Barney's Hide and Seek

"I just HAD to play it to see how bad it was..."

Beginning Stuff: One day, in GameFAQs land, our hero, Matt Hendrick was just finishing up another day at the message boards. After he was finished, he decided to read some reviews of bad video games. Soon enough, he found reviews for Barney's Hide and Seek. He immediately noticed that there were six reviews, all rating the game ''1''. His curiosity aroused, he decided to get the game for a few minutes just to see how bad it truly was. After playing it, he was much inclined to agree with the other six reviewers who suffered through this crap before him.

Graphics: This was the best area of the game. YEAH, like that's saying much. Granted, this is a children's game, so I wasn't expecting a Final Fantasy 8 graphics masterpiece, but the graphics look cartoony as hell, even for a Sega children's game. Oh well, I suppose two or three year olds would go for it, until they start to spew out their first curse words upon playing the game for more than ten seconds. Just to be nice, I will give this game a 2 (out of 10), because of the ridiculously cartoony graphics, with an extra point thrown in because the Genesis is an old system.

Sound: The sound is one step below the graphics, one step off a cliff that is. I'll give them some credit however, they managed to do a near perfect emulation of Barney's voice. The bad thing is, they made that damn dinosaur sound just like his real life counterpart! God, I hate that voice! I'm going to give this a 1.5, with the extra .5 thrown in because of the way Sega did Barney's voice. Geez, I'm being WAY too nice on these reviews. Oh, and as for the other sound, there is none, other than the background ''music'' (don't worry, soon, I'll rip that part as well), and the normal ''I got an item'' sound effects that don't help or harm the game.

Music: As Beavis and Butthead would say when watching a bad music video, ''Heh heh, this music sucks, heh heh''. The people in charge of the music department must have been high on something REALLY strange when they decided to butcher old children's classics such as ''Old MacDonald'' and the Popeye theme song. Hmm..high on something strange. Seeing as how Christmas is coming up, I should find some of that stuff for a few of my stoner friends back home :). Anyway, off of that tangent, the ''music'' consists of very poorly done remakes of the aforementioned songs, in MIDI form. Granted, they couldn't use real audio back then, but I've heard some AWESOME MIDIs, so there is still no excuse for bad music. The last gripe about the music is its loop frequency. The music loops, it seems, every 30 seconds. This makes the music very repetitive, very quick (and I'm in danger of sounding repetitive unless I get off the music subject quickly.) I rate this crap a 1.

Gameplay: Note: The following section is a joke, and NOT to be taken seriously.

Wow, I didn't know that a seemingly crappy childrens game could pack so many RPG elements into it. Without giving any big spoilers, I will try to cover the awesome elements of the game. Here's the backstory, the hero is alone and looking for the rest of his party, who had gone into hiding. Yet, in spite of this horrible event, he always tries to keep a happy face, something that many other RPG heroes of today cannot do.

As far as abilities are concerned, like many heroes, Barney has many of them. Besides the normal ablilites of walking and jumping, Barney can also cast a number of spells, most of which have seen action in an old school Dungeons and Dragons game. Some of these spells include..

(Some of the spell descriptions may be similar to a D+D handbook, but I'm not sure)

Charm Animal: This powerful incantation alters the animal's mind, making it think that the caster is its best friend. The animal will do anything for the caster, including many humanlike activities. When used effectively, the hero's workload is severely cut down.

Animate Object: This spell brings inanimate objects to life, such as musical instruments. Other than this difference, this has essentially the same effect as Charm Animal.

I could list more, but I don't want to spoil the game for anyone willing to play this RPG masterpiece.

This is the end of the joke section

Back to reality and what you're about, your wife can't sm...err..Back to reality (ICP is stuck in my head again..)

The gameplay consists of walking, jumping, finding children, and finding presents. When you find a child, he/she will hug Barney, and be added to the list of children found. The same thing happens when you find a present, except that the presents don't hug Barney. You can also interact with various objects as well, but that's nothing special, just playing the instruments and interacting with the animals.

The section about the spells earlier was partially true, but Barney's only magic comes from a small sprinkle of dust which causes animals to be happy. I wouldn't normally gripe about this, but it doesn't make much of a difference how many animals you help in the game. In fact, I don't think it makes ANY difference, but if you think I'm going to play this game again just to find out, you are SADLY mistaken. The worst thing is, you can beat the game without doing anything at all. I tried to walk through a level without doing anything, and I was still able to beat it. Oh, and you also can't die. If you try to walk off of a cliff, Barney will hold up a ''Stop'' sign and tell you to wait until it's safe to cross. This game is about as deep as the girls from ''Clueless'', and even young children will think so too. Thus, I give the gameplay a 0.5, with the half point thrown in because you can interact with the animals and musical instruments.

''Okay, should I buy or should I rent'': Personally, I don't think any rental store is stupid enough to carry this game, but I wouldn't buy it either. This game is just not worth the five bucks that you would probably pay for it at a used game retailer. Hell, it's not even worth the space on my hard drive. However, if you need some practice smashing things, your doorstop's busted, or you need a big paperweight, Barney's Hide and Seek is perfect for you. Just don't try to play it, mmkay?

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 11/29/00, Updated 11/29/00