER play it again once you've been
through. Chances are you'll switch it off after a
couple of minutes, and only return once every few
months, for a quick play of bash the monsters, and
even then you'll be annoyed that it's impossible to
get most of the monsters.
Overall this is reminiscent of Crazy Castle 4, in the
way that it's not all bad and shows promise, but is
ultimately designed with complete contempt for the
gaming public in mind. Kemco aren't a talentless
company, but they should really throw away their WB
licence and concentrate on making GOOD games.
Tweety Pie!
+ Some nice animation touches
+ A couple of games are o.k
+ competent board design
+ Some of the tunes are quite catchy
Puddy Tat!
- totally inconvenient to play
- mostly GBC graphics
- What, or who, the hell is Marc anthony?!
- most of the games are stinky, and some are carbon copies
- You need four carts to multiplay, there probably
aren't 4 people that own this
- Game explanation screens are incompetant
-Board games are eventless and go on for far, far too long
Overall: 4 out of 10