N-Philes

Camp Lazlo: Leaky Lake Games

Posted December 14th 2006 by Terry Harjanto.

What do you get when you mix a Brazilian spider monkey, an Indian elephant, and an albino pygmy rhino? On TV, you get Cartoon Network's Camp Lazlo, a kids animated series starring Bean Scouts Lazlo, Raj, and Clam. Recently, the trio and Camp Kidney itself made the jump between mediums into video games but something was clearly lost during the transition. Landing on the Game Boy Advance, Camp Lazlo: Leaky Lake Games is a camp that all kids will want to avoid.

The Leaky Lake Games are about to start and Scoutmaster Lumpus needs to choose a cabin team to represent Camp Kidney against the Squirrel Scouts of Acorn Flats. In this game you control the three aforementioned mates of Jelly Bean cabin. You'll perform in a variety of mini-games and item fetching quests in a bid to impress Scoutmaster Lumpus enough so that he'll choose you.

But considering how boring the game is overall, you won't care whether or not you're successful. Realizing that Camp Kidney isn't what it's all cracked up to be starts with the first mini-game called Hot Lava. Lazlo the Brazilian spider monkey uses his imagination to pretend that the floor is molten lava that will kill him if he touches it. In an exercise that, I suppose, is meant to hone Lazlo's jumping skills, you have to move him from one end of the cabin to the other by jumping from one piece of furniture to the other.

This event might have been fun if the game developers hadn't broken one of the key rules of making mini-games: don't let them last long enough to get boring. You land on the last piece of furniture on the other end of the cabin. But nothing happens. Instead, you see the clock in the top right corner of the screen and the counter in the lower right corner. This mini-game gives you five minutes to jump back and forth between the opposite sides of the cabin a total of ten times.

Not only are the mini-games artificially lengthened, but they're also simply poorly designed. Take for example the Swim Trunk event. The instruction screen tells you that the D-pad is used for swimming around and the A button is used to dive under bridges. Next thing you know, Raj the Indian elephant is dumped into Leaky Lake. You quickly discover it's not so much a lake as it is a maze of rivers. What that instruction screen also didn't tell you is that you have five minutes to collect ten flags scattered around in this watery labyrinth before racing your way to the finishing line in some obscure corner of the "lake". Considering how all the trees, rocks, and bridges that could have acted as landmarks all look the same, it took many tries before I manage to complete this event. Out of sheer frustration, I took out pen and paper to map out the maze and the locations of the flags.

Even the mini-games that had the potential to be fun are ruined by poor design decisions. Team Teeter has you controlling Clam the albino pygmy rhino and a fellow Bean Scout in a teeter totter competition. You're given a whole minute to see how many times you can go up and down on the teeter totter. For the first twenty seconds, it's actually fun to see how fast you can go against the opposing team. But because of the minute long limit, you stop trying to go as fast as possible around the half a minute mark since the AI of the opposing team moves so slowly even a child will be able to keep a steady lead on them.

In between mini-games you explore the camp and go on a series of item fetching quests in preparation for the next mini-game event. These fetch quests are even more boring and tedious than the mini-games because just about everybody you talk to is only willing to give you the item you need in exchange for an item they want you to find. The kinds of items that are just haphazardly strewn around the camp is quite surprising. Among trees and bushes, you'll find a variety of things that include sleeping bags, medical kits, and coffee mugs. The game provides you with a compass that points towards these items, but it's still hard to imagine that anybody – especially the younger audience this game is geared for – would have the patience to endure the tedious gameplay.

Even though the mini-games and item fetching are boring, they're thankfully not hampered by the responsive and functional controls. But other than the controls there's little else in this game to make up for the poor gameplay.

The overall camping experience is simply bland. The camp is filled with rocks, bushes, and trees that all look the same. The dirt pathways and grassy areas are single-toned and plain looking. The character sprites have been nicely reproduced from their TV counterparts, but the animation is sparse and all of the characters have a mechanical movement to them due to quickly repeating frames.

The sound has gone through the same treatment. Sound effects are sparse in just about every area. There's some variety to the music according to camp location and character, but all of the musical tracks are short, repetitive, and quickly become annoying. I could only stand one of the musical scores, but even Clam's theme in the game can't compare to the music within the TV show itself.

This game is short and even though you can replay any of the previously competed mini-games there's no incentive to do so. Not a lot was done to polish the game either. The wandering camp characters all share one dialog script and say the same "I'm busy right now" or "I need clean underwear" phrases over and over again. The collision detection is also so poorly done that you'll spend a surprising amount of time trying to get through cabin doors.

Flatline - Ranks below "fat camp" on the Richter scale of fun.

Mini-games and item fetching has been done before and in much better ways. Mixing such boring and tired game mechanics with the Camp Lazlo TV show doesn't do anything to make the game feel fresh or unique. Even worse, it's a blotch on the reputation of Camp Lazlo since the game isn't anywhere as silly or fun as the show.

Posted in: Reviews

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