Advance view of future potential
Hot Potato Game Boy Advance £29.99 Bam Entertainment ***
Rayman Advance Game Boy Advance £29.99 Ubi Soft **
The Game Boy Advance may offer unprecedented visuals for a handheld - as long as you have a decent light source - but the early days of the new handheld have exhibited precious little innovation when it comes to style of game.
Those hardy Game Boy perennials - platform and puzzle games - have been transferred to the Advance with unseemly haste. First up is a puzzler, Hot Potato, an amusing mix of Tetris and Bust-A-Move. Controlling a "bus", you need to clear a path by firing spuds at the potatoes in the way. Match up colours and they disappear, but misfire and a fatal roadblock occurs.
Later levels get increasingly frantic, but the ultimately repetitive action soon takes its toll on your fingers. For a while at least, Hot Potato is an amusing diversion, even if its graphics hardly stretch the GBA.
Rayman Advance, on the other hand, could never have been made for the original Game Boy. This is a beautiful looking platform adventure, with one of the biggest (and best) character animations ever seen on a handheld. As in previous Rayman titles, you jump, climb and fly, aided by your detachable hand and spinning ears.
Unfortunately this is all made infuriatingly difficult by the size of the graphics relative to the screen. After your 100th fatal leap of faith - caused by in an inability to see more of the landscape - you will be throwing your console across the room. Still, those with the patience will enjoy the gorgeous locales that Rayman Advance offers.
Both Hot Potato and Rayman show glimpses of a bright future for GBA owners. (GH)
Jurassic Park 3: Danger Zone
PC £19.99 Knowledge Adventure/ Vivendi **
When a game based on a big movie appears with the box-office release, there are usually two explanations: it's a very poor game rushed out to catch a window of easy sales; or it's a piece of classic opportunism. Danger Zone (and its companion title, Dino Defenders) falls into the latter.
What we have is a series of mini-games strung together within a simple boardgame format. Such compendia clearly have a following and Mario Party 1 & 2 proved they can be genuinely enjoyable if packed with enough games of a high enough quality.
Sadly, Danger Zone is not in the same league. For a start there are only half a dozen mini-games (compared to over 50 in Mario Party) and none lasts longer than 10 seconds. For example, you have to shoot a T-Rex as it races across the screen to capture its DNA (one of the overall objectives of the game). Anyway, while you were reading that, I shot it and progressed to the next game. Sorry.
Other games are simple memory tests or hand-eye co-ordination. None would tax a 7-year old, leaving much needed in the shape of Spielberg eye-candy to keep them hooked. Sadly, this is not to be. Danger Zone features no familiar movie clips, sounds or images and even worse, a gruesome narrator sounds as if he ought to be recording an US version of Banzai!
Even with its excellent graphics and animation, kids will be bored quickly and movie fans gutted by teatime. You have been warned. (MA)
