Pogo Island

Video games have so many valuable lessons to teach us: how else would you have found out that punching a coloured box could yield a magic mushroom that instead of freaking you out and making you think your friend Dave's beard was stalking you, would actually make you giant? Or that beating up hookers was okay, so long as you didn't get caught? Nowhere in life do these opportunities present themselves quite so clearly as in the world of the video game, so it's a good thing we have them to fall back on when our parents, teachers, partners and bosses can't give us what we need. In playing POGO Island, a new Nintendo DS adventure mini-game romp from Electronic Arts, I was privy to another great wisdom: If you're a parrot, don't steer your pirate ship with your eyes closed. In fact, don't steer your pirate ship, full stop. Leave it to someone with hands.

After shipwrecking on a gopher infested island, your crew (the usual suspects, a Gilligan look-a-like, walking cactus, etc) disperse to find the bits and bobs needed to get you back on the seas while you take the opportunity to grab 40 winks on board your ship. So you wrecked it? That doesn't mean you have to try and fix it! What's the point of being a captain if you can't sleep while your minions do all the work? Day turns to night, so the story goes, and night turns to day. You wake to see that exactly zero of your homies have returned with roughly the same amount of badly needed supplies. It just proves what we already know right? You can't send a walking cactus to do a talking parrot's job.

The island is arranged almost like a board game and to advance you'll first have to spin the 'move spinner' with your stylus. The number corresponds to how far you'll go and on each space you'll need to complete a mini-game before moving on. Winning the game may reunite you with one of your friends, or provide you with a piece of equipment needed for your ship, with 'winning' being a rather loose term for completing the minimum requirements of the game. There are, of course, a number of extras you'll get for not just winning the game, but by beating other milestones. Some of these are set down at the beginning of the game while others are nice surprises at the end.

There are five mini-games, each with varying levels of difficulty and what I found to be a rather surprising variety. You'd think that five games couldn't really sustain themselves over the entire story, but I'll go on record as being rather fickle, as a rule, and I'm not sick of it yet. At some locations you're bullied into playing the game occupying that game square, while on others you can play whichever of the five you choose. Poppit, Word Whomp, TriPeaks Solitaire, Phlinx and Squelchies are all surprisingly arresting. The rating on this game is 3+, which lead me to believe I'd be assailed by mind numbing game play with a few bright lights and colours tacked on. Not so. In fact, I found with two of the games in particular, Word Whomp and TriPeaks, anyone under the age of 10 or 11 will struggle.

Poppit sees you popping balloons in groups of two or more, with more points being added for larger numbers of like coloured balloons popped simultaneously. It works kind of like reverse Tetris, and to add to the excitement there are various power-ups hidden among them. Word Whomp has you trying to make words of three letters or more from a group of six presented by a team of gophers. There's a golden word to find, a hint feature if you get stuck and of course at least one six-letter word in each game. This is easily the hardest of the five, with a harsh two-minute limit. TriPeakes Solitaire is a modified version of the old classic, made easier by changing the way cards can be laid down - a three on a two or a four, a five on a four or a six, etc. Fame and fortune is dictated by your speed and the order you flip the pyramids of cards stacked above the main deck, as well as how many you manage to flip, period. Phlinx is so much like Puzzle Bobble that if you've ever played the original you'll be an immediate expert. A new twist is that connecting like-with-like is only half the battle; the object with Phlinx is to detach clusters by breaking them away from the main pack. A number of power ups come into play here too. Squelchies will put you in mind of the old Space Invaders game. Again, it's a matter of getting groups of the same colours together so they self-destruct, but it's organised in columns this time, with the group descending ominously if you fail to pull them out of their original columns and put them with their friends in a timely fashion.

POGO Island is ultimately a spin off of the POGO.com website, set up some time ago to offer desktop diversions. According to their membership counter, the time-wasters number in the hundreds of thousands and it seems popular demand has prompted the aforementioned five to be ported from the website to the Nintendo DS. This means you can test the mini-games out on line, and then make a decision about dropping whatever RRP is on the DS version. Although, while it is a pretty cool kids game, and even good for a laugh where the oldies are concerned, the fact that you can get these games on line (sans story) effectively reduces the value for money of POGO Island to nil. The mini-games are a bit of fun, but not that good that playing them on your DS will add any real depth. What the DS version does allow for is a Wi-Fi link-up with POGO.com, .co.uk, or .ca depending on where you are in the world; unfortunately, as far as I have been able to ascertain, Kiwi gamers haven't been taken into account. The link lets a gamer transfer tokens, earned in various ways throughout the game, to their online account where they can use them to buy into prize draws. Even after playing the game for a week, I have hundreds of tokens saved up, but they've nowhere to go.

Graphically, there's not a great deal of envelope pushing happening, but the visuals are rendered nicely and bits and pieces of 3D animation have been used to spice things up. It's with joy I report that the sound, while fairly simple is for the most part above average and the music they have used is repetitive but up-beat, plenty of fun, and, most importantly for a puzzler, not annoying. For now, useless token accumulation aside, I am happy to crack on and attempt to reach the top level of experience – Island Guru. Until I get there, I'll satisfy myself with the five mini games on offer, as well as the various micro-games and other secrets to be found on the island, of which I'm sure there's a number – it's not often a game gets through quality control at Nintendo without at least a few surprises included. I would suggest that anyone wooed by the above play online first; why buy the cow when you can play with its Squelchies for free?