Babble Reviews Games

Karen Murphy

Warning: Birds, Bugs and Beans ($10) is not for the inhibited or the prudish. If you're out of touch with your inner adolescent boy, you probably won't enjoy yourself. However, if you can still find humor in bodily functions, this game is better than a whoopee cushion. The game consists of tossing cards to the center and, based on the card that appears, making appropriate (or, more often, inappropriate) sounds that correspond to the card. If the card shows a bug, you smash it. If it's a bird, you whistle. Or tweet. If it's a bean, well, you know what to do.The game goes quickly and easily dissolves into hilarity, with the more players the merrier (we had three and could easily have used more). My kids love it, so it's definitely a keeper — and I'm looking forward to introducing it to a group of drunken adults. — Karen Murphy

I asked my daughter how to play the Dress-Up Game ($10) and her summary was pretty good: "You have to use the special stickers and spin the spinner and dress the dolly." First one dressed wins! But she didn't mention the game's most compelling feature: it's made of Colorforms ("with pieces that stick like magic")! Everyone loves Colorforms — at least until they get all gummy from juice and covered with cat hair. Okay, so it pains my feminist soul just a little a bit that the dress-up options don't include something like a trial lawyer's briefcase or firefighter's hat. But I love the fact that the dress-up clothing is refreshingly kid-like: no belly shirts or high heels, just a cheeky red beret and some kick-butt cowboy boots. It's also perfect for kids who haven't quite mastered the concept of playing a game — which really is pretty hard, if you think about it; the first time we tried Candyland, my daughter looked at me like I had asked her the square root of forty-five. Now she's nearing four and we've graduated to Go Fish, but she still loves to play "the dolly game." I'll play as long as my dolly gets to wear those boots. — Jennifer V. Hughes

Pretending to fly is awesome. Airplanes are also awesome. So Konami's Wing Island ($40) for Wii should be a perfect videogame: playing the game is as easy as pointing the remote at the screen and watching the bird-piloted airplanes you've selected mirror your real-life movements. Once you start playing, though, it becomes clear that controlling a digital plane is not as fun as simply pretending you're a plane, or even playing with an actual toy one. Wing Island 's world is drab and ugly, and the tasks tedious (you can fly over cows and drop nets on them or slowly fly through a string of balloons). Even the youngest player may question the game's internal logic — why do giant birds need to fly in planes? — John Constantine

"I almost got it!"
"Look, it actually went over the dog!"
"This is Ant Number Five and this is his Mama."

Giggling, laughing, playing with ants: what could be more fun for a five-year-old? My twins' immediate fascination with this fabulously quiet, non-electronic, classic game ($10) had much to do with the cute colorful "ants" and very little to do with their ability to flick the ants into the big blue pants. No worries — this game was a roaring success. For once, the kids' difficulty achieving the actual goal of the game (to get as many of their ants in the pants as possible) didn't result in frustration and tears. Instead, they just morphed the thing into an adventure with the ant family. Ants in the Pants may not have inspired my family's competitive side, but it gave us plenty of adorable home videos. — Rachael Brownell

My kids couldn't wait to play Flea Circus ($15) — after all, it had dozens of little white plastic cats! And weird blue dogs! Sure, the rules of the game seemed a little confusing, but we'd figure it out as we went along.

"Ready to play?" I asked Serena.

"What?" She hadn't been listening; too busy playing with the little cats.

Having begun to read the instructions, I replied, "I need coffee to play this game."

Essentially, you build a flea circus show by stacking cards worth varying numbers of cats and dogs (the circus's "audience"), then vie with your opponents for control of the most audience members. When the audience pool is used up, each player counts their own dogs and cats, and the player who has attracted the biggest audience wins! If there's an actual strategy to playing this simple game, I haven't figured it out. Serena won and was happy, especially since she managed to score more coveted cats than reviled blue dogs. So I suffered with the dogs. (The sacrifices a parent makes!) Serena, clutching her handful of tiny cats, begged to play again; I suggested that we keep the cats and ditch the game.  — Karen Murphy

Board games are great for preschoolers, but being forced to play Candyland repeatedly can make any parent want to start the cocktail hour at noon. One of the first games my kids played, and one that I 'm happy to play with them, is Mystery Garden. Similar to a glorified Twenty Questions, Mystery Garden is played by secretly turning over picture-cards that match elements of the game board. The other players have to guess what's on the card by asking yes-or-no questions like "Is it something red?," "Does it have stripes?" or "Is it an animal?" Eventually, the answers allow the guessers to narrow down the possibilities and guess what's on the card. Whoever finally makes the correct guess gets to keep the card, and whoever has the most cards at the end is the winner. It's a quick game that's great for teaching categorization and observation skills to pre-readers, and it won't make you want to repeatedly knock your head against a wall. — Karen Murphy

Never has a game been more aptly named. Big Trouble, a brighter, noisier version of its 1970s counterpart, would probably be less trouble if it weren't loud as a fog horn and repetitive as a jackhammer. The game, slated for the over-six crowd, involves playing with cards and following the commands of the voice that sounds suspiciously like Queen Latifah (the twins call it "Bubble Lady"). The fun game I remember — the satisfying bubble in the middle, the popping noise as the die rolls around, the thrill of giving "big trouble" to annoying siblings — is somewhat lost in this new racket. Toys louder than squawking crows have long been banned from our house, so perhaps we're the wrong test group for Big Trouble — but when even a talkative five-year-old says it's "hurting my ears," something is amiss.— Rachael Brownell

The kids were right next to me when I unpacked Hide & Seek Safari, and the three of us reacted with a collective "whooooa!" Wonder of wonders, the batteries are included, so we got to work immediately. It's a twist on the classic game of hide and seek: someone hides the animal (ours is a tiger) anywhere in the immediate vicinity, then another person uses the Seeker Wand to find it. A light display on the wand lets you know when you're getting warmer, and when you're right on top of the animal, the wand will make a thoroughly obnoxious noise. (Dear R&R Games: my kids love this toy and so do I, but if you could make the Seeker Wand slightly less ear-puncturing, I would be eternally grateful. Love, Patti.) Traditional hide and seek has always been a family favorite, but we're pressed for space and we've run out of creative places to hide. Hide & Seek Safari's animals can go where kids and parents can't fit, and it's opened up new dimensions for us, indoors and out. - Patti Nichols

A friend's pre-adolescent son was staying with us for a week, and we needed some games with which to lure him from his Pokemon DS. Ransacking Babble's review box, I found Cosmic Catch ($25) and Electronic Battleship Advanced Mission ($40).

"This is going to be awesome," Jacob said as we worked to install the AAA batteries into the purple Nerf ball (this took three people two screwdrivers and twenty minutes). I agreed, it seemed pretty awesome: the ball talks, Simon Says-style, and recognizes each player by bands worn around the hand. The ball will play four games with you, shouting orders like "Blue!" when you are to throw it to the person with the blue band. And it makes an exploding noise if you screw up. It was fun for about fifteen minutes. We took it out to try it again the second day and it didn't work. At all. It had been reduced overnight to nothing but a heavy Nerf ball. But we didn't mourn long, because we had . . .

Yowza. I always loved the old school version, but this is a million times swanker. You have to program in your coordinates, so there's no cheating. Plus, you can do "sonar sweeps," which tell you if one of your opponent's ships is within a nine-peg radius. And there are all kinds of special weapons and advanced versions — so many that even in three evenings of playing, we still hadn't figured them all out — which occasionally led to some real frustration on all our parts. But younger kids can enjoy the basic level, which is just the original version plus a satisfying electronic "BOOM!" and red light when you hit something. — Ada Calhoun

Navigating the endless game and product tie-ins associated with your kid's favorite TV show could make any parent cynical. But sometimes, those transparently commercial tie-ins result in something great. Disney's Kim Possible is a delightful and funny cartoon about a teenage girl who also happens to be an accomplished super spy, and this video game adaptation is every bit as well-made and fun as the show. While it may not be particularly educational, it is a challenging but forgiving platformer (meaning a game based on jumping and reflex challenges — think Super Mario Brothers) that lets fans of the show guide Kim, and her arch-nemesis Shego, through a series of levels that perfectly mimic the broad-lined pop art of the show. It's simple enough for a five-year-old player, but entertaining enough that parents won't mind picking up that second controller.  —John Constantine

Buckaroo ("the saddle-stacking game with the moody mule") is less a game than an object of familial fascination for all ages. Like its predecessor, Operation, Buckaroo requires some hand-eye coordination and patience; players must carefully place various items on the pack mule, failing which the whole thing goes kerplow! as the mule's spring-loaded legs scatter everything wildly. Like most games for young children, the stated object (to place as many items on the mule without triggering a wild kick) is sublimated to the real fun of the thing (to see how far the crazy mule's kick will send the colorful hat, rope, lamp and camp items). You'll be transfixed as your child reaches out that chubby hand to place the hat on the mule, her eyes growing wide as she slowly realizes the kick is coming, and then falls over in gales of laughter as all the pieces fly. — Rachael Brownell

This version of the classic game Boggle is aimed at preschoolers, and definitely not much use to most kids beyond kindergarten or so. But for the pre-reading set, it's solid gold: a deck of cards with a picture and a three- or four-letter word, six cubes with letters on each side and a plastic tray with a cover that flips up to hide the word. The instructions offer a few different ways your child can play, but the beauty of Boggle Jr. is that you can play it pretty much any way you please, and if you're playing with kids of different abilities, they can each play differently all at once. It's not really a game where anyone wins, and it seems to end when you feel like stopping. My two-year-old is just learning to recognize letters and chose the simplest method of matching the letter cubes to the word on the card, while my four-year-old's approach was to sound out the word and then hide it with the flip-up cover and really try to spell it out. It lends itself beautifully to solitaire, too: one day while I was working, the four-year-old brought Boggle Jr. up to the table and started setting it up next to me. "Honey, I'm sorry, I can't play with you right now." "Oh, that's okay, Mama," she assured me, "I don't want to play. I just want to practice." — Patti Nichols

Although my fourth grader and I have passed several enjoyable hours playing Bananagrams, I have to admit that, for me, the real fun lies in imagining the genesis of this frumpy, educationally sound product. (My frontrunner involves a harried stay-at-home mother, a yellow fanny pack and a Scrabble box that's been stepped on so many times that it's no longer functional.) In an age of 80-dollar Game Boys and other high-tech battery-eaters, Banangrams' old-fashioned pleasures come as a relief — even if, pouch aside, the banana connection is tenuous to the point of feeling forced. (The first player to use all his/her letters says "BANANAS!" and is the winner.) It's highly portable, can be played in various ways and favors any adult whose child opponent attends a progressive school where "invented spelling" is an essential component of the literacy platform. I've always liked games that I can win, as does my six-year-old son, who sidesteps the official rules by flinging handfuls of tiles at unseen aliens. At least we no longer have to worry that he'll put one in his mouth and swallow it. — Ayun Halliday

I remember sitting around my family's old wooden table in the late '70s playing Sorry, waiting for the inevitable bumping of my pieces back to the beginning. Sorry is, after all, "The Game of Sweet Revenge," so it remains a perfectly acceptable outlet for sibling rivalry. The object of Sorry is to be the first player to achieve the "safety zone" and bring all the pieces home. Even my five-year-old twins can appreciate this goal, though the game is slated for the 6+ crowd. The pieces are satisfyingly bright-colored plastic, with wide bases and bulbous tops that are fun to fiddle with between turns. If your family is anything like mine, playing a game that requires you to say "sorry" is always a good idea. According to the twins, the best part is "making the pieces kiss," which proves that Sorry! really is for any age. — Rachael Brownell

Not to say that this card game will save your sanity on vacation, but tossing it in your carry-on couldn't hurt. Each card has a whimsical illustration and a description of an easy-to-spot thing in the airport or on the plane (i.e., a plane taking off, a pay phone, plaid luggage). Bonus cards have challenges, like getting a person to smile at you. Technically, you're supposed to divvy up the cards, set a time limit, and the person with the most points wins the game — but honestly, who cares? Kids have way too much fun just racing to complete each challenge. And it's even better if grown-ups play along. I guarantee everyone sitting around reading Dean Koontz will be jealous. — J.L. Scott

Finally, a game that truly appeals to the wide range of preschool abilities! Cariboo is just complicated enough to keep older children and parents on their toes, and simple enough that my 2-and-half-year-old can get through it with minimal guidance. The premise is cleverly elaborate in a way that creative little minds will appreciate: drawn cards correspond to trap doors, which open with a key. The doors reveal whether the player has found a ball, which is then dropped down a chute. When all the balls are accounted for, a treasure chest springs open to reveal what my children call "The Fabulous Jewel." While my little one needs some help with the order of play, my 4-year-old revels in the game's complexity. Both of them get so caught up in the building anticipation that, no matter who "finds" the treasure, we all feel like winners. The booster pack of advanced cards included with Cariboo means it'll be a game night fixture for years to come. — Patti Nichols

Wallamoppi is an attractively packaged board game that is stored in a wooden box, which instantly makes it cooler than your ratty Jenga pieces from college. The concept of this game is similar: players stack round wooden disks before the marble hits the bottom of the game board. This is a great one to play with kids — even if they're too young to get the nuances of the game, they'll love to watch the discs go flying when the tower inevitably topples, or they'll just have a blast using the wooden discs to create their own buildings. — JL Scott

Growing up with two way-older brothers, I know how much it sucks to want to play a game and have no one to play with. My younger self would have been really excited about these one-player Spiderman logic games – provided she could make it past the tricky instructions. Each of the games has a plastic grid, where you have to get Spidey from one part of the game board to another. With the first one, Spiderman is magnetic and attaches to plastic webs between buildings. In the other, he jumps from plastic crate to crate (disclaimer: you will lose the plastic crates sooner rather than later). A card illustrates how to set up each game board, and a key in the back illustrates how to solve each game. The cards range from easy to hard, and once the initial directions and explanations are figured out, kids can be pretty independent with them, or they can just make up their own games with the moveable plastic pieces. Either choice encourages creativity and independent thinking, and not needing to follow the rules is a huge advantage of playing by yourself. – JL Scott

Here's how Rayman Raving Rabbids begins: our hero, Rayman, is having a picnic with a group of misshapen blue creatures called Globoxes, when a group of evil bunny rabbits bursts out of the ground screaming gibberish. The rabbits kidnap Rayman and then force him to compete in bizarre challenges in their coliseum. When he succeeds, they give him a plunger. Surreal? Certainly. Entertaining and hilarious? You betcha. The game, played alone or with a group of up to four people, is based around completing the rabbits' challenges — there are seventy in all, ranging from a cow toss to a drawing competition. This is a perfect game for a family: competitive but lighthearted enough to keep everything civil, cartoony enough for the very young, and bizarre enough for all but the most humorless adults. — John Constantine

As a boisterous three-year-old, my favorite game in the world was something I coined Cob-a-dee . The game was simple; you take every toy that happens to be nearby, be it stuffed animal or metal police car, and throw it down the basement stairs screaming “COBADEE!” My hazy recollections of this still make me smile and help illustrate a basic truth about childhood: making a mess is awesome. Trashing a room, for its own sake or to carry out some whim of the imagination, is some of the best fun you can have under the age of six, consequences be damned. Elebits is the clean and safe twenty-first-century version of Cob-a-dee.

In the game world, the teensy little critters named Elebits, which power all electronic devices, have escaped. As the child of the two foremost Elebit researchers on the planet, it's your job to round them up, but they're crafty little beasts and tend to hide everywhere. Here's where the game gets fun. Using the Wii's controller like a laser pointer, you can pick up anything you see in your charmingly domestic environment and toss it about, zapping Elebits where you find them. Open a closet and tear everything off the shelves, shaking boxes and smashing vases, or go into your bedroom and topple a shelf, spilling toys and books all over the floor in the process. As the game goes on, your pointer gets more and more powerful, and what you can manipulate grows in tandem. Eventually, you're picking up and tossing around houses, literally trashing the whole neighborhood. Your kid will love making the mess; you'll love not cleaning it up. — John Constantine

Since becoming hooked on Loco Roco, I have learned that there are two types of people: those who just get with it and play, and those who ask, "But how do you win?" This second group is missing the point. In Loco Roco, you are a small yellow blob who bounces through various cartoonish worlds eating fruit, which scores you points and makes you a much bigger yellow blob. That's pretty much it, apart from avoiding "mojas" — little black clouds with angry faces. You bounce, you eat fruit, you find hidden worlds, all to the sweet tunes of happy-happy nonsense pop. If that's not winning, I don't know what is. — Sarah Sundberg

Chances are you've guided a little metal ball through a wooden labyrinth at least once. There's a timeless appeal to those infuriating contraptions; all they require is patience and gross motor function. Mercury Meltdown for the Sony PSP is a software package of 160 digital labyrinths, gussied up in psychedelic colors, a Dr. Seussian science motif, a bizarre jazz soundtrack and a set of obtuse logic puzzles. Hand this game to a puzzle-loving seven-year-old for a long car trip. Once she reaches those vicious advanced puzzles, you'll find out if she knows any four-letter words. — John Constantine

Though Kameo was one of the Xbox 360's launch titles, it's still one of the platform's best games for moderately skilled kids: a smart game that's so versatile even a kid who might normally beat a game in a few hours can enjoy it for dozens of hours. On the surface, it's a standard fantasy game: Princess Kameo is called to save her kingdom by retrieving five magical elements so that a mean-looking green guy doesn't destroy her fairy-filled planet. But the gimmick here is that Kameo must become ten different monsters, summoning their powers at the right moments along the way. She becomes an Yeti-looking dude, a swamp thing, a powerful red dragon, and a dangerous pile of exploding rocks, for starters. The game introduces each monster gradually, so the entire game becomes a process of learning and adapting. Just when you think you've mastered the bad guys by blasting them with fire, the game forces you to become a kind of slimy amoebic blob with elastic tendrils. The game is rated "T" for Teen due to cartoonish violence and the complicated skill-set the game requires, but my ten-year-old test subject (a moderately experienced gamer) mastered and loved it. The game physics are so responsive and creative (especially compared to the endless iterations of sports games) that I began playing it obsessively, and eventually saved the whole fairy kingdom. — Logan Hill

Culinary arts for the under-ten set is a mine field of sticky confections and inedible dough: it's all fun and games putting together a spaghetti dinner made of green Play-Doh but it doesn't really look that appetizing, does it? Thankfully we live in a glorious digital age and child chefs need no longer be shackled by the limitations of the plastic kitchen tools of old. They can prep all kinds of delicacies in Cooking Mama, a sweet little game for the Nintendo DS that has players making everything from omelets to pork curry, with no clean-up necessary.

Mama, the patient cartoon chef who instructs players on how to make the game's selection of dishes, is a lot like what you'd imagine Rachael Ray to be like off screen; beaming a smile at you when you perform well and all freaky, frightening rage when you fail (seriously, Mama's eyes are replaced with fire.) The cooking process is simple: each recipe is comprised of four or five timed preparation tasks like chopping vegetables, rolling dough, or flipping steaks on a grill using the DS's touchscreen and stylus to do the job.

The difficulty level can ramp up pretty quickly, especially when you're trying to delicately grill fish or make sure that your octopus balls don't over-fry. Speaking of fried octopus balls, an unexpected side effect of Cooking Mama is exposure to some unusual cuisine. The game is Japanese in origin and its Americanization doesn't go beyond language translation. So some distinctly Asian cuisine makes up half the menu alongside familiar international favorites like pizza. So an added bonus of the game is that the next time you go to a Japanese restaurant, your kid can order for you. — John Constantine

"Little monkey. Big fun." That was the ingenious marketing slogan behind the original Super Monkey Ball game, a PS2 game that imprisoned cute monkeys in tiny gerbil-like bubbles and set them spinning through a technicolor gauntlet of fantastical mazes. It was a puzzle game, pure and simple: roll a ball from a start-point to an end-point, but all good games are a kind of bizarre conceptual art too: Why not a marble (like Marble Madness)? Who came up with the idea to put a monkey inside a ball, anyway? Why not a dog? Or a lizard? But, yes, monkey seems just right, especially that cute little one wearing a diaper. If you go too fast, your monkey falls tail over teakettle inside his little monkey ball. Go too slow and you run out of time. Fall off a maze (which are always suspended somewhere in the sky) and you plummet to your cutesy death. Super Monkey Ball 2 expanded the number of mazes into Las-Vegas-meets-putt-putt-course-in-outer-space absurdity, and the latest sequel, Super Monkey Ball Adventure, takes the addictive set-up and expands it into a Mario-like universe. The controls are still so simple anyone can start playing in minutes, but the levels in Adventure can be painfully complex — so stick with the original monkeys and their original balls. After all, the absurd simplicity of Monkey Ball (which sounds dirtier every time you say it) is what separates this franchise from its overblown competitors: Little idea. Big fun! — Logan Hill

Most video games for girls under ten tend to revolve around playing house or blank consumerism. But Scurge is an old-school shoot-em-up with colorful 2D graphics and a savvy space bounty hunter named Jenosa as its star. Most of the gameplay is a simple exercise in hand-eye coordination as Jenosa switches between weapons and navigates the labs. Players guide Jenosa around a dilapidated research facility that's been infested with an alien creature, a parasitic entity that can transform itself into a number of organic and mechanical baddies. Bratz this is not. — John Constantine

Everyone raves about online gameplay these days, but, ultimately, it's still a bit lonely: Just you in your living room alone with your controller. It's easy to forget that one of the new platforms' greatest advances is the opportunity to play party games. Eight controllers provide the opportunity to taunt seven competitors in person. For the Xbox, Fuzion Frenzy is simple enough and addictive enough for mom, dad, kids and maybe even grandma (ours plays, but not well, so we taunt her too). The game itself is a neon mash-up of Schwarzenegger's The Running Man, Tron, Dance Dance Revolution, and the Olympics. Set in a futuristic casino-like world where color-coded competitors battle for points and prizes, it's a tournament of minigames that you'll instantly recognize: boat and car-racing, twists on capture the flag, even tag. (One of my favorites allows you to splat bugs to protect giant burgers). The controls are dead simple: never more than a joystick and a button or two. And the graphics are streamlined and bright enough that you can tell what you're doing even when the screen is split into quarters (most new games are too complicated to be playable in split-screen). If you love those retro editions of old arcade games like Dig-Dug and Pac-Man because you and your kids can both figure them out you'll appreciate this one too. — Logan Hill

Here's everything you need to know about the board game Jumpin' Monkeys: it involves shooting plastic monkeys into a tree with a catapult. If this sounds like your idea of fun, then you'll definitely want a copy. If you're worried about monkeys flying all over the room (which they will), or catapults being difficult to aim (which they are), then you may want to pass. We understand that you have enough chaos in your life without adding monkeys and catapults. But if you feel like embracing that chaos, Jumpin' Monkeys is a lot of fun for kids five and up — and, after the kids' bedtime, for drunken adults. — Gwynne Watkins