I decided to let my daughter have the first try with this game. She is in the target demographic (six year old girl). She’s played it off and on, but ultimately it has spent more of its time in our game organizer.

This is totally a side note – but maybe you too have had trouble keeping GBA and DS games organized without losing those little cartridges. I have a set of clear plastic business card sheets, like you’d use in a three-ring binder, tacked up on a wall. Each little compartment is labeled with a game name. My daughter is only allowed to have out one DS and one GBA game at one time and because of the organizer I can tell at a glance if she’s following the rule. This works so much better then keeping a ton of boxes around or putting them all in a drawstring bag and trying to remember which games should be in there.

We Now Return to Our Regularly Scheduled Topic

I did ask my daughter if she liked Strawberryland Games. She said, “Yes.” I’m afraid I wasn’t able to get anything specific out of her (she has autism and Q&A is not her strong suit) but I did notice she seemed to like playing a game where she used the stylus to draw lines of little balloons into the sky. Clearly, in order for the review to live, I was going to have to make the sacrifice and channel my inner little girl. Eeek!

The first thing I noticed upon beginning the game is that there’s an awful lot of reading considering it’s aimed at young girls. The background story definitely comes through only in the text. You can pretty much play the game without the background story and just treat it as a bunch of unrelated mini-games, but it seems silly to have the content but have it not accessible unless someone reads over the young gamer’s shoulder while they play.

The Schedule of Events

There are a number of mini-games that make up the ‘Nearly Once a Year Strawberryland Games’.

I enjoyed the Very Berry Games best. There are three different games in this category – Berry Bounce, Berry Tap and Berry Tiles. All three of these games make really nice use of the DS stylus and touch screen. They each start (relatively) easy and slowly get harder as you progress through the levels.

Berry Bounce has a line of different fruit shapes across the top of the screen. There are eight little gopher holes in the sand and random berries come bouncing up through the holes, arc across the screen, and then disappear into another hole. You need to tap the berries from the little list on top of the screen to clear the list. Yes, there is a time limit on this. If you tap a berry that isn’t on the list, a new berry is added to the list so accuracy is important – especially at higher levels. As you advance through each level, the list of berries to be cleared gets longer and the variety of berries to be cleared increases. I would have made it further if that last darn strawberry would have shown up before time ran out.

Berry Tap is like a demented whack-a-mole game. You’re on the same screen as Berry Bounce with the same eight gopher holes. You have 30 seconds on the clock and have to tap the strawberries as they pop up into the holes. Tap a strawberry successfully and it flits away as a cute little butterfly. If a gopher pops up, you have to whack his little head to make him move. After a second or so, a strawberry appears in his place. As you go up in levels you’ll get other kinds of berries appearing. Don’t touch that other fruit! I found out that if I hit the cherries, for example, it actually subtracted from my strawberry count. Not good. You only have to achieve 10 strawberries per level to advance, but it sure gets trickier, the higher you go. And I swear by level 20ish that the 30 seconds seemed more like 15.

I found Berry Tiles to be a different speed of game. It took a bit more logic and a bit less twitch of the reflex. You start this game with a 4x4 grid of squares. Your little puppy, Pupcake, is your playing piece. The grid will be a mix of berry types – only two different berries at the level I was playing. There are some squares of each berry type. As Pupcake steps onto a square, the berry type changes. Your goal is to end up with all berries of the same type. There is a time limit with this game as well, but it’s not quite as intense right off the bat. You can move Pupcake either with the directional arrows or the stylus. I preferred the arrows. I’m not sure what happened around board 10 or so. I swear that puppy went on a rampage and was not going where I told him. It had to be the puppy’s fault – it couldn’t be me – right?

The nice thing about doing well in each of these games is that you earn strawberry tickets. As Strawberry Shortcake travels the games, she’s going to find a Dessert Booth. In this booth you can spend your tickets to buy or make desserts that will help you in the competition games. You get to choose which competition you want to make the dessert for, and then you can either buy the dessert (each one has a different type of bonus) or you can follow a simple recipe and mix up the dessert yourself. Mixing the dessert reminded me a bit of Cooking Mama, but for kids. It was cute. Again, there are written instructions for this part that you are going to have to help walk your child through. I have to confess that while I was able to make yummy desserts, I didn’t follow the instructions closely enough to learn how to deploy the desserts during the competitions. My bad.

There is one non-competition activity in Strawberryland Games. You can take Strawberry for a ride in a hot air balloon. The control pad lets you move the balloon up and down and a bit side to side. Apparently if you tap on cloud puffs you can collect some goodies. I didn’t know this at the time of my balloon ride, but you might want to keep it in mind for future reference.

The three actual racing games are the Licorice Leap, Berry Boarding, and the Balloon Race. If you’ve been reading the little screens with the background story, you’ll know that the wicked Peppermint Fizz is going to cheat and throw hazards into your path. If you haven’t been following the story – there’s going to be stuff you have to avoid while you race.

The Licorice Leap is carried out by either your intrepid dog Pupcake, or your cat, Custard. You are setting your fearless pet loose on a water course populated with various floating objects. You drag licorice drops into Punch Bowl Pond to create a bridge for your pet between the existing objects. You have to use the stylus and direct your pet all the way across to the right side of the pond and the little flag. Don’t worry. If your pet falls in, you do lose some time, but the little darlings can both swim. If you read the booklet you’ll learn that you can blow into the microphone on your DS to blow the licorice floaters slightly to the right.

Berry Boarding looks a lot like snowboarding, except there’s treats on the slope and the mountain is made out of a whipped cream. You’ll need to avoid hazards as you race down the slope, collect goodies as you move along, and if you time your jumps right, you can do cool stunts in the air. I’ve finished in first place at least one time, which unlocks the chance for you to race as Blueberry instead of Strawberry, but I’m still not clear on what I’m doing that makes my game better or worse. I do know that as you advance in levels, you will start to get obstacles in your path. All I had to do on the first run is collect goodies and try to do stunts.

The one final race is the Balloon Race. This is the one that I saw my daughter playing initially. There are a number of floating platforms and the finish line is apparently high up in the air. Using your stylus you draw lines of pink balloons between platforms and then have Strawberry walk up the balloons. If Strawberry is close to a platform or line of balloons, she can jump between them. I’m afraid that I didn’t do all that well at this game but Alissa certainly seems to enjoy it.

I keep hoping that there’s some sort of knockdown for Peppermint Fizz for all of her cheating, but it doesn’t seem very likely. Revenge probably isn’t a very good component for a kids’ game. I can just pretend that Strawberry and her friends push Peppermint Fizz into the Punch Bowl Pond and gloat as she gets all sticky and soaked, but that’s beyond the scope of this review.

I have mixed feelings about Strawberryland Games. I did find many of the mini-games enjoyable. Now that Alissa has seen me playing the game, she’s confiscated my DS so she can play it some more. In spite of the amount of written instruction, she is figuring out how to play and is having fun. She really likes that the instruction book smells like strawberries. I wish the instructions were more early-reader friendly, but she’s having a good time, and that’s what counts.