Would you play a flying game, if 75 percent of it was looking for fuel?
Or how about a shooter where you only get two bullets at a time, and it takes 15 to
20 minutes to find another one?
That sound fun to you?
‘Cause it shouldn’t, is my point.
Those are games where the thing you want to do, the thing the games are supposedly about…is
actually just a fraction of the game.
You can’t do that until you do this busy work.
Can’t do the fun stuff, until you’ve walked around for half an hour.
That’s Stuart Little 3 for the PlayStation 2.
And you know, it’s that not that this is a bad game.
In fact, Stuart Little 3 is a perfectly okay game for kids.
You play as the mouse, Stuart Little…and you have to take a bunch of photos.
Every level gives you photos to take before you can progress, and before you can take
the photos…usually, you have to play a minigame.
Or do something for a character.
Oh, and recharge your camera.
‘Cause that’s what kids want to do.
Recharge a camera.
And for all the…okay things, this game does?
That about ruined it for me.
The majority of the time you spend playing this game, by a large margin…is just walking
around, trying to find the little power cells that charge your camera.
And you need a freaking hundred of them for the camera to work, and that’s just one
photo.
So you play the minigame, you win the race or whatever…and now you can take the photo.
Only you can’t, because your camera’s not charged.
Get ready to walk around, which takes longer than the objective did.
So it’s just a cheap way of lengthening the game.
And it completely sucks.
I can’t imagine a little kid doing that for long.
Fortunately, the game beneath that isn’t the worst.
Each level is an open world full of little games and challenges, and as you complete
those, you unlock the photo ops.
Not a terrible idea, and it’s actually done pretty well.
The only real problem is, some of the objectives are minigames, and some of the minigames repeat
themselves over and over.
Minigolf, racing, skateboarding…you’re doing this stuff pretty much every level.
And since they’re not exactly the world’s best minigames…you get tired of them after
the first time.
I mean, this is only fun for so long.
Like, minutes.
And I guess, for me, that’s the story with Stuart Little 3.
It’s an okay idea, but…it’s not really much fun.
It’s almost, like…they had a couple minigames, but then they had a “come to Mario” moment,
and they were like, “Wait, we can’t do minigames.
Our children would never forgive us.”
So they threw together some open worlds and put the minigames in there.
Like hiding medicine inside the kid’s ice cream.
Only in this case, it’s medicine-flavored ice cream.
This sucks.
Stuart has a bunch of different vehicles he can use, which is cool, and different outfits
with different abilities.
Good stuff, but again, none of it’s any fun.
And the game doesn’t control very well, either.
You play a really solid platformer or open-world game, and then you play this…it’s night
and day.
Stuart Little 3 doesn’t have very tight controls at all, and the presentation is basically
more of the same.
Standard music, standard PS2 graphics…
Which is fitting, ‘cause this is standard game design.
It’s just that, since it’s a kids game that isn’t broken, it looks better than
it really is.
I actually like the idea here.
Doing tasks to take a photo, playing minigames, collecting the photos…this isn’t the worst
way to do a Stuart Little game.
But the loose controls and repetitive minigames and pointless camera-charging gimmick…all
that irritating bullsh*t snowballs into a whole big avalanche of irritating bullsh*t.
This game is fun for, like, five minutes before it stops being fun.
And then continues to stop being fun.
It’s Stuart Little 3: Big Photo Adventure for the PlayStation 2.
This is no big adventure.
Pee Wee had a big adventure.