I Try & Play: Barbie - The Princess and the Pauper (GBA)

So, I got a new PC, and what better way to celebrate this than playing another Barbie game for GBA. I play this one too from start to finish. It's supposed to be like a puzzle platformer, where you have to use different characters with different skills to progress. This isn't a terrible concept and I've seen some decent executions of it. Sadly, there's no actual puzzles, but rather you will need to swap characters to get past some new blockade in your path while constantly looking for 10 things to collect. It says you need to collect 'em all, and the characters will note that you got all items, but in many of the levels I know I missed several items and they still said the same damn thing. This game could have been so much better with some decent puzzles. I don't think the intended audience would have had less fun with it that way, rather the contrary. This game has so much padding IMO. You move through the level as one person, and then you must change to the other character and move through that same level again. So you basically go through every level twice. Each level is almost alike in terms of what you do. The bosses were a nice touch though. I played on easy, and I guess that's why it didn't matter if I got hit by stuff. I'm glad I played on easy though. Not having watched the movie, I don't know if this game follows the plot or not, but it isn't anything like what I remember the classic story The Prince and the Pauper by Mark Twain to be like. :s The graphics were fine, though not all the game design made sense, like the boat and water at the bottom of the screen. At the very least they didn't just cut out pictures of real things and use that as sprites in the game, like a certain other Barbie game. But one thing they did have in common was that it took me 1 hour and 30 minutes to beat each, though the other one almost half the time was spent on the side-mini-games while here you ran through each level "twice"...

• #gaming
• #barbie
• #the_princess_and_the_pauper
• #princess
• #gba
• #gameboy_advance
• #puzzle
• #platformer
• #garbage