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Game: Winnie the Pooh Piglet's Big Day
Distributor: Jakks Pacific
Release Date: 2006
Genre: Activity Center
Who doesn't love Winnie the Pooh? I've known people who can't stand Mickey Mouse, but I think it's ILLEGAL to hate Pooh Bear! Despite being meant for younger kids, he and the rest of the Hundred-Acre Wood gang are possibly the most charming, fleshed-out, innocent, entertaining, timeless animated characters ever to appear in media. I think you could put these characters in most situations, or have a conversation with any of them, and they'd each come up with a unique way to respond that would still fit where they are and who they're talking to. ...Heck, considering the amount of media they've been in since they started nearly a hundred year ago, you could argue they've already demonstrated how versatile this "simple children's franchise" is!
Purists may prefer the "classic" Winnie the Pooh, the version that began in 1926 with A. A. Milne's Winnie-the-Pooh and continued through a series of volumes written by the author and illustrated by E. H. Shepard. These characters have a much more "old-fashioned" look and personality to them, actually appearing as old-time stuffed animals and, while having the mindset of young children, acting very proper and thoughtfully, including Pooh being a talented poet, yet with thoughts steering towards surrealism and even absolute madness. Imagine them as characters from Alice in Wonderland, and you'll probably get where I'm coming from. They're not as fun or friendly as later versions would be, but they're arguably more imaginative and innocent, while still holding onto an unreasonably high amount of dignity. ...In other words, they were a very "British" interpretation.
This version of Pooh had a long and successful life before his more well-known incarnation. Media and marketing mogul Stephen Slesinger, the same guy who made Tarzan a household name and who gave Pooh his red shirt, acquired the rights in the 1930s and turned it into a multi-million dollar franchise for several decades, with toys, games, sound recordings, a radio show, and even the first short films all about the character!
...If you count a badly-drawn comic adaptation of one of the Winnie the Pooh stories that alternates between two different film strips while a severely lagging narration track plays as a "short film". Then again, I'll give it leeway for being 1935...
This version continues to this day in different formats, including its first TV adaptation on Shirley Temple's Storybook in 1960, a series of Cold War-era Russian cartoons, and, most recently, two authorized sequels to the original books in 2009 and 2016, and a documentary on A. A. Milne's creation of Winnie the Pooh titled Goodbye Christopher Robin in 2017. It's like they say: People always return to the classics.
However, the version most people love and are more familiar with is the Disney adaptation of Winnie the Pooh. Beginning with Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree in 1966, Disney's version of the characters plays up their more innocent and fun traits, while toning down the "navel-gazing" and long discussions of the original media. These changes are possibly why they continue to resonate with audiences today, and why they've overshadowed even the highly successful classic Winnie the Pooh stories. They're still the same characters, but their actions are based more on reaction and adjusting to new situations than sitting around and discussing what to do. Plus, each one has a distinctive personality that defines them, but doesn't limit them, allowing them to tackle any situation thrown at them and work off the equally distinct personalities of their costars. It's this look at how the gears in their heads turn and how expressive they are that makes this version so fun to watch for both children and adults.
Or maybe we as a people just love anthropomorphic teddy bears. Would explain the success of Ted and Paddington. ...Hmmm.... Crossover....
Whatever the reason why we love Winnie the Pooh, we've helped make it one of Disney's largest and most profitable franchises, still going strong over 50 years after Disney acquired the rights. In 2013, Winnie the Pooh was Disney's THIRD highest grossing franchise, after Disney Princess and Star Wars. It's a franchise that's seen 6 theatrical movies, 9 direct-to-video movies, 9 TV specials, 4 TV shows, 2 theme park attractions, and COUNTLESS toys, books, video games, audio recordings, and appearances in other media! And while Winnie the Pooh and friends have had their high and low points, as long as Disney remembers what makes these characters special, they can keep this chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff going for as long as they want!
The absolute "WHAT IS GOING ON?!" moments keep us coming back as well!
Me, personally, I LOVE Winnie the Pooh, especially the Disney version. Like I said, they're all great, rounded characters with distinctive personalities and a wide range of expressions who are masters at spoken humor, slapstick, and, especially, fourth-wall breaks. I grew up watching the original shorts, The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh and The Book of Pooh TV shows, and a lot of the theatrical movies. I had a large collection of books, toys, and a couple computer games(Especially Ready to Read/Ready for Math With Pooh) that I really enjoyed and that I look back upon with fondness. There are a few things featuring Winnie the Pooh that I don't like, particularly the My Friends Tigger and Pooh TV show(which doesn't feel like it belongs in the same universe as Winnie the Pooh), but for the most part, my memories of it are positive. Even today, as an adult, I'm happy to go back and revisit a lot of Winnie the Pooh media(especially when I'm adventuring in the Hundred-Acre Wood in Kingdom Hearts), and find new reasons to enjoy what I liked as a kid. It's a franchise that's stuck with me since the beginning, and one I'm more than happy to keep following.
With a new theatrical movie out, as another film in Disney's hit-or-miss "live-action remake" universe, I'm really excited to see it and what they've done with the characters for Christopher Robin. We're long overdue for another Winnie the Pooh movie(or TV show, come to think of it), and this is a good chance for Disney to reignite interest and see if people as a whole WANT more media featuring Winnie the Pooh! ...And I hope they did it right. I haven't seen it, but based on the reviews and box office receipts... We shall see.
However, in my opinion, the best Winnie the Pooh movie is ironically one that Disney's tried to forget about! Pooh's Grand Adventure: The Search for Christopher Robin was a 1997 direct-to-video feature-length movie where Pooh and friends journey to save Christopher Robin from "skull", while being pursued by a "Skullasaurus", and I won't DARE give away what they actually are! However, when it was released, it got slammed for dark imagery, sad themes, and a tedious and "unadult" plot, so Disney's barely paid any attention to it, only giving it a DVD release back in 2006, and a Blu-Ray just this year! That's sad, because it's a FANTASTIC movie, with great animation, catchy songs, some extremely quotable lines and scenes, and a very mature storyline with a lot of character arcs and a logical progression for each of them. Yes, it's darker than most Winnie the Pooh media, but that actually makes it more timeless, giving both young and old something to come back to and appreciate for different reasons. And it doesn't go overboard; everything still has the same innocence and fun that Winnie the Pooh brings us, just with some scary images that don't go beyond what classic Disney movies like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs have already shown us. If The Tigger Movie didn't get any crap for its mature themes, then why should this one? If you can find a copy, check it out. It may be the best Winnie the Pooh THING you've ever seen!
Though I think we can all agree that Pooh's finest moment was facing off against a demon literally made of marijuana smoke in Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue. ...How can anyone say they hate a special with THAT in it?!
Today, we're looking at Winnie the Pooh's sole venture into Plug n Play territory. ...Besides the Telestory cartridge, but we'll get to that some other time.
Fittingly, the console is built in the shape of a "Hunny" pot, with the main body shaped like a blue pot, with a purple-lined base, and the top full of honey that's dribbling down the sides. ...No wonder Pooh is always hungry. More of the honey
Of course, I say "pot", but with this weird bulge towards the top, it's more pitcher-shaped. All the better to pour the gooey condiment in Pooh's oversized mouth!
Also, props for including the word "Hunny" on the console. My grandmother hates that they misspell it in the show, but we're talking about characters based off a 5-year-old's imagination. We can give them a bit of leeway, grandma...
The button is, of course, in the shape of Pooh's face, with his smiling mug staring right at you as you play. Sorry, Pooh, but I gotta punch you in the face a few dozen times for this game.
And, of course, we have the joystick in the shape of a honey stick, with tiny shapes of bees buzzing around it. ...And every joke I thought of to describe this was too filthy, so moving on.
Finally, we have a rarity for these consoles: A faux-analog joystick! Like Star Wars: The Original Trilogy, we have controls that have such a wide range and large amount of direction, that you'd almost be fooled into thinking that they're analog! ...They're not, as I checked and you can still feel digital switches being pressed when you steer to the sides, but it's still more effort and feels more comfortable than the regular digital controls we're used to with consoles. ...Or maybe you prefer digital switches. Hey, I'm not one to judge. ...Sometimes...
Once again, a game from Jakks Pacific. Though instead of regular contributor HotGen, we have a newcomer: Backbone Entertainment! ...Which actually has ties to another frequent contributor we've seen, so it's debatable is they ARE a newcomer to this blog.
Backbone Entertainment was the result of a merger between Digital Eclipse, which I briefly mentioned in the touch-pad version of Star Wars The Original Trilogy, and ImaginEngine, which formerly specialized in PC edutainment games. Their California locations were merged together and became Backbone Entertainment, which, like most studios featured here, specialized in ports to handheld systems, and ports of older games to modern compilations.
Though they did try their hand at an original franchise with the slightly successful Death Jr. series of games. ...And, considering the reviews for the games and how the last one was released in 2008, you can imagine why they went back to solely doing ports and licensed material.
Backbone Entertainment was also one of the initial companies, along with The Collective and Pipeworks Software, to merge and form Foundation 9, which would later acquire Amaze Entertainment/Griptonite Games, who I mentioned were the developers behind Star Wars The Original Trilogy and Star Wars Revenge of the Sith. However, they continued using the Backbone Entertainment name for their original titles.
Surprisingly, it's still around today, though in name only, as part of a "refounded" Digital Eclipse, and they recently brought us the The Disney Afternoon Collection, Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, and Mega Man Legacy Collection games for the Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch. They're even known as one of the best porting studios, using their "Eclipse Engine" to decompile any game's code and recompile it in a language that can be read by modern systems!
Not bad for a studio that originally brought us Brooktown High...
Like Disney Princess Magical Adventures, this is also a team-up with the former Buena Vista Games, now Disney Interactive Studios, so we're promised some great artwork and music for this game! ...Hopefully, it's more Snow White's Hide and Seek than Ursula's Garden for this one...
This is another console that promises GameKey functionality, that was likely programmed before they got the memo that GameKeys were canceled, since there's no slot to be found on this console. While I miss the games that could have been, I'm glad I don't have to track down an expansion I have to pay through the nose for, like the other increasingly hard-to-find GameKeys...
When the game starts up, we're given a short animation where Pooh is standing in a field as the title pops up behind him, before he walks over to a stump and sits next to his friend Piglet. So right away, we're given a great look at how good the animation is for this game! Like Disney Princess Magical Adventures, it looks like the character sprites were drawn by professional Disney animators and scanned into the game! Just look at how bright and colorful and finely detailed everything looks, with advanced shading, parallax scrolling, and subtle animated quirks like Pooh's inability to stand perfectly still! Sure, it has a lower number of frames than most of the Disney Princess games, and we've seen better animation in the Spongebob games, but it's clear that Disney wanted something based on one of their most successful properties to look as good as possible! Even if it was just a Plug n Play game, which were made when a GBA game was considered too much effort...
Also, as a first here for a game based on a Disney property, we get a version of the theme song playing over the intro! ...And, also a first for games that use the original music, I surprisingly don't like it... The instruments make it sound cheerful and cartoonish, with a fun yet laid-back tone that matches the franchise, but they also sound horribly off-tempo and key. The xylophone in particular continually sounds like it's trying to match the notes, but keeps losing the rhythm or adds new notes that don't match. It's like a bored musician ordered to play the song for the millionth time, so he tries to go off-sheet and give it a more jazzy style, but the conductor constantly catches him and gives him the stink-eye, so he has to catch up with the rest of the orchestra and go back to playing it correctly. Maybe the rest of the song is played at the right tempo, but since the xylophone section is so loud, it overpowers the rest of the instruments!
Somebody get that guy to play "Those Endearing Young Charms"*!
*Disney AND Looney Tunes references in one review? What is this? Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
So the "story" behind this console is that Piglet is feeling down, so Pooh and friends want to play some games together and cheer him up! ...And I hope you enjoyed that Post-It-sized plot, because it never factors into the game! In fact, there's NO story at all to the console, they just added one for the intro. ...Thanks for going the extra mile?
Instead, as you may have guessed from a console like this, it's made up of six activities, which are selectable with a mouse cursor, similarly to My Little Pony Grand Puzzleventure.
Pooh's Music Corner
Rabbit's Birthday Surprise
Light Tag
Butterfly Catch
Rabbit's Garden
Pooh's Picnic Fun
Also, if you click on Pooh and Piglet in the center, the intro replays. Just in case you felt lost in this Nolan-sized plot...
Pooh's Music Corner. Let's start things off with possibly the most simplistic of all the games on this console(and that's saying something!) Pooh, Piglet, Rabbit, Kanga, Roo, and Christopher Robin have gathered in what I'm assuming is Rabbit's house to play music. ...And that's the long and short of it. Click on each of the characters to get the party started! ...Presumably on a Saturday night. ...Where everybody is waiting for me to arrive. ...And I'll be burning rubber for some reason.
Simply click on each character once to begin a makeshift smooth jazz band and let the music travel across the screen. As the music plays, a "hunny" jar in the upper right slowly fills, while Roo starts hopping higher and higher. Though if you get bored, you can click on various other items in the room to trigger short sounds and animations. It's like one of those Animated Storybooks from the 90s! ...Without the story!
Eventually, the jar fills up, and Roo hops from the floor to the chair to the shelf and grabs the jar at the top, signaling the end of the Hundred-Acre Jazz Band At Night performance. Please remember to grab your belongings out from under your seats, and we'll see you at our next stop in Chicago!
...So, this was barely even a game... It's like one of those Flash games you found on the Playhouse Disney or Nick Jr. sites a decade ago, where you clicked on things to make a loose approximation of a song through individual beats. It's fun for a few seconds, but with how repetitive it gets, you quickly click off to go play that Lilo & Stitch sandwich stacker game. ...Still, like Disney Princess Magical Adventures, this is made for little, little kids, so I don't know how mad I can get at it. The music's pretty jazzy, and toddlers can interact with things in the background, so it has SOME substance to it. Plus, the animation's nice, and we get to see most of the gang, so this wasn't terrible. It's weak, but still Jakks Pacific/Disney standards, which keeps it from dropping too far.
I eagerly await the band's next album! With a special guest appearance by Kenny Loggins!
Rabbit's Birthday Surprise. Rabbit's having a birthday, but Pooh and Piglet need a few more carrots for his cake. What's the logical thing to do? Invade his house, hide under a box, and steal HIS carrots while he's still at home, of course! These characters teach your children only the highest of morals!
You control Pooh and Piglet walking under a box, looking for randomly spawning carrots, while Rabbit sweeps his floor in the background. When you find one, reach up, grab it, get back under the box as fast as you can, and go on your grand adventure to find some more!
Also, remember to duck when Rabbit turns around, otherwise, he'll steal a carrot back from you. ...But apparently he never catches on to the fact there's a box with eyeholes running around his house...
Once all carrots have been collected, leap out of the box and wish Rabbit a Happy Birthday! ...From your Tardis-interior box that apparently also contained the cake and party hats! ...Good to be prepared?
This was fun. Again, it's a super-simple game for a two-year-old, but at least it's a GAME! Move left/right, grab the carrots when you can, and hide from Rabbit. The sprites and background were fluid, and there's an element of strategy, even if you can't lose. This is a carrot heist with your friends Pooh and Piglet that's worth going on.
Speaking of which, let's check with them and see how their mission's progressing.
Pooh! What's going on?! Answer me! Pooh? POOOOOOOOOH?!
Light Tag. Pooh and friends have decided to play a friendly game of tag! ...In pitch darkness... In the middle of the woods... The first 5 minutes of a horror movie have just been written!
You guide Pooh around the forest, looking behind objects to find his friends. Once you find one, the sun instantly comes out and EVERYBODY comes out of hiding and starts running. Presumably terrified by the sudden total eclipse they mistook for the middle of the night!
This part continues until one of them is caught by Pooh. It doesn't even have to be the one originally found. As soon as Eeyore/Tigger/Rabbit/Roo/Christopher Robin is caught, everyone returns to hiding, the moon moves back in front of the sun, Audrey II arrives on Earth, and the search continues!
Once all have been found, Pooh jumps for joy and the game ends! ...The world ends too, since the Death Star has clearly parked in front of the sun, but why ruin the moment?
This was also fun. It's a VERY simplistic game of hide 'n seek that only ends when the player has found everyone, and it's easy to catch up to each character, but it's a thrill to chase everyone and see each character portrait filled in as they're caught. Also, it's amazing how short, fat(and proud of that) Pooh can catch up with everyone. If there's one thing to be learned from Pooh and friends, it's the value of determination!
Anyway... The Wild Thornberrys Movie. ...I ran out of eclipse movies that have any relevance here...
Butterfly Catch. Pooh and Piglet are dealing with the butterfly mafia from Grand Puzzleventure. To show they're not to be messed with, Pooh blows large bubbles to trap them in. Right before they panic and realize there's no escape, Piglet pops them to show that their life is in the Hundred-Acre Wood gang's hands! Totally what's happening! ...Except for the stuff that's not...
...That's it. Repeatedly push the button to blow bubbles, watch butterflies and other things get trapped in them, and eventually catch the required number of butterflies. You don't even have to move around the screen... Just push the button and let ancient Nostalgia Critic quotes pass through your minds.
...This is game? I've seen game. This is not game. This is less engaging than Pooh's Music Corner. ...It's so empty and without need of comment, that I'm just going to stop talking and move to the next game.
Rabbit's Garden. Pesky moles have invaded Rabbit's garden, and it's up to Pooh and Piglet to gather as many vegetables as they can before the moles get them all! ...Oh, sure, Rabbit! You're constantly telling others to stay out of your garden, but when it comes to your garden needing actual work, THEN you're hunky dory about the others on your lawn! You're the kind of guy who only calls a "friend" when you need to move a couch, aren't you?
Thankfully, we're back to a game, and a rather exciting one, even! Guide Pooh left and right and uproot Rabbit's carrots and radishes(which Pooh and friends do anyway, but this time, INTENTIONALLY!) But you gotta move fast, because those moles are quick and will pull the veggies down to their subterranean depths before you can say "Oh bother!"
Actually, the best part of this game is when you get to have a tug-of-war with one of the moles. Take that, mole! That'll teach you to take a role in G-Force! And waste Nicholas Cage!
However, I think the fast-paced action is there to distract us from the major issues present here. First of all, Rabbit's veggies are HUGE! The carrots are nearly the same size as Pooh, while the radishes look big enough to squash Piglet like a bug! I know the characters are normally half the size of a 6-to-8-year-old boy, so organic life appears bigger to them than what a normal human sees, but GEEZ, Rabbit! Tone down the Root Excelurator, would ya?! That much steroid in veggies you want to eat can't end happily! If you hear a series of nuclear explosions during the night, it's just your plants exploding from overdose!
The other thing is that those are clearly not moles. They're gophers.
Really, Gopher? I know Disney apparently fired you after Winnie the Pooh: A Valentine for You, but THIS is what you've been reduced to? Organizing your kin to raid Rabbit's garden and steal his root vegetables? You've always been the most hard-working on the show, I'm sure you wouldn't have had trouble getting work elsewhere! At the very least, you could be collecting Workman's Comp from injuries pertaining to constantly falling though gopher holes! Come on! Stop with the petty theft and do something more productive!
Like punch Beaver in the face for stealing your role in My Friends Tigger and Pooh!
Anyway, collect 20 of these abnormally large vegetables, and you'll earn the appreciation of Rabbit. ...Who just sat off to the side of the screen, drinking carrot juice while Pooh wrestled with
Despite my snark, this was the best game so far! I like the imagination and the rush to grab the veggies before they disappear, plus the mechanic where you wrestle with the moles/gophers for the vegetables! This is a game with a sense of humor, and an awareness of its environment and what can be done with it! It's simplistic and unable to be lost, but I think we're aware of that theme by this point. Go forth and steal back what has been taken from you by the rodent regime!
Also, keep a look out for this guy. He's known to be orange and dangerously full of Vitamin K!
Pooh's Picnic Fun. Our final game, and simultaneously the most elaborate! This takes the form of a race, where Pooh and Piglet are competing against Kanga and Roo to get to one end of the track and back! ...And you may notice the major problem with this game: Don't make the player root for the OTHER team! Go Kanga and Roo!
The layout is a fairly complex setup, especially compared to the other games on this console! Pooh/Piglet must crawl through bushes, hop across a pond full of turtles, get thrown in the air and grab a piece of fruit, then do everything again in reverse, drop the fruit in the basket, and run back and do everything again for the other fruit, WHILE racing against Kanga/Roo! ...And bear in mind that two of the games on this console had you doing literally nothing but pressing a button over and over again!
It's like playing one of those tap games on your phone/tablet, then, right at the end, it becomes Mario Kart! Talk about genre and pacing whiplash!
The race is also significantly harder than the other games, even considering how much more of a "game" this is compared to the other events! First of all, you're racing against a computer opponent that executes actions perfectly and is almost as fast as you. That alone makes it noticeably harder to finish in first place. But then you have the obstacles. The bushes are easy, as you just need to duck down and crawl under them to avoid scaring the birds(though the controller makes it a little tricky to hold Down and Right/Left.)
But if you miss a turtle, which dives/surfaces at random, you then need to wade across the pond, costing you valuable time in your race against
At the end, you need to grab a piece of fruit off the tree, while also noting that Pooh throws Piglet slightly to his right, AND the toss needs to be pixel-perfect, or Piglet comes back down empty handed, and you need to try for another piece of fruit off the tree! ...The strawberry/apple/banana/grape/cherry tree! ...What, you never heard of it? I had two in my yard growing up! The flying monkeys kept stealing everything off them, though. ...Also, my favorite food was a bowl of paint chips and milk, in case you were wondering.
THEN, with fruit in hand, you need to make it past the obstacles again and back to the beginning of the track
To drop the fruit in the basket and repeat the race until all fruit has been picked! ...This is an exhausting set of events for an adult gamer, let alone the console's demographic of three-year-olds!
Still, I may be making it sound harder than it actually is. After the first two laps, I finally figured out when to duck/jump/leap, and from there, I finished the race handily. It was still a close call, given the speed they gave to Kanga, but I reached the end and everybody applauded my fruit-snatching talent! Pac-Man ain't got nothing on me!
This was easily the best game on here, and my favorite out of the lot. It had variety, it had challenge, it had a goal, it had opponents, it's the most fleshed out of all the activities on this console! It's difficult, but that makes it more fun for people of all ages to play it(especially twenty-somethings who decided to make looking at games for toddlers their profession...) I don't know how easily a very young child could complete this game, but if it's too hard for them, that just gives reason to come back and play it when they're older! It's an unexpectedly fun game, and alone makes the console worth it! ...If owning a console shaped like a Hunny jar wasn't already a prerogative!
And that was Winnie the Pooh: Piglet's Special Day. On this special day, we banged on dishes to annoy Roo into getting us honey, broke into Rabbit's house to steal his carrots just to give them back as a gift, played hide-and-seek while a moon-sized abomination continually moved into position in front of our sun to devour the earth, showed the butterfly mafia you don't mess with stuffed animals blowing bubbles, stopped a pink-slipped Gopher from ruining the life of one of the show's characters, and showed-up a mother and her young kid in an obstacle course! All to make Piglet feel better about himself!
If it turned out that Winnie the Pooh's Home Run Derby was created as a purgatory to punish the player and these characters for their actions today, that would make too much sense...
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Design: The console's in the shape of a pot of Hunny! What's not to love?! I love how they gave the jar a purple base, they spelled "Hunny" on the side, and they made sure to have the honey running over the sides. On top of all that, you control the game by stirring the honey with a stick with a beehive on top! The only thing that ruins the cosmetics is the bulge they put at the top to give enough space for the Pooh button. I don't know what they could have done to make it look more natural, besides make the entire console larger to accommodate, but it just throws off the design giving the jar a lip like a pitcher. Still, if you, for some reason, need a Winnie the Pooh Hunny pot prop, you couldn't do much better than this. If this was sitting on a shelf, I'd stop and check out what it is. ...Which I did. ...Hence how I came to own it...
Controls: They're very similar pseudo-analog controls to the Star Wars The Original Trilogy console, complete with a large amount of digital buttons on the sides to emulate the wide array of analog directions. As such, you're given a good number of directions to steer Pooh in, and it feels fluid and easy to control. Unfortunately, it has the same problem as The Original Trilogy when it comes to moving at an angle. Pushing the joystick Up- or Down-Right/Left is a slightly fiddly process, as finding the right button that will move Pooh in that direction is tricky. With how laid-back most of these games are, that's not a huge problem, but with the final event, it can be a bit of a headache trying to duck and move under the bushes. Also, I don't understand why they thought they needed a mouse cursor to select things on the main menu, especially since only the first game incorporates a cursor(and even then, it's arguably unnecessary), and moving a cursor around with a joystick is annoying at best... Overall, I love how fluid the controls feel. I just wish they were slightly more responsive...
Graphics: The design is BEAUTIFUL! Once again, it looks like they got top-tier(or at least second-to-top-tier) animators and artists to design sprites and backgrounds for this game! The colors are varied and vibrant, the shading is professional, and everything looks like it's taken straight from one of the Winnie the Pooh shows or movies! The animation, while not as fluid as other games with fluid animations, still looks good, and there are a lot of frames put into the animations, as well as a good variety of animations and transitions, so we're not stuck with two modes of two frames each: walking and ducking. I can even excuse how, while it looks good, it could possibly look better, since I'm not sure the processing power of a Plug n Play could handle a large amount of high quality frames like this without having to give up certain colors and backgrounds to make the game run at a decent speed. Besides, for what we got, everything looks great! We have characters running, laughing, cheering, smiling, jumping, SO much more effort than what was necessary! Winnie the Pooh, in my opinion, has always been one of the best-looking Disney franchises, and this game is no exception. Here's to more Jakks Pacific/Disney team-ups in the future! ...That we're going to look at, I mean. They're not exactly making any new titles together anymore...
Music & Sound: This is probably the first time I have to admit that the game might have been better off without the main theme. I don't know how they managed to screw up a synthesized soundtrack, but the theme song sounds so discordant and out of tune/tempo, that it's almost like someone heard the theme, then tried to recreate it with their software without listening to it again. It's not exactly like other versions I've heard in the past, and the cheery synthesized xylophone & tuba that play the song just annoy me further that it doesn't sound finished. It's like they wanted to make the song, yet make it a jazzy remix at the same time, and it sounds SO off! Besides the theme, the rest of the music is also comprised mostly of synthetic xylophone and tuba, with the occasional Casio keyboard animal noise thrown in, and I had to listen VERY closely to make sure they didn't just use the same track for each stage. It's lively enough, and fits the Winnie the Pooh for toddlers aesthetic they were going for, but it's also bland and forgettable and you won't remember it the second you turn off the console. The only music that stood out to me was the jazz ensemble from the first game, as it was a funky beat, and I wouldn't have minded hearing "Lullaby of Birdland" played by this group. The sounds are stock effects you hear in other games, with "bubble" sounds, pops, squishes, "boings", birds, etc. Nothing sounds recorded specifically for this game. And, I'm sorry, but we've gone too long without speech samples in one of these games! At least have Pooh shout "Oh bother" when he falls in the water! Overall, they're sounds, music, and a badly interpreted theme. They don't warrant much more explanation.
Gameplay: I expected a console for three-year-olds, and I got gameplay tailored for three-year-olds. ...For the most part. Pooh's Music Corner is barely a game, and more just an activity to see what you can click on in the background until Roo finally grabs the jar, which, given how important exploration is at that age, is just fine for kids. Plus the music they can make and slightly alter is the catchiest in the game, so that's a plus for ANY age! Rabbit's Birthday Surprise is a fun little light-stealth game, where kids can grab carrots, while learning to time their actions correctly or risk consequences. It's no Splinter Cell, but I'd hope NOBODY is pushing a series of that complexity on that age range! Light Tag is a fun hide-and-seek game, where kids can find their favorite characters and chase them around, as kids that age are wont to do. Helping them prepare for a Pitch Black situation is handy too. Butterfly Catch... Happened? I guess kids could look at the pretty colors, but it's easily the weakest "game" on here. Rabbit's Garden is a close second for the most fun on this console, as you're racing to grab vegetables, AND fighting over
Replay Value: This was one of the shortest Plug n Play games I've ever tackled, as you can finish literally everything there is to do in under 15 minutes! After that, there's no major reason to come back, unless you're a three-year-old who never gets tired of these games(or someone with the mind of a three-year-old, like me.) Still, I guess you could come back and look at the beautiful graphics. At the very least, you could leave the jazz band on repeat.
Overall:
It's a game console based on Winnie the Pooh, who, even though he resonates with all ages, is always targeted at very young children. Therefore, expect ANY game featuring Winnie the Pooh to have gameplay meant for three-year-olds, and don't be surprised if there's not much else to offer older players. Still, the graphics are beautiful, the gameplay is varied and doesn't fall on minigame cliches like Checkers, puzzles, flood-fill painting, etc., and the console design alone is worth picking it up! I wish the theme music wasn't so awful, but they almost make up for it with the jazz section in the first game. Plus, there's the race at the end, which I think would take a LONG time to grow stale! If you're a parent with kids who are too young for or who have just started school, and you're a fan of Winnie the Pooh or Disney in general, this is perfectly fine for them as a timekiller. It's not the most educational of games, but it has enough entertainment value to keep them interested. ...Also, please never show them My Friends Tigger and Pooh, and instead find out where they keep the episodes of The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh locked away. And if you find a season set, please send a copy my way! You're NEVER too old for that show!
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