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Shrek's Carnival Craze Nintendo Wii

Format:
Nintendo Wii

Genre:
Minigames

Buy/Support:
Support Dom, click to buy via us...

My philosophy is if you're gonna pay for a film license to sell a game, make the most of it. But I if you've spent all your money on getting the license in the first place what do you pay your developers; peanuts. And so is born Shek's Carnival Craze - a game like none that I've ever played, so lacking enthusiasm, life and game play it's painful.

Once the game fires up you get a small animated snippet of Shrek and his growing family. The characters bear some resemblance to their screen doubles but you have to screw up your eyes to see it. There's just something weird about the character's faces that makes you realise this is a long way from DreamWorks's great achievement with their pixel perfect and smooth animation on the big screen. The voice acting again has a passing resemblance to the originals but is flakey at best.

Once the game starts to load you get a clever picture of Pinocchio were his nose growing is used as the loading bar. You can almost hear him saying ‘this is gonna be a great game'. Once the first menu is up you get various choices from the part style menu and a story mode option too. The story mode takes you into the next menu of themed games within the story mode, based on various characters from the film. Selecting one of these takes you into a further menu with choices of mini games. I should say at this point that between each menu is Pinocchio loading his nose again, about 5 or 6 seconds each time just to load more menus screens.

Once into the party game you've selected you get some instructions on what to do with your Wii controllers. These are fairly complex and I cannot see anyone 3+ picking them up let alone 33+. If you manage to decipher the controls you find yourself in one of the very crude, basic games in which you're left wondering if what you are doing has any bearing on what the ropy animations are doing on screen. The more different games you play the less you want to carry on. They are unimaginative and could have been knocked up by monkeys (eating their peanuts).

I love the Shrek film series. It's clever and funny and carried off with wonderful depth every time. Shrek's Carnival Craze-Party Games is a million miles away from the films. It's lacking in anything Shrek. Without the Shrek tag this game would be bad. But with the Shrek name on the cover it turns from bad to criminal. If the real Shrek were here he's be munching up the disc and spitting it out. Shocking.

Written by Dom Roberts

You can support Dom by buying Shrek's Carnival Craze



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Dom Roberts writes the Perpetual Gamer column.

"Welcome to my perpetual gaming reviews. My quest is to look for that one Xbox 360, PS3, Wii, DS lite and PSP game that links my own ongoing life to it."

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