Music Reviews

As a result I bought her a singing lesson CD kind of as a joke "Voice Lessons TO GO" by Vaccarino. She actually has taken it seriously and is now belting out. My daughter is playing along (very proudly and badly) as they sing together. It is hilarious to watch and listen to! I have a feeling I have many years of music lessons to pay for ahead of me, for both of them.

Counting/Colors/Animals Mode: tap the drum and hear the beats being counted. Press the keys for the color and/or animal name featured on the key and a short tune in the instrument featured on the key.

Listen Mode: each key starts a new classic or nursery song; add animal noises by pressing the keys, drum beats by tapping the drum, puppy noise by pressing pumpy's head, and 4 other funny noises by moving the joy-stick. Swirl the joy-stick to speed up the music and hold it down to slow the music. Sing along using the real microphone.

Play Mode: make your own music using the keys, drum, and joy-stick.

Practicallity: uses easy to find, always on hand AA batteries. Features auto shut-off after inactivity to preserve battery life, but can be switched off to prevent accidental activation, etc. 2 volumes (I think the lowest is loud enough, and could be just a bit quieter, but still, I haven't gotten annoyed yet because of all the variety.)

Bottom Line: This is the most action-packed electronic toy out there and at a very good price too. It is the only one of its kind that you will need, and you do need it.

Ahhh, Uplink. Another one of those games that most people have never heard of. And if you haven't heard of it, and you are looking for an exciting and unique simulation, then you have been missing out. Uplink: Hacker Elite isn't just the only game of its kind. It is also an excellent game.

The game has a basic premise. You are a freelance hacker in the year 2010, free to commit all sorts of cyber crimes however you would like. It's kind of like Grand Theft Auto in cyberspace. It is executed very well. The simulation never gets "out of character", so to speak. The start game screen isn't even a typical start game screen - it's a "login" screen onto the game's virtual network.

What this game does a great job of doing is giving you a feeling of mischief that comes from poking your nose into places it is not supposed to be. You accept jobs off of a bulletin board, sabotaging corporate data, breaking into banks, and doing other assorted dirty deeds. You break into secure systems by hacking passwords, disabling firewalls, and other methods, and then work as fast as you can before you are traced. It's very exciting, and it gives you a devious pleasure when you successfully sabotage a company's files.

"Uplink: Hacker Elite" has all sorts of different things to explore. Did you get caught and get yourself a criminal record? Hack into the criminal database and erase it! Are you going to destroy a corporate database? Buy the stock of the company's competitor and make some money off of it. You have to either experiment and figure this stuff out for yourself, or use a walkthrough from the internet. The difficulty level of the game is insane, and it gives you almost no hints.

This game is certainly not for everyone. You will probably either love it or hate it. It requires lots of brainpower, experimentation and planning, and it can get extremely frustrating. This game is very unforgiving, and does not allow you to reload a saved game if you get caught (but there are ways around that). However, you won't find anything else like it out there, and it's very well done. If stealing files from a corporation and then framing someone else for the crime sounds like fun to you, then "Uplink: Hacker Elite" is the game for you.

As for the difference between the Bop It Extreme and the Bop It Extreme 2 versions.(I had this question when I buy this toy)
1) The Bop It Extreme 2 version has 3 levels of volume, while the Bop It Extreme has one LOUD volume.
2) The Bop It Extreme 2 has an earphone jack for personal enjoyment, while the Bop It Extreme doesn't.
3) The Bop It Extreme 2 TELLS you at the end your score(i.e. "You scored forty-eght"), while the Bop It Extreme plays different sounds to denote score(i.e. "whistle, whistle, rachet, rachet, rachet, drum, drum, drum, drum"). Hence requiring you to count and decipher which sound worth more points than other.
4) The Bop It Extreme 2 has more music than the Bop It Extreme as advertised.
5) The Bop It Extreme 2 has rubber grip and better grip-mold for the Spin it! wheel.
6) The Bop It Extreme 2 just looks much cooler, hands down! :D

Playing this game Solo is fun, but get together w/ your friends and you all will have a BLAST!

The reason I gave the game 4 stars, however, is that I had an awful experience the first time I played the game. Here's the scoop...the group I played with included my father-in-law (a country music singer) and young brother-in-law (a rap fan). They repeatedly claimed and sang songs and tunes I had never heard of. I'm not saying that any cheating went on, but I was so far out of the loop about the songs they were choosing that there was no way to tell who was winning and who was losing. Well, OK, I was losing.

This can be a fun game if played with your musical peers. It can be a major disaster otherwise.

I hope this insight helps someone out there.

The graphics and sound are wonderful. Not as good as GT3 but very close. There is no slowdown whatsoever with 21 cars ahead of you. The control is great. It is not nearly as touchy as the EA F1 series. Maybe this isn't realistic, but a little leeway is nice since the majority of gamers are using a handheld controller.

The reason this doesn't get a five star rating is because of three primary reasons. No rearview mirror. I can understand this to a large degree because the framerate is fantastic. But the game also lacks in car audio. This is big because without a rearview mirror you simply don't know who is around you. You have a look back button, but you really can use it only on straightaways. This may be the reason the damaging model is so forgiving. You can bump with your competitors which would put you immediately out of a real race. Since you don't know who's around you this allows you to continue to compete after the first turn. I'm okay with this... but it's a strike against the "pure sim experience."

Also the car set-up is miniscule. An option for more detailed set-ups (with the corresponding result) would be nice.

As with an cosole racer, if you want a pure racing sim you need to own a good PC. That's not a knock on this game, but console racers have to appeal to a younger crowd that won't get as frustrated as with a PC sim.

That's really it. And the fact that it's a 30 dollar game probably is justification for overlooking the flaws I see and give it a 5 star rating. But since you can buy many used games for cheap prices I didn't factor this into the rating. Overall, great job Atari. Sony has a lot of work to do to improve on this game since they now have the exclusive F1 license.

I think the key to games success is that it instructs the player on the pieces, moves and object of the game without seeming like it is teaching. There are multiple mini-games within the actual game that slowly build to a point where the player knows all the moves of an actual game of chess. I will have to update my review after I play through the game myself, because on the first game I played with my daughter, she constantly corrected me.

To summarize: King White is feeling a little tired and disinterested (a mysterious malaise that can best be described as boredom or maybe even depression - seriously! Maybe something gets lost in translation, as this game is made by Chessbase, a German company, but marketed here by Viva Media. Maybe he is a victim of "ennui?"), so his queen suggests that they go on vacation. They put their son Fritz in charge for the duration of their absence, and as soon as the king and queen are out the door, Fritz is challenged to a chess duel by the nasty looking King Black. PROBLEM: Fritz doesn't know how to play chess!!

Follow Fritz and his cousin Bianca across the kingdom as they play a variety of games in order to learn chess basics. Learn how the pieces move, and learn basic tactics like pins, etc. Piece valuation, how to win, etc. are other topics that are taught.

The cool thing is that my son doesn't realize that he is learning! The games are so fun and arcade-like, that he learns how the pieces move without even knowing it.

Examples of the games:
1. Sumo wrestlers on a circular board to teach about the king and the concept of "opposition."
2. A Pac-man-like game to teach the horizontal and vertical movement of the rook.
3. A Pong-like game of smashing toilets (no joke!) to get across the concept of the bishop's diagonal movement.

After going through all the training sessions, my son was ready to take on King Black. He still gets mostly crushed, but that is because he doesn't spend much time thinking before he makes a move. He has managed wins on the lower setting, but that's because the chess engine plays some of the most horrible moves, like leaving a queen hanging, etc.

Highly recommended for youngsters! My son may leave it alone for 3 or 4 weeks at a time, but he always comes back to play the games and to try his hand vs. King Black. Money well spent to teach kids a wonderful game.

Red- can stand fire
Yellow- can hold bomb rocks and can stand electrity
Blue- can swim
white- poisinous
purple- they are fat and can esily kill things when you throw them on your enemy.
I beat pikmin and pikmin 2 looks even better i heard every time you beat it the levels change but i'm not sure? I'f you like pikmin you'll love pikmin 2.

P.s. Buy this game

Anyway. This game promises a lot; it promises to be upwards of 80 hours in length (just for comparison, the Wind Waker was advertised as 40 hours) thanks to its two discs. It's an RPG, but only a few will recognize the name (the Tales series was never really big here in the US). Changing the standard, turn-based RPGs, the Tales series has stood out because of its real-time battle system. It adds a lot more depth to the battle system than normally possible (sorry, Final Fantasies), and with the presence of a huge number of spells and complex combos that are available, you will actually enjoy the battles even after a month of playing. Also, the enemies are actually visible (think Earthbound), and if you get near them, you go to the battle screen and fight. The last little thing about battles is cooking; it seems that this is a complex "little" idea that lets your party members make some kind of food with a variety of ingredients. It also serves as one of the MANY side quests in the game, for there are 24 recipes in all for different types of food (you can even add your own ingredients to the recipe!).

The game's voice acting is also pretty top-notch. While the lip synching isn't that great (mouth moves in some random way) and the motions look the same when a person's talking (some characters just stick their hands out in the same way every time they're talking), but the fact that the ENTIRE script is read out to you by top-notch actors is pretty amazing.

Another, pretty unique feature of the game is that your characters are customizable to the extreme; if you use a certain type of magic (healing, etc.) a number of times, you advance in that category alone. This lets your characters develop into specialized fighting machines.

Normally, I would talk about the story now, but since the game hasn't come out yet, (...) Thanks for reading, and you better get this awesome RPG if you know what's good for you.

PROS:
-THIS GAME IS A DEAD-ON ACCURATE PORT OF THE NES CLASSIC. Nintendo has been promising for years that they would rerelease the game on a modern console, and at long last, they have delivered on that promise.
-EVEN BY TODAY'S STANDARDS, THIS IS A FUN AND CHALLENGING GAME. This is a game that will really make you think on more than a few moments. The puzzles aren't as compelling as anything later in the series, but they add to the fun nonetheless.
-IT'S SO SIMPLE, YET SO COMPLEX AT THE SAME TIME. I loathe games of the modern age due to their high complexity level. The games of today force gamers to spend as much time reading instruction manuals as they do playing the games! This game is simple to learn, but it so compelling that it will keep your attention for an indefinite period of time.

CONS:
-TWENTY DOLLARS (the launch price) FOR THIS GAME IS HIGHWAY ROBBERY! If you were paying twenty dollars for a Game Boy Advance ANTHOLOGY of classic NES or Zelda titles, that would be a good price, but to charge that much for a game that was out before many modern video gamers were even born is just insulting! Why not just whip out your old NES cart instead?
-THE GAME IS HARD, AND NOT ALWAYS IN A GOOD WAY. There is almost no social element in this game whatsoever, so you're more likely than not going to have to use an FAQ or walkthrough to beat the game. You can't tell were dungeons are hidden, nor can you tell where walls can be destroyed with a bomb. Also, many of the dungeon maps are inaccurate - your character can enter rooms of the dungeon that "don't exist", according to the maps. Likewise, the game gives no clues whatsoever as to how some puzzles are solved.
-IT'S THE ORIGINAL - NO NEW FEATURES OR ANYTHING. This is a real shame, because Nintendo could have created a stunningly beautiful remake of this game (kind of like what they did with the Metroid series with Metroid Zero Mission.) This release is a wasted opportunity.

OVERALL:
I know, I complained a lot about this reissue. But that doesn't really change the way I feel about the game itself. This game is a classic, and truly one of Nintendo's greatest triumphs ever. If you've got a Game Boy Advance, give this one a whirl - you'll be glad you did.