Buzz! Junior: Jungle Party
Score: 90% ESRB: Everyone 10+ Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment America Developer: Magenta Software Media: DVD/1 Players: 1 - 4 Genre: Party/ Puzzle
Graphics & Sound: Buzz Junior: Jungle Party is another game like Buzz! The Mega Quiz where you play the entire game using the provided buzzers instead of a standard controller. Instead of being a quiz game, though, this one is a party game where you compete in a series of mini-games to see who is the top monkey. Graphically, Jungle Party looks very much like a child's cartoon show set in the jungle. The characters are all animals of some kind, very cartoony in appearance. The contestants are four cute little monkeys in the four colors of the buzzer choices. In some of the mini-games, there's a huge gorilla officiating. There are turtles that can be turned into bombs, and huge purple hippos that can be dropped on the monkey's heads. Sound like a cartoon show to you? If you don't like to see the monkeys in the buff, there's a variety of clothing to dress them in. Huge sunglasses, printed tee-shirts, red tennis shoes, flip flops, and many more items are available for you to customize your monkey. You unlock even more costumes as you play. You cannot change the color of your monkey, however. You've got the option of blue, orange, green, or yellow, and no two people can be the same color. The background music is also exactly what you would expect to hear on a jungle cartoon. It's full of drums beating out a jungle rhythm. The characters themselves don't speak. They do make monkey noises though. The only voice you'll hear is that of the announcer telling you what game is next and how to play it. You will also hear heckles and/or encouragement from the announcer during the mini-games. These are quite amusing phrases that just make you laugh. Even if you're the contestant being made fun of, it's still humorous.
Gameplay: To start Buzz! Junior: Jungle Party, just press the big red button. The Main Menu will appear and give you the choice of Multiplayer, Single Player, Practice, and Options. For both single and multiplayer, if you enter a name that you have previously used, it will automatically have the same clothes on that you had worn previously, even if you are playing as a different color. You can still change them if you want to, of course. Multiplayer gives you the choice of short, medium, long, or marathon game. A short game is five rounds, a medium game is 10 rounds, a long game is 20 rounds, and a marathon game is 25 rounds. After you choose the game length, you have the option to create a custom game. In a custom game, you select the games you want to play and the order you want to play them in. If you just really can't get enough of a certain game, you can select it multiple times. After you decide on a custom game or not, you then get to choose which player is which color and customize and name your monkey. After that, you play the mini-games. Before each game, the announcer will explain how to play that game. It really is that easy to play Jungle Party. If you choose to play single player, you'll be given ten random mini-games. You can't do a custom game for single player. For each game, you'll get a score. If it's a game like Primate Penalties, you get the total of both your score and your opponents. 8000 is a perfect score for each mini-game. At the end of the ten rounds, your total is your final score. If you've scored high enough, you'll be placed on the high score tree. Practice lets you play any of the mini-games that you want to, in either single or multiplayer mode. You can also use this as a really quick play when you just want to prove that you are truly better than your sibling at a specific mini-game. In Options, you can change whether or not Jungle Party autosaves. Autosave is turned on by default. You can also adjust the screen alignment and turn widescreen on/off. In the Options, you can also replay the intro video and view the high scores.
Difficulty: Buzz! Junior: Jungle Party is very easy to play. Even if you've never played videogames before, you won't have any trouble playing it. Before each mini-game, the game explains which button you need to press to do which action. A lot of the games only require using the red buzzer on top. Even when they require more than one button, there's only five buttons total, so it's never really hard to be able to press them all, but you might have to use both hands to be the quickest. Jungle Party is an easy game to play, but not necessarily an easy game to win. Some of the games take skills to play. You have to have the quickest reaction time to win, like in Simian Shootout. That's something you can practice and get better at. Other games, Run Around!, are just plain luck. If you guess the right crate to stand under so that you don't get squished by a hippo, you win. There's really no way to practice and get better at luck games. Since you can create a custom game though, if you want to leave out those luck games and have it based purely on skill, you can. If you're one of those really lucky people who just seem to win, leave out the skill games if you want. I can tell you that quite a few of the skill games will take some time to master perfectly!
Game Mechanics: Buzz Junior: Jungle Party is played entirely by using the provided buzzers. Honestly, it's much easier to use the buzzer than it is to use a controller. The buzzer can be played using only one hand, and that's really hard to do with a normal controller. Any buzzer can be used for any player. You don't have to untangle cords to make sure that whoever wants to be blue has the far left buzzer. At the beginning of each mini-game, the announcer tells you exactly what the controls are for that mini-game. If you already know how to play that specific one, you can simply press the big red button on top to skip the instructions. Some games require only the big red button, and the majority of them you can easily play one-handed. There are a few games, like Whack A Squirrel, where we found that it was easier to press them quickly if we used both hands. You can tell that Jungle Party was geared to a younger audience when it was developed, but that doesn't mean that only kids will enjoy it. We found it to be a very fun game to just put in and play. The simple format and easy gameplay makes it a wonderful stress reliever.
-Cyn, GameVortex Communications AKA Sara Earl
Bratz: The Movie Mercury Meltdown Revolution