Barbie Fashion Pack

"Here! Have the dubious pleasure of manipulating Barbie and her friends in a drug-induced make-up session of FEAR"

When you introduce Barbie Fashion Pack's cartridge in your Gameboy, the very first thing you learn is that Mattel actually owns the copyright of the colour “Barbie Pink”. I admit to some surprise at the fact that a natural phenomenon based in the refraction of light can be considered intellectual property of a company, but I digress. Your first action as a player is to choose which doll you want to experiment with: Barbie, or one of her three friends. Apart from the name, the only difference between these four women is the colour of their skin, which scales from white to black in a very politically correct fashion and prompts me to address this game as “United Colours of Barbietton” instead.

Once you've chosen your “character” (a more appropriate term would be “background image”), you need to provide her with cosmetics and clothes. No, these people don't buy their belongings with money like the rest of us mortals –I guess introducing money in the game would have led the children to question where or who does Barbie get her money from, and from there on the subject leaps to much less pleasant thoughts. So, fashion items are now acquired via surreal and mostly psychedelic minigames.

In Barbie Fashion Pack at least, the world of a woman is divided into seven layers and none of them is a philosophical movement. These seven territories of unexplored possibilities are lipstick, jewels, shoes, necklaces, perfume, T-shirts and skirts. Each one of them has its own minigame, although all of them fail pretty much the same way to be entertaining or a challenge, or a game at all for that matter. The skirt minigame, for instance, is a tile puzzle kind of thing where you have to unscramble tiles to form the image of the skirt you're trying to get at the moment. The problem is that it's a 4x4 grid, so it can be solved over and over again just by looking at the skirt's outline: there are so few tiles that nearly all of them have a very obvious border that tells you where to put it, regardless of the pattern or design of the current item.

Other games, on the other hand, make an attempt (if it is an attempt) at increasing the difficulty. In the lipstick game, there are scrolling hearts you have to “shoot” with your lipstick –the idea of shooting lipsticks, incidentally, brings me happy memories of Cold War spy novels, but somehow I doubt the developer(s) did that on purpose. Said hearts, as I was saying, move marginally faster in more advanced levels.

However, attempt at higher difficulty or not, the main flaw of all the minigames is always the same: it is impossible to lose. The game will keep running regardless of how many times you shot the wrong-patterned T-shirt or how long it's taking your evil shoe-eating purse to, well, eat shoes. With the target player being the average 6-years-old girl, it would be unfair to have the Gameboy self-destruct as soon as the kid makes a mistake, but the point is that she's human, never mind her age. Being human has its perks, and one of them is having a handy brain that can learn new skills and develop them with practice. As opposed to doorstops, which I imagine having a remarkably hard time doing either. Every minigame in Barbie should be asked who it is trying to please: human or doorstop? The only one that seems to steer in the general direction of “human” is the perfume game, a pipe-constructing game where you need to form a channel between one end of a maze and the other. This one does force the player into some kind of conscious activity rather than reducing them to a sobbing, instinct-based shadow of their former self.

Other than that, one thing shocks me: for a game that gives so much importance to physical appearance, it's remarkably difficult to make your Barbie look decent. The aforementioned copyright screen mentions 2000 as the year of its release, but all the visuals in this game have such a late 80s / early 90s feel to them that I kind of expect Madonna to bust a move on-screen every time I get to the main menu. That means big hair, bows, trainers with an otherwise formal attire, white T-shirts with various drawings of violent colours… A pink (Barbie Pink?) backpack with smiley and “peace” sign badges on it brings us even further into the past, posing the question of just when did the developers intend to release this game initially.

That comment on Barbie's outfit choice was as deep as a glass of water, but so is the game. When you're not playing minigames, you go to some kind of dressing room where you can have your mannequin try whatever you got her. This part is actually the game's objective –once you've got a new garment, you go to the dressing room and put it on Barbie. Looking at the doll smile even when she's wearing shoes that don't match her purse is all the reward you're getting, because there really isn't anything at all you can do with your prizes except looking at them.

So, in short, Barbie Fashion Pack offers a unique chance to dispassionately play games that fail to be a challenge in order to obtain circa-1987 garments and jewels which you can look at. If that sounds appealing to you, go ahead and buy the game –but if you're looking for a present for someone else, for someone nice especially, allow me to suggest that you get something else. The appalling minigames might not make this game unplayable to die-hard fans of Barbie, but I can't think of anyone who could possibly need to give even more importance to physical appearance, in this day and age… And that's all this game has to teach.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 04/27/05