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Review: Snowball RunReviewed By: Kirk Hiner Review Computer: 867MHz G4, 640MB RAM, ATI RADEON 8500, Mac OS X v10.2.6 Review Date: June 1, 2003
When you've been playing and reviewing games as long as I have, you start to notice warning signs. Quite often, they're hidden all over and around a game's packaging, making it quite clear to wary gamers that they should stear away from certain titles. For instance, if the name Sierra is anywhere on a product, it's usually best to just move along quietly to another area of the store...unless the game also has Al Lowe's name on it, that is. Another warning sign is the word "Beachhead." If Beachhead is written on the box, that usually means the game in the box is, in fact, Beachhead, in which case your money would be better spent on some kind of blunt object with which you could hit yourself in the face for a few hours. Some warning signs require you to pick up the box and read them. People like to say you can't judge a book by its cover, but these people are wrong. You can judge a book by its cover; otherwise, what would be the point of having a cover? Why wouldn't all books just be brown like a paper bag? Why do they hire artists to design book covers if you can't judge the book by the cover they create? Why do they praise the book on the back cover if they don't want us to judge the book? It's that praise thing you have to watch out for with computer games. Check to see which aspects of the game they're touting. Pay careful attention to how it's described. If it seems like hyperbole, it is hyperbole, even if you don't know what hyperbole is.
With Snowball Run, I caught the warning signs. Let's take a look:
In fact, the only line that accurately descibes the game is "75-fish packed levels." 75 levels is good, and, if they're packed with fish, all the better. The marketing department must've agreed, as they repeated it in the bulleted highlights, which I'll address now:
What happened to the fish?
You know how you sometimes see those dorky commercials from the American Dental Association or something like that in which they try to get you to wear mouth guards while skateboarding or playing football? They always have lame cartoon characters with shades and mohawks, and they end the commercial explaining that it's cool to wear a mouth guard, and you know that not even second graders aren't going to buy into that junk because the forty-eight-year-old marketing exec who wrote it hasn't known from cool in thirty years. That's the same effect this game achieves by claiming it has cool sound and music.
This is a good thing to have a in a game, but is it really something that should be used as a selling point? If it's a children's game, simple controls should be mandatory. If it's for advanced gamers, they won't care.
Again, this is a selling point? A scoring system? Instead, I suggest this; "Objectives & the Opportunity to Try Again Should You Fail"
Don't even get me started on fake marketing terms such as "fun-tastic." Not funny. Not clever. Never have been. Never will be. The only thing more annoying than "fun-tastic" is calling some kind of Easter special "eggs-ceptional," and that'll become a hanging offense when I become mayor. "But Kirk," you may be saying, "are you always this bitter, or is the game really that bad?" Well, the game's not that bad, but it's not that good, either. It's basically just a rehash of Sega's console game Super Monkey Ball 2, only not nearly as good. Sega at least knew that rolling a ball around obstacle courses to reach a goal within a set amount of time is not enough to give a game staying power, so they added a dozen mini-games. Not so, here. It's just your penguin rolling around, collecting fish, avoid obstacles, and reaching the goal...75 times.
I think what bothered me most about this game, aside from the lack of charm, is that there was no real sense of adventure (but hadn't they claimed a "bold adventure" on the box?). There was nothing to tie the levels together, and the monotonous gameplay wasn't incentive enough to keep me playing. It didn't take long before I completely lost interest in helping this penguin get home. Luckily, the game would sometimes crash on me, so I didn't have to worry about it too much. Do I have anything pleasant to say about the game? Sure. It's colorful. I like colors. Also, after you advance to the next difficulty level, you're given the option of starting at that level the next time you play, thereby saving you from suffering through the levels you've already completed. Oh, and there's this. As Bill Stiteler pointed out to me, the designers were smart enough to realize that, in order for a penguin to make a ball move forward by running on top of it, he'd have to step backwards. I suppose if you're closer to 5 or 85-years-old, you won't be bothered by any of this as much as I was. However, you could pick up games such as Marble Blast Gold or just about anything from the Pangea catalog and not be bothered at all. Trust me, those games are "fun-ceptional!" See what I mean?  [an error occurred while processing this directive]
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Case in point: Snowball Run. Now, I'd read the descriptions of this game well before I obtained my review copy. I knew what I was getting into, but I did it nonetheless. Why? Because I'm a sucker for these simple arcade action games. Call it a byproduct of my wasted youth, but I'd still happily dump countless quarters into Donkey Kong and Tail Gunner machines if there were still Donkey Kong and Tail Gunner machines around. It's also my naïveté. I enter into each game with the blind hope that it's going to be great. This makes me a little more forgiving than some, but it can also make me look foolish.
Okay, the most glaring warning there is the use of three exclamation marks. One is warning enough, three is like being smacked in the face with a Do Not Enter road sign. However, you should've already been steared clear of the game by the "edge of your seat" cliché. First of all, sitting on the edge of your seat can cause back pain, so it's never advised. Secondly, if a phrase is used frequently to describe monster truck rallys, it shouldn't be used to describe a game involving a snowball-riding penguin.
What this always means is that it's fun for kids aged 5 and 85. Everyone in between will find it boring.
Some of the levels are kind of fun, yes, and they do become challenging. A couple are well nigh impossible, but that's no different from Super Monkey Ball 2, in which luck is a bigger factor than skill.