Robyn Can’t Jump

I’m going through a teaching certification course at the moment, and my gaming time has been almost entirely swallowed up by required-reading time. Also, I am lazy. So that’s why it’s been like two months since I wrote a post here. My bad!

I’d like to jump back in (haha, see what I did there?) with a post about a really good game but, alas, the game I’ve played most recently is Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix for the Wii. And it is not good.

I was attracted to the title by the promise of being able to use the wiimote as a wand. How cool is that? Very cool, I thought. So when I saw a used copy of HPatOotPVGfW (as it shall henceforth be known – pronounce it as huhpatootpuvgufew!) on sale, I snapped it up.

“I really like this one,” the dude behind the counter told me, “but a lot of people think it’s too hard.”

“Hard like how?” I queried, with stunningly good grammar and clarity. “Like, hard to use the wiimote?”

The salesdude nodded. “Some of the spells take these, like, really precise movements.”

“I’ve been playing Elebits a lot,” I said. “So… I dunno. I think I can cope.”

“Oh, yeah, if you’ve been playing Elebits, no problem!”

Thus reassured, I took HPatOotPVGfW home and popped it in the Wii. And I can tell you, the spells do take, like, really precise movements. But that is not the main problem with the game. The main problem with the game is that it is so boring that I couldn’t force myself to go beyond a first (and totally unexciting) practice duel with Draco Malfoy. Possibly, it all gets much more interesting once you get past the tutorial, spell-learning mode. But I just can’t bring myself to care enough to try, even for the noble purpose of discovering how gender is treated in the game.

The other rather unimpressive thing about the game is that everyone in it is basically a jerk. I like a good snark as much as the next person, but listening to all of the characters casually insulting each other with every line of dialogue got old fast. Though it did provide my husband, our friend Heather and me with some entertainment for several weeks thereafter.

“Geez,” we’d say, “[fill in the blank!] is such an asshole. S/he should attend Hogwarts!”

And then we’d collapse into fits of giggles.

And that was the sum total of the entertainment that HPatOotPVGfW provided.

Suggest a more entertaining game to me (or tell me how wrong I am about HPatOotPVGfW) here.

Oh, gosh. I just realized how long it’s been since I wrote a game up for the ol’ jumpblog, here. The reason for that, of course, is that I’ve been so super-busy that a) I’ve been playing fewer games and b) I haven’t had much time to think or write about them. So I think I’ll do this review in handy-dandy bullet point format!

Okay, here goes. MySims, for the Nintendo DS, a game in which you try to bring a mostly-abandoned small town back to life by making people happy – mostly by giving them cake:

Pros:

• ZOMG, this game is so cute! And if anyone is thinking something along the lines of, “oh, of course you’d care about that, you girl,” first of all – what the hell are you doing reading this blog? You are definitely in the wrong place. And second, everyone who has seen this game (including manly dudes of my acquaintance) has immediately uttered some variation of the “ZOMG so cute!” reaction.
• The avatars are pretty dang customizable, which is awesome.
• Gameplay is easy to master (with the exception of a few of the minigames), and not at all stressful for a beginner (as in, no one shoots at you, and you can try again as often as you like).
• Minigames! I love minigames!
• No jumping.

Cons:

• It’s possible to create a really androgynous-looking avatar, and several of the NPCs you bump into in-game look like they’re engaging in some gender role transgression. Neat! However, all of the dialogue that deals with gender or sexuality in any way (which is pretty minimal, what with this being an “E for Everyone” game) is heteronormative.
• Occasionally it’s really hard to figure out how to progress. I’ve been trying to please a fashion-conscious resident of my little Sim town (it’s called ROBYNTOWN, because I wasn’t bright enough to figure out how to turn off the caps lock when naming it) by wearing appropriate outfits for each location in the area for ages. But there’s no indication of what’s appropriate. I’m supposed to wear a “wilder” color for the fashion show in the forest. I’ve tried bright yellow – not it. Green? Nope. Flowered prints? No dice. Camouflage! No! What does “wilder” even mean?
• Okay, I like minigames, but even I can get to a point where I’ve just done too much fishing. Enough with the fishing! How many kinds of fish are there?!
• Also, I still look like a dork when I have to blow into the microphone in public in order to play a game. There is no way to do that subtly, even with a headset on.

Conclusion: the game is adorable, fun, easy for new players to get started with, and not stressful. Avatar customization is quite good, but the gender stuff in-game could have been more interesting. If you like minigames a lot and don’t mind trying a lot of different approaches to a problem with no clear direction about what to do, definitely check it out. If you’re not excited by the idea of endlessly fishing or trying on outfit after outfit to impress a Sim who’s been wearing the same pink dress for weeks, you should give this title a miss.

Make your own points here.

Jimmy and I went to the game store last week to sell some of our less-awesome games and pick up some new ones. I wanted to get another princess-themed game for my DS (I think I’ve found a favorite genre, in a weird sort of way), but they didn’t have any used, and Jimmy talked me into getting Elebits for the Wii – which was cheaper and would probably have a longer play time – instead.

So. The first thing to know about Elebits is that it is really, really weird. The purpose of the main game is, essentially, to zap tiny electricity-generating creatures called Elebits in an effort to restore power to your home and town. There’s a lot more to the frame story than that, but the important thing is that in order to get all the Elebits you have to totally ransack every room in the house, flinging furniture about and destroying fragile objects with wild abandon.

If you’re a fan of virtual destruction, this game is for you.

In some levels, you have to avoid making too much noise, or breaking too many objects, which kind’ve puts a damper on the fun. But usually it’s totally okay to pick up a shelf full of delicate curios and shake the hell out of it. Also, uprooting carrots, ornamental bushes and fire hydrants is good.

The best part of the game from my perspective is that there’s no jumping whatsoever. Unfortunately, the Elebits do sometimes shoot you with toy tanks (which, again, weird), and giant Elebits will throw stuff at you until you beat them with fences or park benches or whatever and smash them into smaller, more zappable components. All of the Elebits, and the locations they inhabit, are colorful and visually very appealing. Pleasant but unobtrusive background music and lots of sound effects enhance the gameplay.

Probably the thing that I find most frustrating from a gameplay perspective is that every level is timed. For someone who occasionally has a hard time navigating even with a Wiimote and attached Nunchuk (yep, I can get stuck in a corner using any console!), getting through a level within a set time limit can go beyond “challenging” into the territory of “annoyingly difficult.” I think an “easy” setting with longer timers or no timer at all would have been a nice addition to the game.

As it is, I’ve had to try most levels at least twice (and for a few, I’ve finally broken down and asked Jameson to try to beat them for me). But I’m still playing, because Elebits is really fun.

There are other gameplay modes – you can make your own levels, or play multiplayer minigames – which also seem fun, but which I haven’t explored too much yet. I’ve been playing pretty steadily all week, but still haven’t completed the main story arc. I guess Jimmy was right when he predicted that there’d be many hours of potential play time in Elebits.

I find that I’m taking my time a little bit more with this title than I have with super-fun games I’ve played on the DS or the Xbox 360. I think there are two factors involved. One is that the Wiimote is physically a little more demanding than the DS’s stylus or the controller for the 360. My arms get tired after a while. The other is that the kind of motion required to get through a level in Elebits means that the camera pans and joggles a lot, and I’m prone to motion sickness. After half an hour or so I have to take a break, for fear that I’ll be ill. I find it particularly uncomfortable to watch Jameson play – being in control of the motion myself makes it a little less jarring. Other potential players who have a tendency towards motion sickness might want to try this title out before buying it.

Gender isn’t much of an issue in Elebits, since most of the “characters” are little electricity monsters. The main character and player’s avatar, Kai, is identified as a boy in the frame narrative and manual, which I think is kind’ve a shame. Kai’s character design is very androgynous, and I think it would be nice if players could imagine that Kai is a girl or a boy, depending on their own preferences. Both of Kai’s parents are scientists who study Elebits, which is cool, but the advanced technology found around the home seems to always be identified as belonging to Kai’s father. Does his mother not have a secret lab? I’m hoping I’ll stumble across more of her influence in later levels.

Elebits is, in the end, a really fun game that’s not too hard to play and has lots of appeal. Gender isn’t handled as well as it could be, but it’s not nearly as bad as it could be, either. I think this is a good title for the newbie gamer – unless said newbie gamer has a big problem with motion sickness. Or, like, a phobia involving electricity monsters.

Talk about how much fun it is to break virtual stuff in search of monsters to zap here.

When the thrill of pretend-bowling on the Wii started to pale a bit, I turned my attention to finding another game that would be fun for a group of friends to enjoy together. I was attracted to Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz because the back of the box advertises “50 exciting Party Games.” If Wii Sports was fun and novel for a month or so, surely 50 games would entertain for even longer!

Well, no.

One of the things that makes the Wii appealing to me – and to many, many of the console’s other users – is that it’s generally very newbie-friendly. Using the wiimote is much more intuitive than using a more standard console controller, and many of the titles developed for the Wii are designed to appeal to inexperienced gamers.

Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, with its bright, cartoony characters, certainly looks friendly – but I can’t play it at all. In the main game, you choose a monkey-in-a-ball avatar, and then try to navigate through maze-like levels, collecting bananas and avoiding falls, by tilting and rocking and generally flailing the wiimote.

I have never managed to get past the first level.

I’ve seen young kids play this game, and my husband seems to be able to do it a little, but it’s just way too fast for me. And too frustrating. Falling off the edge of the map over and over and over again gets boring fast.

But I didn’t buy the title for the main game – it was the minigames, the party games, that I was after.

Unfortunately, they’re not much more fun.

Some of the party games are pretty awesome. I quite enjoy the one where your monkey walks across a carnival-style high wire, and the ring-toss minigame is pretty cool. Several more of the games are just too physically demanding to be worthwhile. In one game, your monkey is inside a mechanical frog-thing and you have to navigate a terraced course by flicking the wiimote quickly upwards over and over to hop. Halfway through the minigame my repetitive-stress-injury-prone wrists would be a fiery mass of pain.

The problem with the majority of the minigames, though, is that they just don’t work. They’re meant to be played with friends, but they don’t seem to respond well to the input of multiple wiimotes. Avatars will stop responding, or suddenly disappear off the screen during many games. Frustrating lag time kicks in on others.

The end result is that of the advertised 50 minigames, only a bare handful are actually fun and playable. From a gameplay perspective, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz is a massive disappointment for the newbie gamer looking for a fun, social title.

There’s not much to be said for gender in Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz, since the game is much more about puzzles than about characters. Two of the five available monkey avatars are girls, which is pretty good. The different avatars have some different abilities, but they don’t seem to be gendered. The background information about the available monkeys included in the game booklet is a little eye-rolling, though. Both of the female characters are described as being in love with one of the males, though it’s also mentioned that one is a martial artist and one likes flowers. The male monkeys, on the other hand, have friendships and hobbies and interests in things like bananas, instead of girls.

Conclusion: Unless you really love the idea of being a rolling monkey in a fast-paced maze game, don’t bother with Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz.

Chat about monkeys in balls with me here.

Do you enjoy pinball games? Have you ever thought to yourself that pinball would be even cooler if there were creepy aliens wandering around the table that you could fight, both in pinball form and when you turn into a heavily armored woman with a gun?

If so, Metroid Prime Pinball for the Nintendo DS is definitely the game for you.

Like most pinball games, both virtual and traditional, the controls are simple to master. You have paddles that can be controlled by pressing either the L and R buttons, or the left arrow on the directional pad and the A button. When the ball approaches one of the paddles, you redirect it by pressing the appropriate button. Once you’ve moved past the beginner’s stage of pinball – simply trying to keep the ball on the table – you can apply some strategy to hit targets that will give you more points and try to tilt the table in useful directions by poking the touchscreen, and so on.

What sets Metroid Prime Pinball apart is the aliens. The pinball is, in fact, Samus Aran from the Metroid series in her morphball form, and the tables feature a variety of enemies, including space pirates and, of course, metroids. In Samus’s morphball form, you can damage the various aliens by ricocheting into them (they can also damage you, so sometimes you’ll want to steer well clear), but it’s also possible to enter “combat mode,” where you can shoot things, instead. Awesome.

Other positives include nice-looking art, appealing music and neat sound effects. There are also multiple tables and single-player modes (with saved high scores so that your badassery at pinball will be properly recorded), and a fun multiplayer mode which allows you to play with up to seven friends using a single game card. It also allows you to send metroids their way (by hitting the right targets on the table) to mess them up.

This facilitates some good trash-talking*:

“I thought you might be lonely, so I sent a couple metroids your way.”

“Oh yeah? Well since you like them so much… Here are a few for you!”

One feature that falls rather short is the Rumble Pak that comes packaged with the game. It fits into the DS’s Game Boy Advance slot and vibrates at key points throughout the game, but so mildly that it doesn’t add much to the gameplay experience. And while the shaking is gentle and unobtrusive, the noise the Rumble Pak makes is not.

Metroid Prime Pinball is easy to play, and continues to be fun even after you’ve mastered it. And Samus Aran is a nifty female character, and a great choice for a pinball hero. I highly recommend this game.

* Trash-talk examples taken from real gameplay experiences.

Threaten to send some metroids my way here.

I was interested in Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords long before I had a chance to play it, thanks to Olivia’s review and the discussion about the bearded dwarven woman in the game over in the forums. It sounded like exactly my kind of thing – I love puzzles, I have deep affection for classic RPGs and I usually get stressed out by combat. Doing puzzles in an RPG in place of combat? Awesome!

In November, I got my very own copy in the mail from Olivia (thanks Olivia! I know you’re just trying to turn me into a DS zombie like you, but I still think you’re cool!), and I soon discovered that, yes, Puzzle Quest is awesome.

There’s not a lot to explain about the mechanics. It’s an RPG, so you wander around a map, visiting towns and castles and holes in the ground (no, really) and talking to people and so on, as one might expect. And a lot of times, you have to fight someone. By lining up three-or-more-of-a-kind items in classic puzzle-game style. One of the things you try to line up is skulls, which drain your opponent’s hit points. Death puzzling! The glowing red skulls are extra death!

I’m not sure that it’s possible to adequately convey how very much death-by-puzzle tickles me. Suffice it to say that I was very, very pleased by the gameplay in Puzzle Quest, even when I had a sneaking suspicion that the game was somehow cheating (the more likely explanation for my frequent losing is that I’m not as clever as I think I am, of course).

Less pleasing was the whole plot thing. It was, y’know, kind’ve…boring. Earnest, but boring. Yes, yes, there’s an Ancient Evil coming to threaten the world as our hero(ine) knows it and only s/he can stop it and s/he has to pick up artifacts and a colorful, rag-tag bunch of sidekicks with varying degrees of Mysterious Pasts and Annoying Dialogue Styles along the way… Nothing new to see here.

One thing that does set Puzzle Quest apart from most of the classic-style RPGs I’ve seen before, though, was the variety of female NPCs. There’s the very attractive queen(s) and the impetuous, little-sister-like girl, but there’s also a fighting coach (from what I could understand, anyway), a mommy dragon, an undead ex-girlfriend and a dwarf woman with a bad-ass beard.

And the player, potentially. At the beginning of the game, you get to make choices about what sort of character you’d like to be, including picking a character portrait to represent yourself. And there are as many girl options as boy options! I went for a chick in full plate with long blonde hair. My favorite part about the picture was how her breastplate didn’t have boobs sculpted into it.

There’s a subplot that involves arranged marriage which is very slightly discomfiting, but overall I found Puzzle Quest to be very feminist-friendly. It’s newbie-friendly, as well – you start the game out with some basic training in how to do the puzzles, and when you mess up and get death-skulled later on, you can just try the same enemy again later. And because it’s puzzle-based as well as being an RPG, I think the game has considerable appeal for both nostalgic RPG-lovers and fans of casual puzzle games.

But I’ve got more data to work with on this one than just my own impressions.

After a lot of obsessive playing, I managed to complete the main plot in mid-December, but I decided to keep playing with my original character and try to complete some more sub-plots. I was working on it one evening at my husband’s parents’ house (where we were visiting for Christmas) when my mother-in-law asked what I was doing. I tilted the DS to show her, and explained the basics of the game. She seemed oddly interested.

“Do you want to try?” I said, after a bit.

Jimmy’s parents don’t really get why he and I enjoy the geekin’ life so much. I wasn’t really prepared for his mother to be interested in my handheld gaming console, much less want to play with it, but it seemed like good manners to offer.

“Yes, if you don’t mind,” my mother-in-law said.

Bonding potential! I quickly set her up with a new character of her very own (she chose a dark-haired, sort’ve punk-rock-looking woman with a low-cut top for her avatar, laughingly saying, “oh, that’s so me.”), and talked her through the first couple of combats.

She played until midnight that night, and picked the game up repeatedly for the rest of our week-long stay.

Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords definitely has its weak points – the monotony of doing the exact same kind of puzzle over and over again, the uninspired plot – but it’s a lot of fun. I’d love to see some more games in the same vein. And I’m pretty sure my mother-in-law would, too.

Want to discuss death-by-puzzle with me?  Do so here.

Despite being hilariously bad at first-person shooter games, I was really, really excited about Mass Effect long before its November release. Partly, that was because I’m friendly with one of the BioWare writers who worked on it, Patrick Weekes, but the awesome-looking screencaps and trailers and promotional video bits that were released in various places online leading up to the release definitely had a lot to do with it.

My husband bought me the game for my birthday, and we started playing it that night. I had a lot of fun doing character creation. I particularly enjoyed choosing details about my character’s background, especially when I learned they’d be relevant to some plots in the game, and doing the physical appearance customization. After a good half hour of happy fiddling, I was ready to debut Commander Rayne Shepard, a highly-principled soldier who looked like some kind of blend of myself and Maggie Gyllenhaal (my coloring, eyes and face shape, Ms. Gyllenhaal’s nose and a super-cute short haircut that’d look great on either of us). After about fifteen minutes of actual gameplay (long enough to get past the introductory conversations), I was ready to hand the controller over to Jameson with the petulant birthday-girl command that he “do the hard stuff for me, but let me make all the decisions.”

I had run up against my usual frustration with first-person shooters: disorientation. I couldn’t figure out where I was going, how to aim when shooting stuff, how not to bump into walls, etc. And because there were scary robot-lizard-bug-monsters shooting at me even as I failed to do so much as face them, I felt anxious and tense about trying to master the controls on my own. Fortunately, my husband is a generous and patient man, and he willingly did “the hard stuff” for me for the twenty hours of play time it took us to complete the main plot the first time through, and let me do all the deciding (and, yes, I did give in to the temptation to say “I’m the decider!” once or twice).

As Rayne advanced in level and general bad-assery, there were a few times when I thought I’d give navigation under fire and shooting bad guys another try (I very quickly mastered running around the Normandy, Commander Shepard’s ship, where absolutely no one was trying to shoot me. I also mastered flirting with Kaidan Alenko. That was easy), but I was so caught up in the plot and the world of Mass Effect that I didn’t want to waste time fumbling around when Jameson could do it so much more easily.

It was easy to get caught up, because the story is awesome. As is the voice acting, the visuals and the music. And you know what else is awesome? The great variety of characters in the game, including lots of women who do and say lots of different kinds of things, and lots of people of color. I raised my eyebrows at a couple of costuming decisions for some female characters, and I felt that it was unrealistic to have (apparent) female sex workers but no male ones on a planet that’s the center of everything important for many species of aliens, but overall I was exceedingly happy with the representation of women in the game.

When Jameson and I finished the game together, I had that bittersweet let-down feeling that I get after closing the last book in a great series. I wanted more! Right away!

“You can play it over with the same character,” Jameson pointed out. “You’ll start high-level, so it’ll be easier for you, and you can go after all of the side quests that we missed.”

Smart man!

He set me up with the stuff most likely to keep me alive while I wandered around in circles getting shot, pointed me the right way a few times in the first combat and then went to bed. A few minutes later, I fought against a strong desire to go wake him up and make him defuse some bombs for me. There was a timer! I’d have to navigate really fast! And if I messed up, my character would die!

But if I woke Jameson up, I knew he’d be really grumpy.

So I took a deep breath, hunched forward over the controller in anxiety, and defused the bombs. And it wasn’t nearly as hard as I had thought – the timer ran long enough for me to bump into several walls and walk in at least three circles.

After that, I got lost immediately. But then I figured out where I was, pointed myself in the right direction, and…got lost again. I managed to reach my destination on the third try, though, and I soon got the hang of using the maps provided in the game, then I mastered moving around without skewing my view off into confusing directions and I even figured out how to acquit myself well in combat, eventually.

Along the way, I managed to do a lot of improbable and rather stupid things, such as impaling my Mako (the land vehicle) on a gun turret after bouncing down a hill. The turret spun and spun, trying to shoot me but unable to shoot down far enough to catch the Mako wrapped around its center, while I used it as an axis for my own futile spinning.

I actually did wake Jameson up for help with that one. It took him about a minute to get the Mako off the turret. The solution? Jumping. Argh!

With the exception of a few blips like that one, I found that the game itself gave me all of the training I needed to play it, once I stopped feeling anxious that I was going to get my character killed (and why is that so anxiety-laden for me, anyway? I can save games…). I wasn’t at all confident that I could play an FPS-style game, much less finish one, but I did. I suspect that other FPS-shy players and chronic wall-bumpers could enjoy Mass Effect, too. Particularly if they have the option, as I did, of playing with a character far enough advanced to survive a bit of a beating on those occasions when they forget something like how to move backwards and get behind cover for a moment or two (not that I have ever done that).

And it couldn’t hurt to have a patient, more experienced gamer around to help out now and then. Like when you’re happily scooting around on a planet’s surface and your controller rumbles and suddenly you have to fight a Thresher Maw – the one thing I never mastered, probably because it involves some jumping.

Also, those things give me the galloping heebie-jeebies.

If you want to commiserate with me about Thresher Maws or discuss other aspects of this post, you can do so on our forums here.

I never played with Barbie dolls as a kid (it was My Little Ponies and Lego all the way, for me), but a few years ago I tumbled headlong into the world of one of a kind fashion doll-making – a hobby wherein one modifies fashion dolls, such as Barbies, with a variety of techniques including repainting faces, shaping limbs and re-rooting hair in order to create unique dolls, often representing favorite characters from books and movies, etc. – and I’ve had something of an interest in everything Barbie since. I’ve watched a few of the animated Barbie movies, and I’ve sent Barbie greeting cards (usually modified to humorous effect with permanent markers beforehand) to friends and, a little while ago, I bought my first Barbie video game: Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses for the Nintendo DS.

I probably could have picked a worse game for my very first attempt at using my new DS, but it’s hard to imagine what that might have been. You see, Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses is a platformer. That’s right. Jumping. Lots and lots of jumping.

I know this makes me sound like a total n00b (which, of course, I am), but I’m going to confess to you all that despite playing this game – this game designed for young children – on and off for several weeks, I still haven’t beaten it. And I’m playing on the easy setting.

I do keep trying, though, because even though the game is almost entirely jumping, which I hate, it’s still fun. And also very weird – after facing a boss who threw bottles at me which I had to hit with a butterfly net so that they’d shatter on the ground and hurt his feet, I knew I needed to see everything else that this game has to offer in the way of sheer goofiness.

I’m (obviously) no connoisseur of the platformer genre, but Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses seems well-crafted from a gameplay standpoint. You play as Genevieve, jumping your way through your father’s palace and a large enchanted garden (reached through the floor of your bedroom, of course) in search of your eleven sisters, who will do what they can to help you progress through the levels by giving you dancing shoes with useful properties (one pair gives you access to the enemy-whacking butterfly net, for example, while another provides stilts that allow you to walk across some areas without even jumping).

The upper screen is where the action takes place, allowing the lower touchscreen to serve as an inventory where you can access the different shoes by tapping them with the stylus. The abxy buttons are used for jumping and for deploying the properties of your various shoes. The direction of your movement is, naturally, controlled by the directional pad. Periodically, you’ll also have to do some things that will get you stared at in public, such as blowing vigorously into the DS’s microphone in order to put out fires that stand in your way.

As you make your way through the game, you’ll be challenged by a host of minor enemies including bugs of all kinds, carnivorous flowers, falling vases and floating teapots that pour scalding liquid on you (I have no idea what Genevieve could have done to provoke the teapots. I think maybe they’re just naturally aggressive), as well as boss battles. If you’re playing on the easy setting, you’ll have plenty of time to sort out how best to approach each enemy – there’s no life bar on easy, and you’ll just flash a lot and sometimes fall off the ledge you’re currently standing on when you make a mistake. On the normal setting, you’ll have to be more careful, as each strike from an enemy will lower your life bar by one, and when you run out of life you’ll swoon dramatically and then return to the beginning of the level. Ouch.

The graphic design and animation is fun and appealing, but not exceptional, and the music gets old fast. But that’s what the sliding volume control is for, right? The repetitive nature of the main game can be broken up with mini-games which are unlocked as you progress.

From a feminist standpoint, Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses does pretty well. You’re playing as a young woman who is on a quest to save her family and has to show considerable physical aptitude as well as bravery, resourcefulness and quick thinking. And while that’s a story I’d like for any female character, it’s not often that I see a very feminine, dress-wearing, dancing-shoe-toting princess in the scrappy heroine role, and it’s nice to get that variety in there. I wish there was a little bit more variety – it would be nice if video game Genevieve was available in different skin tones, as the actual doll version released by Mattel is – but I was overall pretty impressed with the storyline presented in the game.

Final verdict? I wouldn’t recommend Barbie in the 12 Dancing Princesses to beginners, unless they really like (or show an unusual aptitude for) platformers, but I’d be happy to give young girls (or boys!) who are better at DS games than I am their own copies of a fun, cute game with a capable girl hero.

You can discuss this review on our forums at this link.

Hi there. My name is Robyn Fleming, alias Revena (a screenname/handle I’ve been using online since I was a pre-teen), and I can’t jump.

When I was a kid, my older brother and his friends played a lot of video games. They let me in on the action for fighting games – Street Fighter II is a little more entertaining when you rotate turns between three people than when it’s just you against your buddy for hours on end, I guess – but when it came to RPGs or platformers, my participation was limited to that of supportive audience member, no matter how often I begged for a chance at the controller. Ah, the trials of being the tagalong younger sibling!

I played other kinds of games. My cousin got me started with tabletop RPGs when I was six or seven, and my earliest memories include computers with educational learning games loaded on them. And my brother, despite not being permitted to have his own consoles (my father held the slightly illogical position that computer games were okay, but video games would rot one’s brain), continued to be an avid video gamer.

The result is that I have lots of the same cultural reference-points as video gamers my age (I can hum along with the music from Final Fantasy, and references to princesses being in other castles crack me up), and am a happy spectator for more modern games, but lack the skillz to actually play most of them.

This has occasionally caused me some embarrassment. I’m told that it’s very entertaining to watch me spin in place and bump into walls when I try to play first-person shooter games. And while my button-mashing approach to fighting games worked pretty well when my opponents and I were pre-teens, I’m no match for my friends who know their way around a controller, these days.

Once, when I was in college, a guy I had a serious crush on invited me to join him at his apartment one evening to “play some video games or something.” Believing that this must be code for “fool around together,” I put on a cute skirt and a fitted t-shirt and prepared myself for an evening of semi-reclining fun.

To my surprise, he actually did want to play video games – specifically, ports of classic arcade games that would run on an emulator for his desktop computer. I did my best for a miserable half hour while he encouraged me by shouting things like: “Jump! Jump, damn it! HIT THE B BUTTON.”

I can’t believe I shaved my legs for this, I thought. But at least it will make for a funny story later. Once it stops being mortifying.

It has become a funny story, at least to me, and has also given rise to the title of this blog.

Which brings me to my purpose here. In October, I got married to a wonderful geek, and we combined our worldly goods. All of a sudden, I have constant access to video game consoles and games – I even have my own handheld console, a Nintendo DS Lite, which I received as a wedding gift from some of my awesome friends. But though I am now technically able to play lots of games, my underdeveloped controller and internal video game logic know-how prevents me from playing many, many of them well.

My leisure time would be less frustrating if I could know ahead of time which games I’d be able to enjoy right away, and which I’d need some serious practice at before playing smoothly. I figure that there are other people out there in more or less my position – unskilled, unpracticed people who want to play, but have some trouble finding good introductory titles – and that if I spend some time reviewing games for accessibility as I try them out, it might help other would-be video gamers.

So that’s what I intend to do. Since this is an Iris blog (and since I couldn’t help myself, anyway), I’ll also be evaluating the games that I play from a feminist perspective, as well as from other critical perspectives. Hopefully, I’ll also provide some entertainment and amusement along the way.

Welcome to Robyn Can’t Jump. Let the skillzless video gaming begin!

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