Elf Bowling was originally a freeware game that, in all seriousness, probably took a few days at the most to program and was meant to be downloaded for free and chuckled at when your friends e-mailed you the link to it, then deleted and forgotten forever. It wasn’t supposed to be a commercial game, it was a stupid fad, and porting it to the DS isn’t basically as far removed from the scale of good game ideas as mass producing DS carts that play the numa numa video (or any other played out internet fad). What it all boils down to is that what we have here is a blatant attempt to cash in on the grandmas who are looking for presents for their grandkids, and think they’re buying a cute game here. What they’re actually getting is a collection of 2 old freeware games, something that’s far from a bargain when you realize the “games” you get are barely complex enough to even be considered a mini-game. The game starts off with what should go down in history as the worst theme song ever. A trio of identical elves on the top screen do a dance that features about 5 frames of animation while a 2-second sound clip of somebody saying “elf elf baby” in a synth-speech sounding voice loops over and over again until you pick between the two options, after which a fart sound plays because, you know, nothing's funnier then a fart sound.
Once you move on to the gameplay, your first option is Elf Bowling 1, a “bowling” game that has nothing to do with bowling. Instead of using the touch screen to roll a bowling ball or some other clever or even marginally passable gameplay mechanic, you tap the screen when a moving arrow at the bottom of the lane is in the spot you want to throw the ball from. The result has absolutely nothing to do with the actual physics of bowling, and everything to do with being a boring waste of time that you could otherwise be using to sit and do absolutely nothing. The bowling pins are elves, and in keeping with the massively funny nature of this game, they frequently moon you because seeing naked elf butts is hilarious. There's nothing to the game but tapping the screen at the right time, and the results are pre-set for each arrow, so it's not really hard to find out how to get a strike every time, a level of interactivity that wouldn’t even make a decent Atari 2600 game, let alone a DS game.
Elf Bowling 2 isn’t actually a bowling game at all; it’s a shuffleboard game with nearly identical mechanics to the first game. You again play as Santa, who now gets to throw a bunch of thong-wearing elves (yet another excuse to show off elf butts and play fart sounds because this game is just so funny) and the point is to send the elf-puck off the end of the shuffleboard thing and into the water to get eaten by a shark. It basically plays exactly the same way as the first game with the addition of a way to control how much power is behind your shot, something that isn’t really a big deal and doesn’t do anything to make the game more fun then staring at television test patterns.
The graphics of both games would be considered sub-par in a first-gen NES title. You can tell there was absolutely no effort made to improve them from the free incarnation of the game, and in some ways the graphics and animations are dumbed down from the PC version. In all fairness there have been some really amazing games with ugly graphics over the years, but here it looks like they didn’t even try, and there’s literally no gameplay to make up for the ugly visuals. The controls basically amount to repeatedly pushing a button over and over again. You have no control over the ball other than deciding which little arrow is yellow when you tap the screen. There are LCD keychain games with more interactivity than this, and that is not a good thing.
You can probably see and do everything this cartridge has to offer in around 10 minutes, and after that you’ll be left wondering why you didn’t light the money you spent on this game on fire or some other scenario that would end in you not owning Elf Bowling 1&2. The game is boring and stupid (not the most professional way to put it, but it's hard to be professional and serious while reviewing a game that was meant as a joke), the humor basically amounts to stupidly-childish puns and tired fart jokes, and it's obvious there was literally no effort put into the game, which while forgivable in the realm of freeware is nowhere near it in the land of games that cost actual money.
Bottom Line:
There’s no conceivable reason to want this game at all, unless you just really feel like paying for a game that’s been free for eight years and provides several minutes of play time at the most. These games weren’t meant to be played more then once, if you even finished a full game at all, and theyre nowhere near being worth $20. Or any amount of money for that matter. The games originally cost nothing, and that’s exactly what they’re worth.
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| 0.4 |
Posted: 2007-03-03 22:45:48 PST