captaind's Full Review: Finding Nemo: Nemo's Underwater World of Fun for W...
Finding Nemo: Nemos Underwater World of Fun is a typical example of a movie tie-in game gone wrong. Sure, its very nicely presented and has some clips from the movie for you to watch, but theres no substance to it at all.
Basically what we have here is a collection of simple mini-games, which when completed let you play a different mini-game. When youve completed that youve completed the game. (To be fair you can go back and play any of the seven different games again, and the difficulty level will go much higher than needed for to complete the basic game, but why would you?) The best thing about the movie was that although kids loved it, it was just as enjoyable (perhaps even more so) for adults, because of the different layers of humour. With this game its purely for young children (who may love it) the games are very easy and it took me a grand total of an hour and a half to complete the game (including watching the movie clips!).
The graphics are very nice and look authentic to the film, and the animation is reasonably good (apart from the lip-synching). There is some decent music and the voice-acting is good, though the sound-bites from the movie get very repetitive. Its all very prettily presented though and pretty much all of the characters from the movie are here somewhere.
Nemos father explains when you begin the game that hes going to build a racecourse so that Nemo can prove himself to be a super swimmer. Before this however Nemo needs to win some items by playing the sub-games. You swim round looking for these games (with a few animated bits you can activate along the way by clicking on them). Theres a game where you have to guess which shell a little critter is hiding from there are only three which get shuffled around, but it is extremely easy to keep track of where the critter is. You also have to feed kelp to Bruce the shark in a breakout / pinball style game, and help Dory with a shape-order memory game with the ever-moving shoal of fish, and play a match-it game which is also far too easy because its only on a 4x4 grid. By far he best of the games is one where you swim through the gulf stream with the turtles, collecting shells along the way and avoiding collisions, and have to exit at the correct point. Once youve completed a game at level 5 you get to see a related clip from the movie, and you also collect a shell. When you have the shells from all 5 games, you go to the main race.
This is somewhat like the turtles game and involved trying to collect the singing clams against a time limit. Various obstacles slow you down but there are power-ups to collect that can help you. Complete that at level 5 and you win the game. Roll credits
Once youve done that you can race again or play any of the other games, and they do get harder as you go along. Theres also another weird game where you help the gang from the fish tank create weird and wonderful music. Well mostly weird. For a very young child who loved the movie and hasnt yet developed any kind of advanced co-ordination skills this would be a very good game, but for anyone whos played computer games before its far too easy and very, very simple. It looks and sounds nice for toddlers, and they may enjoy it, but I wouldnt recommend it for anyone else. (This may be a little unfair as it was obviously designed for the very young but Im not very young so Im rating it from my own point of view!!)
System Specs
OS: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/x64
CPU: Pentium 2 266MHz or above
HDD space: 440Mb
Memory: 128Mb or above
Graphics card: 8Mb or higher card with DirectX 8.1 or above
Age rating: 3+ (my guess is it's most suitable for 4-8 year old's, give or take a year maybe)
(This game CD contains both the Windows and Mac versions of the game.)
Finding Nemo: Nemo's Underwater World of Fun (JC) ' Packaging: Jewel Case Condition: New Publisher: THQ Platform: Windows Mac Rating: Everyone Descrip...More at eBay
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