Winx Club is a show that my daughter has enjoyed watching on Saturday mornings this year, and so she was very excited when we were given the chance to review the game based on the TV show. The two of us sat down together to play Winx Club: Quest for the Codex because I was curious to see just how “girly” the game was, as I know that my two sons are also often caught watching Winx Club right beside their sister in the mornings. The game is very much like what the show is, one that was probably created to target a young girl market, but brothers will suffer through as well because it's just that fun.The game is divided into what most games of the type are, either Story Mode, where you play the story to help the Winx Club defeat Darkar and his plans to rule the universe, and Arcade Mode, where you can pick which mini game to play. The story is filled with cut scenes that make use of both the top and bottom screens on the DS to form one overall image. Often times the middle of the image looks strange when the developers try to do this, but not with Winx Club. The graphics on this game are very clean, sharp and look to me to be just like the ones used in the cartoon. Of course, they are basically a series of still images used to tell the story, not animated images like in the cartoon, but this style of art works for the game. The sound is generally high pitched, fairy type music, but it fits with the theme of the cartoon. What this has meant in my house, though, is that headphones are a requirement when playing the game if you want sound on. Keep in mind that if your daughter (or son in my case) is playing the game to find out the story, reading is required. The story is told as you read the dialog between the characters, though the developers were thinking of kids when they created the game, and you have to press the “A” button to advance the text.
So what are the games like? Well, pretty typical for a kid's adventure game, but they do make better use of the DS technology than many do. Most of the mini games require you to use the stylus and use both screens to play the games. And there is a nice variety of them to keep kids busy for quite some time. In fact, it is one of those games that my daughter has picked up often over the last few weeks. There are 6 different mini-games, and in between playing the mini-games in story mode, you'll have to battle the bad guys and try to rescue the little fairies. This portion of the game is your typical side-scroller game where you move using the arrow keys, fire with the A button, and your special abilities are on the other buttons. So far they have been pretty easy to get through, with a bigger “boss” at the end of the level that you can use the special abilities on.
As for the mini-games, they are the best part of the game as far as we're concerned.
Tecna's game: Tecna is the Winx with the technological mind. In her game you are trying to create a data path by using the stylus to move tiles of various shapes into place to form the shortest path from the input to output, squashing bugs and speeding up the data stream once the path is complete. The game board is divided into a grid, and the pieces are given to you at random, so you'll sometimes want to put a piece off to the side rather than along your data path. And you need to keep in mind that the data is moving the whole time you're building the data path, so you need to move quickly.
Stella's game: Stella is like the mother of the fairy bunch, the one who tries to keep the pixies safe. In her game you use the stylus to draw lines to bounce the Sun Ball off of and keep it on the game board. Your goal is to pass it by the pixies on the screen, and rescue them before time runs out.
Bloom's game: Poor Bloom is plagued by nightmares for various reasons throughout the story. Your job is to “chase the shadow” of her nightmares in hopes of getting them to go away. Her game is the most difficult. You have to keep up with the little shadow pixie as she flits up and down quickly across the screen. To be honest, we're still not sure how we've gotten beyond this particular mini-game when it comes up, we just try to get as high a score as possible. There seems to be a critical point where you get a good enough score to move on, but neither of us is sure how to tell what that is.
Musa's game: Musa is the musical fairy of the bunch. In her game you pick the right instrument and play the notes in time to the music as they pass by the keyboard. The notes are shaped like one of four instruments, and float down from the top screen to the bottom. This game isn't all that difficult if you have a sense of rhythm, as the music with it has a steady beat, and you usually only have to play one note while the other is just coming down from the top screen. This is the mini-game that both my daughter and I like playing the best.
Flora's Game: Flora is the little naturalist of the bunch, and is trying to grow her garden. Your job is to help Flora protect her vines from the incoming bugs by firing bug spray at them. You also can collect different power-ups that give you special abilities, but the real trick to the game is to both move quickly and try to keep track of what order the bugs appeared on screen. The bugs will start to attack the vine no matter how fast you tap your stylus on them to fire at them, you just have to make sure they don't get to munch for too long before hitting them with the bug zapper. And from what we can tell, there is no pattern to the order that the bugs come out in, it is pretty random, so the game is different each time.
Layla's game: Layla likes to get down and boogie. (And yes, my daughter rolled her eyes at me too when I said that out loud, so you can too.) The directions for the game say to “get up on the floor and get down with Layla”, though, so I'm not so old that the phrase isn't still used. It seems that every game like Winx Club comes out with their own version of “DDR for the fingers”, and this one is no exception. This game doesn't use the stylus, but uses the arrow pad and “A” button well, with you having to match the image on the screen with the direction as it passes off the bottom of the screen in time to the music. The one disadvantage about this sort of set up is that you're so busy watching the lower part of the screen, glancing up every now and then to see what's coming next, that you don't really get to see what moves Layla is doing in response to your timing, be it good or bad timing. This game is almost as difficult to get through as Bloom's game is, but with Layla's we at least understand what we're doing wrong to get a low score. And practice does seem to make perfect.
What we like about arcade mode is that you don't have to play through the story mode first. Many games now are requiring you to unlock the mini-games by playing through story mode. This can get frustrating if you're stuck at a part in the story and just can't get beyond it. With the design of Winx Club: Quest for the Codex you don't have to worry if you're stuck at a point in story mode. You can go play the mini-games you like and just come back to the story when you are ready to try again. I also like that most of the mini-games have different difficulty levels to them that you can set in arcade mode, giving an appropriate challenge level to different aged gamers.
Overall the game is a simple one, nothing groundbreaking in it, but no real flaws that we've found either. As I said earlier, it is one my daughter comes back to frequently to play, and I've even found her older brother playing sometimes too. If your kids are fans of Winx Club, then we recommend it highly. Whether you pick it up to play through a few chapters in story mode, or just to try to do a little better at one of the mini-games, it is still a fun game for kids of all ages.
I’ve played computer games since college, addicted first to story type games like Might and Magic. I have 3 children who also love computer games. My oldest son is a typical kid who loves the challenge of pressing the right combination of buttons and levers on a joystick in just the right way to make something happens, and frequently gets frustrated with mom’s slow fingers. ;) We use computers for both education and entertainment, and sometimes even bribery for good behavior.
The “glory days” of computer gaming for me were when games like Spectre Supreme, Pirate’s Gold, the Might and Magic series, the original Prince of Persia… those sorts of games were coming out on a regular basis. Back then I owned a Macintosh and was a die hard Mac fan. I was one of the first in my area to buy an iMac and on it learned the joy of playing games on the internet like daily crossword puzzle and “mind bender” type puzzles. My first online RPG was given to me for Christmas the year EQ was released, and I was hooked from day one. I played EQ for about a year. I started playing DaoC during late alpha testing, and was hooked on it.. well, to be honest I still am. I’ve tried pretty much every MMORPG I can get my hands on, from big names like EQ, to more obscure ones such as Underlight. I’ve been writing for IMGS since the first DaoC guide, and find I love the challenge of learning a game and presenting what I’ve learned (and sometimes my opinions), to other players.
I’m not a very strong player as far as learning PvE or quick reaction times, so I tend to stay away from games where I’m pitted against someone else in a way that requires physical (rather than mental) response. I still enjoy story and puzzle games, and in a way that’s how I still approach online games. I would much rather spend hours working through a quest than 5 minutes in combat against another player. I still get lost in simulation type games, obsessing over them until I’ve gotten them beaten. And I like being able to sit down at the computer when I’ve got less than half an hour and playing through a few levels of a puzzle game. I tend not to like first-person shooter type games, or anything with person to person violence, so I steer away from them unless they are fantasy based settings. All in all, I enjoy computer gaming so much that my life feels incomplete somehow when my computer is down.
