My Vine review of BUZZ Jr.! Jungle Party Bundle

I'm in the Amazon Vine program, which is to say that I sometimes get free merchandise from Amazon on the understanding that I will post a review of it. And indeed I just posted a review of a fun game the girls and I spent a while playing, which review I hereby cross-post:

BUZZ Jr.! Jungle Party Bundle is a PlayStation II game for 1-4 players. (Single players play against the computer; multiple players against one another.) The game comes packaged with special controllers whose confusing snake of wires ultimately plug into your PlayStation's USB port. The controllers have a big red button on the top and four rectangular color buttons on their thumb side. There are 25 mini games. When you start up a game you can elect to play a short, medium, or long match, which consist respectively of four, ten, or twenty mini games. Each of the mini games only takes a few minutes to play. A three-person match of medium length took us about a half hour to complete. In a standard game you do not control which mini games you play, but it's possible to create custom multiplayer games in which you do select your mini games.

The mini games are all very easy to understand. Some require luck, some guesswork; many test the players' ability to quickly match colors on the screen with the colors on their controllers. Many of the games are similar to one another: there are a couple of variations on the game Wonderball, for example, in which a player needs to pass an item to another player before, say, it explodes or causes one's parachute not to deploy. And a game in which one is rewarded for keeping one's head in a lion's mouth for a long time--but not too long--has a conceptual twin in the game which rewards one for..carbonating a bath while a gorilla naps. Whack-a-Squirrel requires players to respond quickly to the color of the hole a squirrel pops out of, and similar skills are required in the hurdle-jumping and log-rolling games.

Players all appear as monkeys who are distinguished by their color--blue, orange, green, and yellow. One can also name one's monkey and personalize it's appearance--face, shirt, and shoes--which will probably make the game even more attractive to the younger crowd.

While the games are easily played even by young children--I played with a five-year-old and an eleven-year-old--the oral directions that precede each mini game are difficult to follow. Once you've played a game for 30 seconds you get it--the very young will require a bit of direction--but almost invariably we were all left wondering what we were supposed to do once the timer started.

The problem with the directions is the only negative I uncovered in some two hours of solid playtime, and once you've played the game once that negative disappears. It's a good family game because it can, as they say, be enjoyed by kids of all ages. We were all laughing aloud while playing. The game is rated E for everyone and it contains, the box notes, "crude humor" and "cartoon violence." True enough: there was implicit monkey flatulence and more than one monkey fell from a great height while saddled with an anvil. A few monkeys also were blown up and, as already noted, a number of squirrels were beaten about the head with over-sized mallets. But then again, those are the sorts of things we were laughing about most.

Tags: Amazon Vine, BUZZ Jr.! Jungle Party Bundle, PlayStation