Where’s Waldo?

By Spencer . September 30, 2005 . 1:40am

Not everything needs to be made into a video game. The Where’s Waldo books were perfectly fine as books, but the good (or bad designers) at THQ decided to make a video game out of Where’s Waldo. If you haven’t seen a Where’s Waldo book before, we’ll sum it up for you. It’s your job to find the little red striped wearing adventurer, Waldo, who is in a sea of people and objects. The books are mildly entertaining for a five year old for the first time around. After Waldo is found the challenge is over and the book gathers dust. Now THQ could have made a platformer, a board game heck even a shooter starring Waldo, but instead they tried to replicate the style of the books.

The game’s "story" is it’s your job to find Waldo throughout a whopping eight levels. Waldo is randomly placed in a level and you have a little box, which you scroll across the screen to find him. This wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the awful rendition of Waldo. In a sea of blocky humanoid figures, its hard to discern what any of the figures are. Another problem with the whole find Waldo deal is that the select box where you would try to find Waldo is awful. You might be right on Waldo and pressing "A" to acknowledge that you’ve found him, but the box won’t respond. At this point you’ll start looking other places, when you were in the right place the first time. All of this wastes time on the game clock. Each wrong push of the button takes away from your time and you’ll be wasting plenty of time looking for Waldo even though you found him.

Besides the standard search for Waldo style of game there are two mini games within the levels. One of the games is finding Waldo in complete darkness. In this game you’ll move around the find box randomly until you spot Waldo, what a great idea. The other mini game is a maze where you have to navigate through to find Waldo. There is a random figure that appears and if you touch it you’ll lose a lot of time. However, this enemy moves really fast, and you’ll probably touch it once just by pure bad luck. None of these games were well thought out and are way more frustrating than fun.

Did we mention that there was no music while searching for Waldo? Well, there isn’t. The only sounds you hear while looking for Waldo is white noise and the occasional error sound from selecting the wrong spot. We’re not expecting THX quality audio here, but we’re expecting something, anything other than nothing. The dead noise makes the game more boring than it already is.

Why THQ made such an abysmal game is a question in many people’s minds. This game is only good for die hard NES collectors and people who like terrible games.

Hard to find?

Surprisingly, this stinker is hard to find, maybe everyone threw them in the trash. The real question is why find it?

+ Pros: Umm it has Waldo?

- Cons: No gameplay present, lack of music, blocky graphics, the fact that people pay for this game

Overall: Where’s Waldo is a travesty of a NES game, if you have the cash to buy this game go get a Where’s Waldo book instead.

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