STUDIO: Brash Entertainment
RELEASE DATE: October 28, 2008
CONSOLE: DS
DEVELOPER: 7 Studios
GENRE: Mini-Games
PLAYERS: 1
ESRB RATING: E (Everyone)

Now that most of the real amusement parks in the increasingly cold sections of the country have closed for the season, what's a fan of Six Flags to do? When I read that Brash Entertainment, a company that has made several movie-licensed games recently including Jumper and Space Chimps, had teamed with Six Flags to make a game for the DS that plays off the carnival games usually found at amusement parks, I assumed it would be a clever and fun diversion to tide me over until Great America opens again. But how do you take what's great about going to Six Flags and shrink it down to something that requires you to use your DS stylus? I'm a huge fan of the "mini-game genre" of the DS. I love being able to pick up the DS and play something like Brain Age or the mini-games in Super Mario for a few minutes and put it down again. Puzzles and mini-games work very well on the DS. So, I assumed that a game based on an amusement park would be a clever mix of games like Whack-a-Mole and other carnival games that I loved in person and will love even more on my DS. I assumed wrong. Six Flags Fun Park is part-adventure, part-mini-game, and neither of them really work. Who would have thought that a game with the name Six Flags Fun Park would be so drab, dull, and repetitive?

Six Flags Fun Park brings 40 mini-games to unique theme areas like Six Flags Hurricane Harbor, Six Flags Fright Fest, Funville, and Astro City. But players will spend the majority of the game moving around Six Flags with the control of their stylus. You can interact with the other kids at the park - although the extent of that interaction usually consists of clicking on them and reading a bad joke - or play mini-games. To play mini-games, you'll have to actually go to work at the park, making pizzas in Hometown Square or burgers in another section of the park. You can even pick up trash and plant trees around the park. I'm all for teaching kids to not litter and go green, but it seems odd to make a game called Six Flags Fun Park that focuses so heavily on child labor.

But what about the mini-games? Some are clever and fun, but most are horribly designed and damn-near impossible, and all are based on sliding your stylus across the bottom screen and releasing it at the right time. Release the dart to pop the balloon. Release the line to catch the fish. Release the ball to throw it at the open receiver. The big problem with the mini-games in Six Flags Fun Park is that far too many are based on quantity and luck. Rub your stylus back and forth in any direction as much as you can, and there's a good chance that you'll win a prize. No need to read the instructions or feel like you're actually doing anything. And yet, some games are the opposite. The pop-a-shot game, for example, simply never worked right for me, as if it wasn't completely designed. I actually enjoyed working at the pizza booth more - customers order a pizza with 1-4 ingredients and you have to make it as quickly as possible - because it seemed like there was more than luck involved. As for the quests/adventure part of the game, it's shockingly dull and poorly designed. It's essentially a series of "go talk to this guy" missions. At one point, when one character instructed me to speak to the guy standing RIGHT NEXT TO HIM, I realized that brain power wasn't the main goal of Six Flags Fun Park.

And that's fine. I understand that Six Flags Fun Park on the DS is made for a limited, young audience, but it seems like an opportunity to expand to a wider one was missed. Is it just kids who turned Carnival Games into a big hit? My father may be a kid at heart but he's over sixty in actual years and he played that game. There's no reason that Six Flags Fun Park on the DS couldn't have had something for every age instead of just a series of repetitive, badly constructed games. I love going to the amusement park and actually have kept prizes that I've collected playing carnival games, but, unfortunately, that feeling was never recreated by the developers of Six Flags Fun Park.