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Review by Jason Venter 
December 02, 2006
Thus begins Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, the Game Boy Advance adaptation of the popular show from Cartoon Network. Players will adventure through the large building as both Mac and Bloo, each with their own capabilities. Along the way, they’ll meet familiar faces from the show and repeatedly do one thing: fetch items.
Sometimes, they’re fetching cogs. On other occasions it will be fire-breathing puppies, or bits of a plaster bust that Bloo carelessly knocked from its stand. From the very start of the game when you have to collect a smattering of household goods that have been spread all over the mansion, it’s clear that item collection will be a common theme. That continues until the very end with only amusing bits of dialogue serving as your reward. Fortunately, that part of the game is at least on track; the characters are constantly spouting one-liners that are genuinely amusing, if only in a juvenile sort of way.
Grabbing all the items isn’t half as satisfying as reading the jokes, though. Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends is rather large, a few winding staircases stacked on top of one another with doorways that connect to long hallways and still more doors. At first, it’s easy to get lost in all the options, and it’s only by the end of the game that you’re likely to know your way around the building. That’s because by then, you will have wandered rather aimlessly about for hours on end, grabbing little trinkets and starting to wonder why things have to be so monotonous.
The developers realized that this would be a problem, so they took a proactive approach to fixing it. They halfway succeeded. Every few stages, you’ll find things interrupted by a boss encounter or a special event.
Boss encounters are one of the game’s highlights, if only because they represent such a change from the norm. Elsewhere in the game, you’ll only seldom find yourself facing opponents like floating wads of paper (called ‘scribbles’) or angry imaginary friends. When a boss decides to ruin your day, though, you’ll find yourself participating in genuinely satisfying encounters. There are no directions on how to beat each opponent, just a few visual clues. Younger gamers will probably have to ask for help, or they’ll just stumble their way around until they figure out the secret to success.
There are three boss encounters in the game, a rather small number made less notably diminutive by the fact that the game itself will take you approximately that many hours to complete. Fights revolve around you stunning your opponent so that he temporarily can’t move, then pelting him with your slingshot. This is done differently in each fight, which is what gives them their appeal. In one, you’ll let a giant beast slam the ground so that it angers the bees in the treetop above, which then sting your adversary so that you can sneak in a shot. In another, you have to hop up platforms and fire past some barriers so that you’ll trigger an event that stops your enemy in his tracks. Battles are challenging and a good break from the item collection.
Another such break comes in the form of the banister sequences. At two separate points in the game, you’ll be asked to slide down banisters without touching the staircases themselves. You have to in order to get to the bottom with time to spare, the game tells you. It’s about as close as things ever get to being an actual action game, and you’ll probably find that some of your favorite moments in Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends are spent on banisters.
In another side game, you have to sneak your way from one end of the building to the other while avoiding detection. This requires pressing up against obstacles at certain points, then making a mad dash to the next save point the minute your enemy has his back turned. Stealth modes in games almost always are frustrating, as is true here. You’ll sometimes drop down from one platform to the next, only to find that it’s actually a staircase you didn’t see. Then your characters slides automatically down it and into an enemy’s line of sight. That’s not fun. Thankfully, there’s only the one stealth sequence in the whole game, which means it only just barely wears out its welcome and then is gone for good.
If only the same could be said for the item collection. Is it too much to ask for a developer to just focus on good, old-fashioned levels? Expansive environments with items secreted away have their place in some games, but even the most experienced of game developers have sometimes gone down the wrong path when exploring the play mechanic. In Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, a few straight-up platform sequences would have improved things significantly. The fact that the backgrounds (which include multiple layers and nice detail) look really good is irrelevant; you’ll see far too much of the same scenery a thousand times over as you snag the different trinkets.
At least mini-games break things up a little. Red tickets are scattered all over the mansion, and every 25th one you gather lets you play neat little mini-games at your leisure. One is a variation of whack-a-mole that actually does fairly well for itself, another is skee ball (which isn’t particularly engaging) and there’s even paddleball, where you see how often you can hit the rubber ball before it slaps Bloo in the face.
With humorous dialogue and a perfectly competent visual style that captures some of the flair of the show, Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends had the potential to be the handheld system’s next great platformer. Sometimes it almost is. Kids will certainly find a lot to like here, and they’ll probably play through it several times. The cartridge saves progress automatically, too--no fiddling required--so it’s perfect for road trips or whatever else. Still, the player who has played enough other games will probably get sick of all the fetching long before the credits roll. This is one title that’s just what the colorful packaging promises: great for kids and quickly tiresome for anyone else.
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Most recent video game reviews written by Jason Venter
The Simpsons Arcade Game (Xbox 360) [February 04, 2012]
Pushmo (3DS) [January 31, 2012]
Unstoppable Gorg (PC) [January 19, 2012]
Skylanders: Spyro's Adventure (Xbox 360) [January 08, 2012]
Defense Grid: The Awakening (PC) [January 04, 2012]
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