NES #43: The Great Waldo Search

This should be an interesting one. I can almost guarantee that it will take me longer to write this article than it took me to beat this game on the hardest setting. Well I guess using the word "hardest" is actually incorrect seeing as there are only two settings. Am I correcting my own grammar already? That's never a good sign when I start padding these things in the first paragraph. I guess I will talk about the game now.

I have a feeling that if I had known about this game in 1992 I would've been all over it. That was when I was reading (or looking at) the Waldo books, watching the Waldo tv show, and eating the Waldo pasta. I could probably re-watch the cartoon and talk about how much it sucks now, but I'm not going to destroy my entire childhood just yet. This was a much more innocent time, and I would not have been scared off by the THQ logo on the front. If I had played it in 1992 instead of 2014 would I have enjoyed it, or would it have been one of those crushing moments when I first started to realize that people only cared about making money and not making kids happy? It's hard to say.

The concept for this one is actually a somewhat sound one. The fact that the images are not stuck for all eternity on a piece of paper means that Waldo can actually be in a different place each time you play. It is also not a chore to play. Sure you're just moving a cursor around looking for things, but it controls well and the timer does give it some excitement. So far the game is actually sounding pretty good in spite of all the bad reviews. Is this one of those cases where online reviewers give it a hard time simply because it is based on a known character and funnier to insult than to praise? Nope.

The fatal flaw with this game is that it is just too easy. There are only five levels and none of them are all that big. The clock doesn't last all that long, but there are plenty of extra ones to pick up even on the harder setting. I turned this game on for the first time and was done with it in about twenty minutes. Now I know that I am an adult now, but this game does not seem like it would be much harder for kids. The skill of looking for things and pushing a button is something that develops rather early in children. Now you can go for the high score, but I don't see there being that much of a difference in score from round to round. It is set up to where it should be around 50-60 thousand every time. Of course I could just suck, but I'm not even sure if that is possible with this game.

So in the end this is one of those games that brings out the cynic in people. This is a quickly thrown together game that was meant to trick kids into making their parents spend money. They will quickly be done with it and have to spend more money on another wonderful game by THQ. I wouldn't have realized this as a child. I would have lived in wonderful ignorance where everything was fun and that's all that mattered. Now I am grown and I know that most people are just out to get me, but at least I know what to watch out for. I'm not sure which is worse.