GOT-CHA MINI GAME FESTIVAL (ARCADE)

I’m going for quantity over quality today, friends – why should I write an article about one game when I can cover nineteen games at once? That’s just economical, that is. Okay, sure, they’re only minigames. And a lot of them are very similar or even downright identical. And I could be playing WarioWare instead. I didn’t really think this through very well, so let’s get straight to it: here’s Dongsung Wonder Park and Para’s 1997 arcade grab-bag Got-Cha: Mini Game Festival!

I sincerely hope Noel Edmonds isn’t involved.
When I first started playing Got-Cha, I did wonder whether it had been made specifically for a real-world theme park. “Dongsung Wonder Park” definitely sounds like it could be an amusement park, and the game’s got that “festival” subtitle – and then there’s the game’s mascot.

I don’t think it’s ever given a name, but this lion thing shows up throughout the game and you’ve got to admit it really does look like the kind of mascot a theme park might employ. It also looks like a bunch of other things, so I’ve created a handy visual guide to this thing’s make-up.

Yep, that about covers it. On further inspection, it seems that Got-Cha was not affiliated with some mysterious Korean amusement park and is just an arcade game.

As mentioned above, it’s a collection of nineteen minigames that you can either choose to play one-by-one in an attempt to clear them all without running out of lives, or by selecting your favourites from a list. I know this because there’s an English voice over from a lady whose mood is hard to pin down. It’s definitely not the usually semi-psychotic exuberance I tend to associate with voice acting in mid-nineties arcade games… but neither does it sound bored, nor does it sink into House of the Dead 2 levels of unintentional parody. After hearing this lady’s voice a lot – she tells you the rules for every minigame, too – the best description I can come up with is “business-like.” If you’ve ever had to call a company who weren’t big enough to outsource their telephone messages and got Debbie from reception to record them, you’ll recognise the vibe of Got-Cha’s narration.

Right then, here we go with a look at all of Got-Cha’s minigames, each of which are explained in a brief pre-round screen. This minigame’s called Strike Dolls, a name which by rights should belong to an obscure Japanese fighting game with an all-female cast rather than this dull colour-matching challenge.
You can also see Got-Cha’s control set-up here. You’ve got three colour-coded buttons: red on the left, green in the middle and blue on the right. The majority of Got-Cha’s minigames involve pressing the correct colour at the right moment, so try to fix the position of each colour firmly in you mind. Occasionally red and blue work as left and right, too.

In Strike Dolls, you have to knock down the tower by hitting the button that matches the colour of the puck at the bottom of the tower. That’s all there is to it, and if you manage to completely knock down the tower the stage is cleared. You also get to see the mascot standing on top of the stack, and now that I’m seeing a full-body shot of it I’m regretting not including Footix, the mascot of the 1998 World Cup, in the genetic equation I posted above.
Of course, the most interesting thing about this minigame is the giant cat in the background, looming over the trees like an ancient god of the forest. Presumably it was included to distract from the fact that this minigame is boring. I wonder if it’s one of the developer’s cats.

More cats with Hungry Kitty, and also more big digitized photos of pets. In the interests of maintaining the delicate balance between the cat and dog factions, it’s a dog this time. Once again this is the most interesting thing about the minigame, because all you do in Hungry Kitty is hammer the buttons as quickly as possible to make the kitty eat the fish. I suppose it’s helpful that this minigame appears so early in the list, because your fingers haven’t had a chance to get tired yet.

Monster Madness is next, and Godzilla’s got a fresh new look! He’s destroying the city, sure, but once he’s defeated the citizens won’t need to rebuild – dozens of families can simply live inside Godzilla’s baseball cap. The brim is a ready-made veranda!
This is a colour-matching game, where you hit the appropriate button to have your bootleg Ghostbuster zap the red, blue and green (AKA Cool Original) Godzillas as they appear. Press the wrong button and you’re incinerated by Godzilla’s atomic breath. Don’t worry, it just makes you lose a point.

Wash Day works the same as the Strike Dolls minigame – hit the correct colours in sequence – except you’re going horizontally this time, controlling a maid who’s got to bring the laundry in before it starts raining. Sometimes the said laundry is the plug suits from Neon Genesis Evangelion. Having seen Evangelion, I can totally believe that NERV leader and terrible anime dad Gendo Ikari would be the kind of person to hire someone dressed as an anime housemaid to do his chores for him.

The wonderfully named UFO Witness is all about quick shape recognition. You wouldn’t have to work so fast if the observatory would just open their doors slightly wider, but doors that big must take a lot of power to open and space research is underfunded as it is without getting massive bills from British Gas. So, you’re forced to identify the spacecraft (or Santa Claus) through a very narrow field of view. It’s not difficult, and the most interesting thing about it is that the mascot looks even more like a bootleg Sonic the Hedgehog than before.

Spinning Pictures is about two things: spinning pictures and gratuitous panty shots. A picture of this underwear-flashing anime homunculus appears on the screen, gets covered up and is then rotated a few times at random. You job is to figure out what the rotated picture will look like when it’s revealed. That’s all straightforward enough, although I am confused as to why the last two minigames have included Santa-related content.

In The Write Stuff, Got-Cha’s developers clearly grew worried that the players would become too overwhelmed by the high-speed action, engaging gameplay and cartoon knickers that have thus far been at the core of the Got-Cha experience.  That level of sustained mental stimulation simply isn’t safe, so to protect you they included a minigame where you spell a three letter word by using the buttons to move a cursor left and right. Whew, what a blessed relief.
Seriously, though, I have to admire the cheek of any game developer who says “you know how you enter your name on the high score table? Well, what if we made that a minigame?” The irony is that Got-Cha doesn’t have a high score table.

Sky’s the Limit now, where two brooding anime pilots silently judge your attempts to keep your jet fighter on the runway by pressing the green button when it veers over the centre line. No, they’re not really judging you. It’s just that Got-Cha is a three-player game and that’s where the other two players’ planes would be if you had two friends. That seems unlikely, though. Two friends? C’mon, be realistic.

Is this minigame going to be about Kevin Costner movies?

Apparently not, unless Kevin Costner has played either an axe-wielding zombie or a young anime lady. I’m not sure which of those Kevin Costner performances I would prefer to see. Probably the anime girl. It would the greatest challenge of his acting career, after all.
As you can probably guess, this is a “shooting” gallery, where you press the colour of the doors to shoot as many zombies as possible without hitting the ladies. If you do hit the ladies, their shirts fall off and they hurriedly cover themselves off, presumably to trick horny weirdos to lose credits by shooting the girls on purpose. A cunning cash-grabbing trick by the developers, there, although it’s also a shocking double-standard. Why can’t I shoot the zombies’ shirts off? They might have terrifying malformations under there! Malformations, I say! Actually, on closer inspection I don’t think they’re zombies at all. Those joints seem to be skeletal in nature, or possibly exoskeletal.  Skull-faced axe maniac skeleton-insect-men? Got-Cha’s definitely got one thing going for it.

All the thrills of a Tiger Electronics hand-held LCD racing game in Rush Hour, plus yet more cheesecake anime art. I think that might be the same girl as the one in Spinning Pictures. They’ve got the same haircut, at least.
Rush Hour is a simple matter of avoiding the traffic by moving left and right across the three lanes, but it is one of the few games in Got-Cha that includes even the slightest element of strategy. You have to pass a certain number of cars to win, and you can make your car accelerate with the green button. The faster you’re going the more cars you’ll pass but the harder it is to avoid collisions, so there’s the faintest bit of risk-reward gameplay in there. It’s better than nothing, I suppose.

Rock Paper Scissors was bound to show up at some point, and here it is. I presume I don’t have to explain Rock Paper Scissors to you. The picture at the top cycles between the three options and then suddenly disappears, leaving you to try to remember what the last picture you saw was and then choose the correct counter-play. The hardest thing about this minigame is that the icons you choose from change order, so you have to pay attention to which one you’re selecting. You shouldn’t have trouble with this one unless you have narcolepsy that’s exacerbated by dot-matrix displays.

From one of the easiest minigames to the one that I personally found to be the most difficult with Jungle Escape. It stars a gorilla in a helmet and lots of anti-personnel explosives, so I have to assume the gorilla works for a landmine-clearing NGO. Between this brave ape and Princess Diana’s ghost the world will be rid of landmines, but first you must guide the gorilla to the end of the stage. To do this you press the colour that doesn’t match the landmine in front of you – in the screenshot above, for example, you’d press either green or blue. Later in the stage things are complicated by there being two mines at a time, and I don’t know whether it’s because I’ve spent the whole game up to this point matching colours or because I’m an uncoordinated idiot but I found it very difficult to pick the right colour. This isn’t a complaint; it made a nice change to play a minigame that I had to actually think about.

Kitty’s Mousetrap sees the return of the fish-gobbling cat from earlier in the game. Having grown weary of an all-seafood diet, the cat has branched out into devouring mice after capturing them using an over-complicated mousetrap built to look like a bridge. A variety of mice scurry around on the bridge, and when a mouse is standing on a portion of the bridge that matches their colour you hit the button to open the bridge’s trap doors and send them plummeting into the bubbling cartoon cauldron that I assume the cat has set up under the bridge.
Not a bad little game, this one, as it’s not the by-now-familiar challenge to match colours as quickly as possible. Instead you’ve got to stay patient and try to keep an eye on each member of the mouse swarm, and it’s a welcome change of pace.

I mentioned WarioWare right at the start of this article, and School Daze definitely is the most WarioWare-like minigame to be found in Got-Cha. It’s another one where all you do is mash the buttons as quickly as possible. Doing so makes the muscular, gloved arm click a mechanical pencil, with the goal being to eject as many pencil leads as possible. Wait a minute, that was a WarioWare microgame!
I do like the comedic idea of clicking a pencil becoming a competitive sport played by men with arms that’d make Popeye jealous, though. It’s got all the entertainment value of cricket but you can play along in the comfort of your own home!

Bumper Cars now, where you use the buttons to turn your car left or right while trying to collect more flags than your opponents. Because the CPU cars can drive faster than you and are prone to ramming your vehicle across the field of play, I found a relaxed, zen approach worked best in this minigame. Just let the cars smash you around. You’re bound to end up near some flags eventually.

Okay, is that a Santa Claus themed bikini? I am no closer to figuring out what the deal is with all the Christmas stuff, but I can tell you this – that is a very poorly-drawn arse. Fur-trimmed pants, bulbous hips – I think this character was based on a He-Man action figure.

In Farm Guard, you have to pelt rowdy children with eggs to prevent them from stealing your precious melons. Yep, it’s another colour-matching shooting gallery thing, but mischievous children cannot compete with skeletal monsters or Godzilla, even if they have fashioned previously-stolen melons into crude helmets.

Part-Time Job is all about the game’s mascot being the world’s most irritating fast-food customer, swanning into the place and ordering dozens of very specific burgers that you have to build by hitting the correct button for each ingredient. It’s decent enough, I suppose, although for me the highlight was definitely when the mascot came in and ordered the tomato and lettuce sandwich you can see above. You’re making a mockery of the very concept of hamburgers, you maniac!

Bungee-jumping action in Off the Deep End, where you up the buttons to grab items on your left and right as you fall – items that include cakes, chocolate bars and whatever that thing in the screenshot above is supposed to be. A packing peanut, perhaps. Matters are complicated by the addition of bombs that blow up if you grab them. Maybe once he’s cleared out all the land mines that gorilla can get to work eradicating the menace of hovering cartoon bombs.



Finally – finally – we’ve reach the last game: Galactic Invasion. Press the matching colours to shoot down the UFOs. You could have figured that out for yourself, you’re an intelligent sort, I’m sure. That said, this game didn’t seem to work quite right, in a way I can’t quite pin down. There was a... delay to it, almost, made more noticeable by the fact that all the other minigames played nice and crisply. But none of that really matters. I still managed to emerge triumphant, Paris is saved for alien devastation and Got-Cha: Mini Game Festival draws to a close.

There’s not much of an ending, just a picture of a medal, the word “CHAMP” and, as mentioned, no chance to enter your name in a high-score table. You do get to see your individual scores for each event, though. This is, of course, utterly uninteresting in concept, although I did notice that you can see a picture of the zombie-shooting minigame and the enemy target appears to be a bloke in a trenchcoat rather than a monster, raising the possibility of different graphics appearing either due to randomness or certain circumstances…

...and I did indeed play a bit more and noticed that the mascot was replaced by a dancing anime girl on top of the stacks in the first minigame. I suppose that’s something that might help to keep Got-Cha a bit more interesting over time, and if you’re feeling industrious you can go through and try to find all these variations. Not me, though. I’ve had enough of Got-Cha for now, and probably forever. It’s not a terrible game, though. The games aren’t particularly interesting but they all work fine, and I know I say this a lot but this would probably be more fun if played in multiplayer – it certainly feels like that’s the intended way to enjoy the game. But I played it alone, naturally, and I found it to be okay. Some of the graphics were quite nice and I loved the narrator’s “please stay on the line and someone will answer your call shortly” voice work. It did make me think about Christmas in July, though, so it loses points for that.

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BARNEY BEAR MEETS SANTA CLAUS (AMIGA)

Okay, fine, why not? Let’s actually look at a Christmas-themed game for once. ‘Tis the season, and all that. I think this might be the first time I’ve ever covered a Christmas game here at VGJunk. You see, the thing is I just don’t like Christmas all that much. Not in a bah-humbug-y way - I’m not against the holidays or anything, I'm down wih the message of peace and goodwill and I’m not the type to bang on about how it’s all become too commercialised, maaan. It just doesn’t really do it for me, you know. I’ve got Halloween for fun holiday times. But Christmas time is here, and maybe playing a seasonally-appropriate game will increase my levels of festive cheer. If I could get up to “holly jolly” from my current level of “trying to plan around reduced public transport services,” it’d be nice – and if I managed to get such a boost from this game, it’d be a bonafide Christmas miracle. It’s Free Spirit Software’s 1990 Amiga deck-the-halls-em-up Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus!

There’s Jolly Old Saint Nick now, sharing his sleigh with the titular Barney Bear. At the front of the sleigh are the traditional reindeer and at the back of the sleigh is some strange, malformed creature with twiglet legs. I think it’s supposed to be a dog. I’m sure it’s meant to be sitting on top of Santa’s sack, but because they’re the same colour you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s a dog with a hugely distended stomach. You shouldn’t have swallowed that canoe, Fido.

Of course, I’ve met Barney Bear before. A few months ago I wrote about Barney Bear Goes to Space, another Free Spirit title created by the same two people and also released in 1990. In that game, Barney went on a field trip to NASA, fell asleep on a conveyor belt and woke up aboard a space shuttle. It was half digital story book and half low-effort activity centre, so I’ve got a pretty good idea how Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus is going to play out.

It’s Christmas Eve, and all through the house not a creature is stirring except for Barney Bear and his dog Skippy. Not my words, folks, but the words of the robotic narrator whose dulcet tones will relay to us the story of Barney Bear, the jammiest little bear-cub in the world. Going to space and meeting Santa in the same year? What’s he got planned for the new year, finding a golden ticket and appearing in Barney and the Chocolate Factory?
Anyway, the narrator has the same synthesised voice as in Barney Bear Goes to Space. I described it there as like Stephen Hawking reading the CBeebies bedtime story, and that’s a description that holds true for Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus.

Santa has arrived. His unfocussed eyes and swaying, unbalanced gait suggest that a lot of kids have left a glass of brandy out for Santa this year. He tells Barney that he needs help at the North Pole, and asks if the young bear wants to come with him to see his toy factory. Santa, my man, it’s already late at night on Christmas Eve. If you’re desperate enough to turn to a bear-child for help, the situation has probably gotten away from you already.

And so off they fly, away to the North Pole – but not before the game reminds you that Barney Bear must ask his parents permission before travelling to Santa’s Grotto. Sadly, you don’t actually see this happen. Barney’s on his way though, so his parents must have been cool with it. The kid’s already been to outer space, he can clearly look after himself.

Before long, Barney and Skippy arrive at Santa’s Arctic fortress / toy factory. I was expecting an architectural style inspired by cosy cottages and gingerbread houses, not the opening shot of Blade Runner, but that’s what we’ve got here. I particularly like the huge flaming pylons in the background. That must be how they burn off the excess menthol from the Peppermint Mines. Then, just when I was getting my head around the weirdly fascistic look of Santa’s compound, the robot narrator informed me that the toy factory “is bigger than your whole city,” a statement that must have made player in Tokyo or Mexico City look out of their window and say “are you sure about that, sunbeam?”

So now we’re in Santa’s Workshop, and that’s where the storybook portion of the game ends. It feels like there was somehow even less to it than the story part of Barney Bear Goes to Space, to the point that I was, like, did I miss something? But no, I didn’t. Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus is both the title of the game and a complete and thorough description of the story.
Before I move on to the minigames, I must point out that while it’s easy to mock children’s entertainment for sometimes looking unintentionally weird or creepy – very easy, which is why I do it – when I reached this screen the narrator said “this is going to be lots of fun” and I swear to god Santa turns, looks into the “camera” and winks. I’m beginning to regret accompanying an old man to meet the slave workforce he keeps inside a city-sized frozen prison.
Okay then, minigames! If you click on certain background elements on this screen you can do an activity. Let’s start with the toy machine, shall we?

It’s a body-parts-swapping activity, of the kind I’m sure you’ve seen before. Combine the head, body and legs of various wacky characters to create the latest hot new toy that all the kids are clamouring for. You’ve got a few different sets to work with, including all your festive favourites – Santa Claus, a robot, a snowman, the Nativity Frog…

Whaddya mean, you’ve never heard of the Nativity Frog? The frog whose croaks led Mary and Joseph to the manger in which they lay the newbon Messiah? His flesh and shorts are the entire reason that red and green are colours of Christmas! You people need to study your Bibles more closely.

Of course, the real function of these body-swapping games is to come up with the most grotesque abomination that you can. I’ve plumped for this terrifying creation. The soulless, psychotic mind of a clown, the immortal body of a robot and the round lower half of a snowman that allows this remorseless killing machine to chase you over any terrain. Well, it’s not going to be any worse that the last couple of Terminator films, right?

There’s an odd-one-out game, which feels insultingly easy even for a game aimed at very young children. It’s obvious which one you need to pick in this line-up. Barney Bear isn’t nearly cool enough to pull off those sunglasses, and when you consider he’s been to space and met Father Christmas that’s a real burn on Barney.

There are a couple of letter games to play as well. One is a simple anagram solving challenge where you must unscramble words like “owl” and “zebra” - you know, Christmas words – and it’s so dull I couldn’t bring myself to even show you a screenshot. It looks almost identical to the minigame pictured above, where you have to find the missing letter to complete the alphabetical sequence. Beige squares, textured metal floors… I feel like I’m belabouring the point a touch but Free Spirit seem to have forgotten that they were supposed to be making a Christmas themed game. Could the letters not have been iced onto biscuits in front of a snowy backdrop or something? The “factory” part of Santa’s Unfathomably Vast Toy Factory is taking far too much of the focus, if you ask me. Although, I did learn that those textured metal floors are called “diamond plate” so I’ve got something out of the experience.

You can also enjoy a rousing game of “Find the Elf.” This screenshot’s from after I found the Elf, by the way. Even the Barney Bear games don’t make it that easy for you. What happens is that the narrator says, for example, that the Elf is in the red present or the smallest present, so you click on the appropriate gift and the elf pops out. Then the Elf says “you found me hehehehe” in the same robotic voice as the narrator, except it's pitched up a bit. This has the effect of making it sound fifty percent more elfin but roughly one thousand percent creepier. It’s the high-pitched mechanical laugh, it sounds like a disturbed robot child pulling the wings off fly-droids.

Probably the most enjoyable of the activities (a weak field to be the front-runner in, admittedly) is the colouring book. A selection of black-and-white line drawings for you to fill in, plus some very basic drawing tools so you can add your own flourishes as you see fit. It might be the best thing in this game, but it’s still a bad digital colouring book. It works in exactly the same way as the one in Barney Bear Goes to Space, and my description of that game’s colouring book applies here: it’s slow, awkward, fiddly to fill in the smaller areas and the drawing tools seem to create shapes that lay on a completely different “layer” to the rest of the drawing, making them annoying to work with. Still, you can colour in some fairly nice festive pictures, like I have done in the screenshot above. I hope you appreciate the effort I went to in ensuring that the stripes of the candy canes are all filled in correctly. If only Christmas spirit was measured by the amount of f-bombs you dropped while trying to colour a finicky candy cane, this game would be more festive than the Queen doing her speech in a novelty jumper while half-cut on Bailey’s.

The colouring book is the part of Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus that you can spend the most time with before the grinding weight of tedium forces you to stop, which is damning with faint praise indeed. But hey, at least you’ve got some nice Christmas-y scenes to look at, like Santa laughing at Barney as though our little bear friend has just told Santa he wants world peace for Christmas.

How about this toy bear? Or as Barney would call it, "a doll," I guess? Little could be more festive than baubles, gift-wrapped presents and teddy bears, even if the teddy bear does have the blank stare of someone who’s just walked in on their parents going at it underneath the mistletoe.

“Mother and father like to wrestle but it makes them sweaty so they do it with no clothes on.”

Your artistic masterpieces don’t even have to be related to Christmas! I made this horrible thing by accident. Okay, the nose wasn’t an accident, but I was a well-behaved child who was far too decent / cowardly to draw graffiti penises so I’m making up for it now. Erm, merry Christmas, I guess. As an apology, if you’re making a videogame and you want to use this thing as an enemy design, go right ahead. It could use its jug ears to fly at you, that could be pretty terrifying, right?

And that’s your lot. A short story and some rather pathetic minigames comprise ninety-nine percent of Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus. The other one percent? Well, on the main toy factory screen you can click certain things in the background and they play a sound file. The clock chimes, the buttons click and whistle and the elves in the background say “happy new year” although it probably won’t be happy for them because they’ll be out of a job. Barney Bear Goes to Space didn’t include much content either but it had more to it than this game – at least you could learn some (occasionally incorrect) space facts. Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus has some half-decent graphics and an enjoyably robotic voice-over but that’s about all it has – and it didn’t even make me feel more Christmas-y, which is all I really wanted from it. Okay, so it made me want to eat candy canes but that doesn’t take much doing. In short, I feel no more or less of the Christmas spirit now than I did before I played Barney Bear Meets Santa Claus, but it did remind me to buy candy canes. Please clap as I unfurl the world’s smallest “mission accomplished” banner.

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MARY-KATE AND ASHLEY: CRUSH COURSE (GAME BOY COLOR)

For the past couple of weeks I’ve had a chest infection, so as you can imagine I’ve felt pretty miserable. On top of that, I’m in the middle of quitting smoking, so every minor frustration and annoyance feels as though it’s magnified a thousand-fold and if the company that keeps cold-calling and trying to sell me energy-efficient windows rings one more time I’m going to track down the person responsible and insert my telephone into them sideways. So, I thought to myself “what could provide both my body and mind with a soothing balm during these trying times? I know, I’ll write about a Game Boy Color game starring the Olsen Twins!” I am not an intelligent man. Here it is, then: the 2001 GBC debacle that is Crawfish Interactive’s Mary-Kate and Ashley: Crush Course!

Here are Mary-Kate and Ashley now. Which one is Mary-Kate and which one is Ashley? I don’t have a bloody clue. I don’t know much of anything about the Olsen twins, in fact. I have the vague impression that they’re one of those cultural things marketed towards children that people who are old enough to know better get irrationally angry about, like Barney the Dinosaur or Justin Bieber. They’re actresses, right? That’s what Wikipedia says, anyway. Or at least they were actresses, but they seem to have stopped doing that now that they’ve made vast oceans of money via their various tie-in products and the fashion ranges that they run, which sounds like a very sensible way to handle the whole “child star” situation.

The first thing I noticed when I started up this game is that it sure does include a lot of corporate logos. Some are obvious inclusions, like the developer’s logo and one from publishers Acclaim. Others are a little more interesting, like these two. Dualstar is the Olsen twins’ production company, which handled their movies, videogames and other spin-offs. The fact that its logo looks like a big blue arse will seem very appropriate once we get into the gameplay. Then there’s the mention of the Olsen’s AOL keyword, which I’m sure will set the nostalgia centres fluttering amongst a certain set of VGJunk’s readership. Personally, I feel that the keyword being mary-kateandashley rather undermines the idea of keywords being short and snappy.

There’s also this rather insulting message that implies you’re not a “real girl” if you don’t want a videogame about trying to get boys to fancy you. Screw you, M-KA:CC. Because it’s a licensed Game Boy Color game based around tween entertainers, I’m sure you’ve all already realised that it should read “godawful minigames for easily confused but well-meaning parents.”

Okay, okay, I’ll get to the actual “game.” Your first job is to pick one of these brutally digitised pictures of Mary-Kate or Ashley to serve as your avatar. I suppose these pictures aren’t too bad when you consider that, you know, they’re on the Game Boy Color. Plus, the noseless look of the one at the top-right means you can pretend it’s a character illustration from Final Fantasy Tactics. You must also choose a colour to represent you. I went with orange, because it’s only a couple of weeks until October and I’ve been thinkin’ about pumpkins.

Then you select which of these three locations you want to play in, all of them typical places where teens like to hang out. Apparently. When I was a teen I hung out in my bedroom and, erm, that’s about it, but I’m sure happenin’ young kids like the Olsen twins love hanging around the park, presumably drinking White Lightning and trying the cigarettes they filched from their parents. You might notice that the mall, that ultimate beacon of teen activity, is locked. Don’t worry, I played enough of Crush Course to unlock it. Doctors remain unable to ascertain what exactly is wrong with me.

Oh look, it’s a board game. You roll a dice, move that amount of squares and are affected by whatever symbol is on the space you land on.

Unless you land on one of the many blank spaces, in which case nothing happens except the faces of the Olsen twins appear and, one assumes, shout “safe!” at you in the manner of a baseball umpire. That’s fifty percent of the game right there, folks.

Around the board you go, with between one and three CPU opponents hot on your tail. I suppose you could play Crush Course with other human people, but that would hardly be fair on them, would it? As far as I can tell, the main aim of the game is to collect hearts, and when you’ve got enough hearts a boy will declare their undying love for you. Something along those lines, anyway – I must confess I never really figured out exactly what Crush Course wanted from me. Besides my abject misery, that is. I never even learned how to consistently gain hearts. It’s all down to the squares you land on, that much is clear. Some squares are safe, as we’ve seen, but some will cause you to miss a turn or switch the direction that you’re travelling around the board. If you’re really unlucky, you’ll land on a space containing a minigame.

The most common minigame is the “crush minigame,” something that’s incredibly poorly named because “mini” doesn’t adequately describe how small it is and “game” is a flat-out lie. As you can see, you have to guess which of the boys has a crush on you. Get it right and you’ll earn a heart or two. Please note the use of the word “cuties” here. I’m glad I’m writing this down and not saying it loud, because if I were saying it loud I would have shattered my fingers trying to perform sufficiently large finger quotes around the word “cuties.”

Well, here they are. The cuties. I can’t decide which one is my favourite. Is it Dan, who looks like he’s trying to hide a bathroom sink in his mouth? Or perhaps it’s James, the ghastly result of a teleporter accident involving Hugh Grant and a bootleg Ghostface Halloween mask? Actually, I think Corey’s the best. Influenced by The Simpsons’ take on teen heartthrobs called Corey? Possibly, but mostly it’s his dimples and his bizarrely-proportioned jawline. That’s not a head, it’s a carrier bag stuffed with live weasels.
All the “cuties” are rather unpleasant to look at, having veered too far into the realms of the cartoonish, and I think part of the problem is the contrast between the real pictures of the real Olsen twins and the way the hunks are illustrated – specifically, they’re illustrated like a cheap colouring book you’d get in a £1 mystery bag. However they look, you can put this whole unpleasant charade to bed by quickly selecting one of the boys. It doesn’t matter which one, because the whole thing runs on guesswork and there’s no way to deduce which of the boys has a crush on you. In fact, a bit of fiddling with save states revealed that sometimes all of the boys will give you hearts if you pick them, proving that Mary-Kate and Ashley have captivated the entire school like a pair of pre-adult sirens.

Unfortunately, there are other minigames. These ones actually force you into some kind of gameplay. There are either quite a few minigames or about four of them, depending on how you want to look at it, and for most of the rest of this article I’ll be covering the various activities that you’re forced to endure.
This first one is called Locker Treasure, and the description makes Mary-Kate / Ashley sound like a raging kleptomaniac as they steal “treasures” from other people’s lockers.

It’s a platformer, I suppose. You jump around the candy-coloured lockers, collecting the items that range from small piles of coins to a surprisingly large amount of Stars of David. Grab as many as you can during the time limit and, erm, that’s about it.
I’m going to come right out and say it: this minigame is bloody awful. It’s incredibly shallow, the controls are spongy and your character drifts around the screen in a manner that’d be more appropriate for a game set on the moon rather than in a high school locker room. There’s a real problem with vertical surfaces, too: if you jump into a wall or the side of a platform, rather than falling straight down as you’d expect your character gets “stuck” inside the object, slowly sliding down the surface while a grating sound effect plays repeatedly. That’s not even the worst sound effect here, either: whenever you jump, there’s a strange, digital bonging sound, which is far too deep and ominous for a colourful Game Boy platformer about the Olsen twins. Imagine a videogame character has died, and as they wait at the River Styx they hear this sound, the macabre pealing of the ferryman’s bell.

Funnily enough, I think my personal Room 101 might actually contain a copy of Mary-Kate and Ashley: Crush Course.

This is Science Mess, which takes the item-grabbing concept of the previous minigame but transplants it to a top-down perspective. And removes the jumping. You walk around and collect the items that are scattered on the floor. Prepare to be thrilled as your chosen Olsen slowly walks around a high school science lab! Gird yourself for the pulse-pounding excitement of light chores! All the boys in school are gathered at the windows, peering inside and thinking “wow, look at the way she picked up that beach ball that someone brought to science class: she really is the girl of my dreams!”
Obviously, this minigame is incredibly tedious and contains absolutely zero fun. The only slight distraction I got from it was trying to figure out why there’s an open manhole in the middle of this classroom. Then I realised it’s supposed to be a top-down view of a chair. That flight of fancy was semi-interesting for the four seconds it lasted, at least.

The coherence of the school setting is stretched to breaking point with the Scooter Race, which is exactly what it sounds like. Someone’s built a race course from old tyres in the school gym, and you must drive your moped to the finish line as quickly as possible. This is proof that the Olsen’s hypnotic, bewitching powers have extended from the student body to the faculty. My teachers wouldn’t even let us wear dark-soled shoes in the sports hall, never mind racing motor vehicles in there. They also never let us use the indoor football nets that were in there, either. I’m still bitter about that.
Anyway, scooter racing. It’s a frustrating battle against momentum, and your vehicle takes your controller inputs as mere suggestions rather than firm directives. You slide, and slide, and slide around, bumping into the tyres in a mode that suffers because it’s almost not terrible. If they dialled back the momentum a little and let you move faster, it’d be the best minigame of the bunch. Not that that’s saying much, and it’d still be the piece of sweetcorn sticking out of the turd even if it was improved. On top of the control issues, you can also drive straight though the tyres at certain points (something that I’m convinced wasn’t intentional) and yet again the sound effects plumb new depths of hideousness. Your scooter emits a constant shrieking wail that I’m struggling to describe, but I will say this: if you’re making a low-budget YouTube horror movie and you need a sound effect for when the monster appears and cause the camera to glitch out, I would recommend checking out Crush Course.

Onward to the park, which you would think would make a better setting for scooter races but what the hell do I know, it’s not like I ever go outside. The board game portion of Crush Course works the same in the park, but the minigames look different. Notice that I said look different.

Here’s one we haven’t seen yet, as the Olsen twins go fishing. It’s a simple matter of moving the cursor over each fish as they appear… or it would be simple if it also wasn’t burdened by the cursor having an extreme amount of momentum. You’ll spend most of your time here trying to drag the reticle out of the corners of the play area, but that’s okay because it’s not like you have to do anything to catch the fish, so you’ll still be collecting them even if you’re moving the target around at random.
As with all the other minigames, the problem here is that it’s just so boring. Every challenge you face seems to have been created by the developers working through the first three chapters of a “How to Design Flash Games for the Web” book, and none of them extend beyond moving a character or cursor from one place to another. Would the fishing game be bearable if it had any sort of complexity to it at all? Maybe certain fish that you had to avoid, or the requirement to perform a well-timed button press to reel the fish in? Erm, probably not. It would still be crap, but it would be slightly more interesting crap.

The crushing sense of dullness reaches its absolute nadir with the hedge maze. Walk to the centre of the hedge maze, don’t touch the hedges, contemplate running away to a convent and taking a vow of chastity if this is what it takes to form a romantic relationship.

There’s also Park Treasure, which is identical to Locker Treasure except with park instead of lockers. And by park, I mean floating lumps of turf. At least the Olsens are doing all this healthy jumping exercise out in the fresh air now.

The park also plays host to a boat race, which controls suspiciously similarly to the scooter race. You see what I mean about there being a limited supply of minigames, despite what Crush Course wants you to believe? You’ve got jump-and-collect, walk-and-collect, races, move the cursor over the thing and The Unending Labyrinths of Infinite Tedium. At least the boat races offers a few different routes for you to take, with some being quicker than others. However, the biggest difference between the boat and scooter races is that the boat race is the only minigame where I managed to crash into a large, erect nipple.

By the way, each location has its own different set of “cuties.” They’re still mostly terrifying, although I appreciate the inclusion of Wez as the token “smart guy who wears glasses.” However, Richie is clearly in his forties, and if he’s hanging around the park looking at teenage girls he should be getting arrested, not taking part in the cutie parade.

Lastly, there’s the mall. That unhappy emoticon is adequately capturing how I feel about having to play through the same set of minigames for a third time, but I’m here now so I might as well get on with it.

We’ve got Clothing Treasure, which recreates all the excitement of being a Primark employee by having you wander around a clothing store, picking up items that people have rudely thrown on the floor. Yes, it works in precisely the same way as the other top-down collecting games.

The mall version of the fishing game is this sale-em-up event, where you must use the cursor to pillage the shelves. There are bargains to be had on all the things teen girls love, like CDs and chunks of mouldy green cheese. No, I don’t have a clue either.

The mall also has its own maze game, as you make your way to your seat in a very poorly laid-out cinema. Do I need to tell you it’s exactly the same as the other mazes? No, I didn’t think so. I will say that at least this minigame has some attention to detail, because that floor looks just as disgusting as you’d expect from a mall cinema. I can almost feel what it would be like to walk on that carpet. Squish, crunch, squish, crunch.

And finally – there are other minigames, but I can’t bring myself to cover them – there’s the mall’s racing game, which is all about cars and skidding around in the car park. “Avoid crashing into other people’s cars,” the instructions say. That’s all well can good, but if you didn’t want me crashing into the other cars then why did you make my car handle like wet soap with olive oil for blood?

Good lord, what an absolute cavalcade of crap that was. Every minigame is utterly devoid of fun, complete non-events with the charm and personality of a damp sock. The only thing that stopped me from instantly falling into a coma the second I started playing them was the sound effects, which are some of the very worst I’ve ever heard in a videogame. Horrific, strangled-sounding electronic wails permeate every moment of the experience, as though the cartridge is haunted by a robot ghost with its genitals caught in a mousetrap.

I haven’t even mentioned how bad the board game portion of Crush Course is, either, so I’ll do that now: it’s garbage. It’s tedious, too random and I never really figured out exactly how it works. Sometimes when you finish a round, you’re shown a picture of one of the boys. Does… does that mean he’s mine now? The complex psychological brainwashing procedure of walking around a cinema looking for a specific seat has worked, and now he is mine to command? I haven’t got a clue. However, the very worst thing about the board game segments is how the minigame scoring works. If you land on a minigame, you have to play it, and if you score less points than the previous high score, you lose a heart. That makes a kind of sense. However, you can land on the same minigame multiple times during a round, and you have to beat your own high score or you lose a heart. Because the games are all so incredibly basic, it’s very difficult to not set a very high score and thus potentially dick yourself over later in the round, unless you purposefully play badly in order to make things easier for you later on. I don’t know about you, but any game that encourages you to do badly has gone terribly wrong in my book.

It seems that Crush Course wants you to keep playing and harvesting boys, if this password system is anything to go by. It gives you a code so you can save your character and continue your progress, although it does commit the cardinal sin of videogame passwords by including separate letters that almost identical to each other – the C and the G in this case. Having a part of the game made worse by such an easily-avoided issue sums up Crush Course rather neatly.

Perhaps there’s a true ending to Mary-Kate and Ashley: Crush Course, a finale that’s revealed to you if you manage to add all the boys to your harem, but I’m sure you’ll forgive me for not reaching that point. I’ve had more than enough of this game, thank you very much. Everything about it is lazy, cynical and worst of all stultifyingly dull, topped off with sound effects wrenched from the very bowels of electronic hell. The usual back-and-forth “it was made for kids, but apparently by people who hate children” argument could be made, but I suppose there’s no point. Crush Course is a cash-grab, and an awful one at that. It’s certainly bad enough to be way down near the bottom of the list of “worst games I’ve ever played,” although it’s not bad enough to wrest that particular crown from Rugrats: Totally Angelica. I thought quite hard about why (to me, at least) Rugrats is the worse game when Crush Course is clearly just as wretched, and eventually I figured it out. Rugrats: Totally Angelica is more painful to play because it forces you to play it. Like, there are goals and objectives and to accomplish them you have to struggle with the game’s tsunami of bullshit. In Crush Course, everything is so pointless, so easy and so boring that you don’t have to interact with the game nearly as much. It’s awful, but its awfulness washes over you whereas Rugrats’ awfulness clings to your face and tries to gnaw your eyeballs out of your skull. I’ll leave you with that mental image as I bid farewell for today, and one final word of warning: don’t play Mary-Kate and Ashley: Crush Course. It’s not big and it’s not clever.

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