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.