Buzz Junior: Dino Den review (PS2)

If you were designing a game for kids, what would be the first thing you would ensure? Well of course, it has to be fun. Probably with vibrant colours, inviting and easy to learn for multiple players and perhaps with a beatable AI on the standard difficulty. Well… Dino Den has vibrant colours.

Let’s be fair to the thing. The game starts and assuming you’ve got your buzzers plugged in all will run smoothly. An entertaining intro (remember the audience) starts and you’ll be introduced to your characters, the dinosaurs you’ll be controlling. Thrust into the main menu you’ll be able to play a Multiplayer game, a Team game or just Practice. Despite the name, you can play the games on your own, but since there are always four dinos in each game, your rosta will be filled by AI players of adjustable difficulty.

Lots of games

Your standard Multiplayer mode lets you choose the length of game and then will choose from a random selection of 25 games to fill the plate. These vary from bouncing on a larger dinosaur’s belly, pressing the right coloured button when you land to bounce higher and therefore obviously gain more points to using your buzzer to let go from spinning around a series of poles, trying to aim yourself correctly to climb the poles to the top. It’s all very gimmicky, but you can see it could entertain players quite well.

Then there’s the game where you have to hit the coloured button before all of your opponents to grab a steak (and therefore points). The one recurring problem with all of this is that anyone that knows the order of colours on a standard buzzer is at a massive advantage, not having to look down to see what they are pushing. You can work around it by noting the order of the coloured dinosaurs on the screen for the most part, but for kids, this adds easily to the frustration of anyone but the host that probably owns the game.

Blue and Orange and Green and Yellow

Then there’s the choice of colours. Understandable considering the buzzers already having them printed on them, but for most of the games it remains tricky to instantly tell the difference between the yellow and orange coloured ‘items’; a problem when quick fingers are the biggest currency in the winning shop. Yes, the games are varied and crazy, but while some show creative flair, there are those that seem to be the simplest dullest things that the team could think of to fill out the ‘25’ games rosta.

One has you riding on the back of a dinosaur (great – unless the background decides not to load) while avoiding oncoming branches (brilliant), sometimes ducking below them and sometimes jumping over them (nice) by… pressing the buzzer (oh). You simply press the buzzer and your dino will either jump or duck, which requires timing skill, but unfortunately quite a bit of luck too, and when it’s luck involved you just know the AI is going to cheat.

Brash claim!

Okay, it’s not as if they really cheat, but ultimately it comes completely down to your otherwise friendly PS2 whether or not your opponents will pass or fail each obstacle (and this isn’t just in the dinosaur riding game). Indeed, there are many games (especially in the team game) where it comes down to passing or failing a challenge rather than doing better than other people, and even on the standard difficulty the other team will pass every time, leaving you the ‘challenge’ of performing perfectly or falling behind, without a chance to beat them.

The team games give you the choice of who is in which team, and you go head to head on a point scoring fiasco over a number of the 10 specially designed team games. When my girlfriend (sorry I made you play this, hun) and I decided to battle the opponents we were happily in the lead until about half way, when a single mistake took us back to even, and for the remaining three games, our opponents did not perform anything other than perfectly. It was impossible for us to beat them, merely hoping for a draw.

Eggs win you the match

The scoring system seems needlessly complicated in the Team mode, too. While you’ll need a full team of humans to play, you work in collaboration to try and beat the other team, or simply not fail, but when it comes down to scoring everything the winning team gets four eggs while the losing team is awarded three. Essentially it’s a point to nothing, spiced up perhaps to make the team of ‘loser kids’ not feel like they’d lost everything when they find themselves with 15 points to 20 in a 5 game match. It annoyed me, however for its pointlessness.

Still, with the frustration of computer players pumping up the difficulty by the random selection sometimes making them undefeatable the game does have some draw as a four player game, but you’ll definitely need to get four players to take part to ensure the game remains relatively fair (ignoring anyone that knows the order of colours on the controller, thereby not having to look down every press).

Buzz Junior: Dino Den annoyed the hell out of my girlfriend and I, but ultimately we have to remember that it is not aimed at our age (maybe mental age?) but at young children that want a little distraction at a birthday party. With the game populated by ‘real’ people, it will entertain, especially through the wide selection of games but make sure you invite enough kids, because if you have to play to fill in the numbers and an AI dinosaur beats everyone it doesn’t fill the room with much pleasure.