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Find Waldo, Yet Again - Where’s Waldo? The Fantastic Journey DS By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman About 20 years ago British illustrator, Martin Handford created a pop culture phenomenon with his creatively clever Where’s Waldo? (Wally if you’re from the UK) series of picture books. The books featured elaborately drawn 2 page illustration spreads of humorous situations and locales. Hidden somewhere in each scene is the titular character, Waldo who is normally set apart from the other figures in the picture by his: red and white striped shirt and hat, blue jeans, circular framed glasses and walking stick. However, finding Waldo isn’t your only task, you’re also given a list of obscure items to find in each picture too. Sadly, the popularity of Where’s Waldo? has greatly diminished to the point where Waldo memes and pop culture references fall into the comedic category of “I know, but don’t care.”
Even though Waldo hasn’t been relevant for over a decade, that didn’t stop him from recently jumping onto the hidden picture game band wagon. Where’s Waldo?: The Fantastic Journey on DS is a pretty much what you’d expect from a game based on a picture book. Waldo’s fantastic journey is spread over 12 various scenes/worlds with 3 challenges each. The challenges come in 4 flavors: book style (finding Waldo, Waldo’s friends and some special objects), find a scene (basically just finding special screen shots), Odlaw’s challenge (finding various yellow and black objects), and the Highlights style puzzle of finding 10 differences between 2 similar pictures. Each challenge works on a (very generous) timer, ensuring that you don’t spend all day trying to finish up a task. The game also depletes a bit of time for every wrong guess you make to keep you from just clicking randomly in hopes of stumbling upon an object. Despite these 2 factors, the game is very easy. Both easy and normal mode could be beaten within a few hours (about 2 for easy and 5 for normal), even if you choose to revisit levels to get a perfect 5 star score.
The game makes itself way too easy by breaking up each illustration into small pieces while you’re searching, rather than making you look through the entire picture. It’s like having someone who’s solved the puzzles before draw a circle around what you’re looking for as a way of saying “you’d be too stupid to find that without my hint.” The only time this doesn’t occur is when you’re searching for Waldo himself, in which case you look through the whole map. A hard mode where the game wouldn’t cordon off your relevant search area would be more than welcome, but is sadly and stupidly absent from the game. I can’t really make a technical assessment of the graphics in this game, since they come straight from the Martin Handford books (in fact, I’m almost sure this is just a digital copy of the original Where’s Waldo? book). If you like Handford’s drawing style, you’re going to like the graphics in the game.
The music, sound and voices are simply existential. They don’t stand out as being notably bad or good, they’re just there. I will admit that sometimes I really like when Whitebeard the Wizard says I’m brilliant or that I was made to do this, it kind of brightens my mood if I’m feeling down in a cheap and cheesy way. I really feel bad that someone had actually spent $30 buying me this game. In fact, had I known how this game was going to be, I would have probably just asked for the complete Where’s Waldo? bookset (which also retails for $30) instead. The game has less replay value than the books, since I’ll essentially need to forget where everything is in the game to fully enjoy it again. At least, I could have just browsed through the picture books for funny scenes at my own pace after finding all the listed stuff. The only advantage that this game has over the hardbacks is the fact that no one will be able to tell that you’re into 20 year old picture books if you play this in public.
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