Story Since the movie and game’s plots are similar other than the playable character being inserted into the story, I am going to link the wiki page of the movie here: https://archive.vn/XPDeG Graphics If there is one aspect I can commend them for, it is how well they translated the style of the movie into the game. Some textures and models might look a bit dated, but I was impressed with how the characters look and how some of the environments (most notably Dankweed Pond and the Night Barn) still holds up. Looking at the concept art for the game, it does show how much they were able to complete within the short timeframe and tight budget. After looking at some gameplay between different versions, I noticed that fireflies are present in some versions of the game during the nighttime. Music What can I say, North Mississippi Allstars have done a sublime job of incorporating country, blues, rock, and some electronic music into this game to give it an identity. If there are some songs that stood out to me it would be Night Theme 2, Golf Mini-Game, and Ben’s Death. The Wii version has exclusive tracks, but there is a playlist of this soundtrack on jewtube if you were interested in hearing the other songs in the game.

Gameplay The best way I can compare this game to is not Rockstar Studios’ Grand Theft Auto, but Rockstar Vancouver’s Bully (which is funny since Barnyard came out two months before Bully) since it is a condensed map with a lot to do and your main form of transportation is riding a bicycle. There are secrets you can find if you reach certain milestones in the Night Barn side quest with the Milkweed item and they make use of your Sunglasses really well with some minigames, setting the Super Squirt records, or just spraying the characters with milk. The only good physics in this game is the milk physics since it renders the milk as a stream then into tiny particles with their own little hitboxes. You find recipes and notes throughout the game for tips, lore, or make extra cash. You find ingredients at certain places or create them via unorthodox methods for a comedic factor, for example to make milk you milk yourself into a container that looks like you are urinating. You can eat food to replenish your stamina, instead of waiting. You can upgrade your bike throughout to increases its sprint duration. The game was obviously basing itself off the Mario Party games, especially if you look at promotional material for the game where they had some cut/changed content. There was going to be multiplayer support but that was scrapped, so they had to compensate by having the CPUs playing against you. The problem is that the AI is inconsistent, in terms of difficulty. Some parts of the game were better to control with Keyboard and Mouse or with a controller. On the occasion, the game would crash so it is best to save after a certain period. Also, do not sell stuff in the Gopher Shop or the game will crash when you exit out of it.

The Minigames (ranked from worst to best) 1. Joy Ride – Especially with the Boy Tipping mission, the physics are slippery and the car behaves odd with the KB+M. The acceleration keeps going despite only pressing the W key once, so you had to brake often. It plays better with a Controller, but you will crash at certain parts and must reverse out resulting in losing a life from getting caught by the cops. The music is alright, however. 2. Whac-A-Rac – All you have to do is whack the raccoon and coyote plushies for points and avoid the chicken and egg plushies to not lose points, but hitting Freddy is a game-over. Works fine with both controls. 3. Barnyard Pool – It is self-explanatory. It follows the 15-ball rule in pool, except it is simplified with two colors. The pool table’s design is faithful to the movie, but it sucks playing pool on it. The physics in this is odd, especially when a ball falls into a pocket like a vacuum cleaner. 4. Chasing Chicks – You have to find chicks and send them back through certain targets to earn points, and you can squirt your opponents to distract from sending chicks back to the coop. The AI is easy to exploit, so it is not as fun as other minigames. 5. Milk Bar – If you ever played Root Beer Tapper, then you know how this game works. You fill up shakes, so the customer is happy enough to not reach you. If a glass breaks, then you lose a life and points. You only have five glasses before the game ends, so you have to be careful with managing everything this minigame throws at you. 6. Honey Collecting – You collect honey while trying to avoid the bees, if you collect enough honey then you could get the Royal Jelly, a rare food item in the game. It plays a lot on stealth, so it is a welcome change in gameplay. 7. Barnyard Darts – Very simple, you have to aim at your targets to get points and the faster you get them the more points you get as a bonus. Do not aim at your enemy’s targets or they will get the points. 8. Chicken Launch – This minigame is best played with a controller, but with KB+M it should take some practice since you control Peck like an airplane. Rise of the Valkyries plays throughout as you fly through rings to get boost, so you can reach the finish fast. There are bonus windows in the end to get some extra points. Don’t crash, however there are some funny cutscenes if you launch Peck too soft or too hard. 9. Mud Jumpers – You have to avoid the pipe by jumping over it or kicking it back to your opponents. The pipe increases its speed as it gets kicked more, so it gets more interesting as you try to eliminate the opponents. 10. Tease the Mailman/Mrs. Beady – A simple minigame in which you would do funny moves before the Mailman or Mr. Beady (since Mrs. Beady knows that you walk on two legs already) looks back at you. You must be on all fours, or else they will freak out and you fail the minigame. 11. Bike Race – This was more tolerable compared to Joy Ride, and there are some shortcuts you can take to get ahead. The music is great with this, and I enjoyed myself more racing on a bike than in a vehicle. The AI in this is fair compared to other minigames. 12. The Defender Minigames – There are plenty since they play similar to each other. Use your sunglasses to defend the veggie patch or the chicken coop from raccoons, coyotes, or even nightmare versions of Freddy. If they get an egg, then you have to squirt them and return the egg back to the coop ala Chasing Chicks. With the veggie patch, you will have raccoons that would shoot tomatoes at you, so you have to spray them before they shoot you. The coyotes can attack you, so spray them before they get you. 13. Cow Tipping/Final Boss – This was enjoyable to play. You have a tomato launcher to launch tomatoes at intruders that are trying to tip the cows over. The gophers give you power-ups to help you throughout the minigame. The occasional coyote spawns, but you can terminate them for extra points. The final mission in the game plays similar except you have Wild Mike as a power-up, and you have shoot Daz before he throws barrels at you while defending the chickens against the coyotes. 14. Sharp Squirter – Another favorite of mine since there is skill involved. All you have to do is squirt the cans before the timer runs out. It is simple, but the skill comes from how you chain the cans together since the milk physics were good. It gets more fun as the difficulty gets ramped up. Also, a rendition of Bad to the Bone plays while you complete the minigame. 15. Gopher Golf – This has to be the best minigame, the developers used this five times throughout the main story, in the entire game. It might be long, but it is fun to just clear the holes while listening to the music in the background. The timed version is easy to let you get the hang of how some of the holes work. Hole-in-Ones give you extra lives, so some of the holes are possible to clear in one “stroke”. The precision version is more difficult, but it is enough to give the player a fair challenge. If score high enough on some of these minigames, you get a “Star” rating. If you get enough of them, then you will become the Barnyard Champion. It is a nice bonus for those that put in the effort to get high scores.

The Night Barn This is how you do a major side quest right, in my opinion. When you start out, the night barn is barren, so it is up to you to buy some decorations, party gear, stuff for the bar, etc. to bring in more animals. While some of the progression comes from interacting with the some of the stuff you bought, dancing with the animals, and even unlocking minigames; it is refreshing to see your efforts. Once you reach 100%, then you are the Party Animal. You can bypass a lot of the Gopher Bucks grind by finding hidden Gopher Bucks under a bunch of Treasurebells with your metal detector, and then sleeping to respawn them in. Alternatively, you can use your Golden Rush tokens to create a stream of Gopher Bucks to get them within a time frame, but the previous method is better.

Closing Statements What got me back into playing this game is seeing some people playing it online, and I played it as a kid so I thought it would be fun to revisit it. I played it, and gave my thoughts about the game, the developers, licensed games, etc while I streamed it. There is still a community of players that enjoy the game to this day. While the development studio closed in 2011, they did develop the de Blob franchise which was a critical and financial hit and experimented with a unique gameplay style for the Wii. I wonder where they are now, because the last thing they ever worked on was The Avengers which was set to release back in 2012 but got cancelled. There are archives of their site if you want to dig into how the studio was doing back then. This game, while rough in places, has its moments. My only gripe with this game was the fact there was originally going to be multiplayer in the game as in up to four players could play the minigames and explore the world. I guess that was ambitious for the time since that would not be fully realized in that style until GTA IV’s'online mode became a thing. Again, I would recommend that you check out their promotional material and concept art to see what the game could have been or looked like. You can still explore the areas after you beat the game. In fact, you get access to the junkyard, so you can check around the area and have fun doing tricks on your bike. You can continue finishing up some side quests in the game after beating the campaign. Technically, THQNordic has the rights to Nickelodeon’s properties, but the game itself is technically abandonware since the development studio closed down so you can easily get a copy of the PC game or emulate the Wii/Gamecube version on Dolphin if you like(in fact, this is the best way to bring more attention to the game itself). They recently made a joking tweet about Barnyard to promote the Destroy All Humans remake, and some people still want a remaster of this game so there is still a demand for the game to come back in some form. Hopefully, the multiplayer is fully implemented and cut content is restored. I should add that the PC version is toaster-friendly since the specs for it are not too demanding. My final score for Barnyard: The Video Game is 7.3/10

>>12 one question about ur scoring do u score it as a 7.3 compared to all other games or like a 7.3 for how much u enjoyed it

>>13 It's a little bit of both. If you look at the review scores on Metacritic, my score is stuck between the fans and critics. The game is really good in some aspects like the art style and sidequests, but there are some parts that needed to be fix like crashes, lack of multiplayer support, and adding more content in the form of minigames to add variety. In my opinion, I enjoyed the game then and now despite the crashes I experienced throughout the playthrough. This game doesn't have autosave which is why I stress that you save your game at least every 30 minutes, but you can easily get back on your progress. I would highly recommend this game to people who love open-world games or want to dig into the pockets of gold in licensed games.

great games from the ps2 era. Never really heard/seen anyone talk about them over the years for some reason. Fun town building and weapon development. Weapons breaking in DC1 really pisses me off though.

>>40 DC2 is amazing, so many things to do in that game. I also liked Summoner 2 and Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time.

>>40 >>44 I wouldn't call Prince of Persia or Dark Cloud "overlooked", good games tho

>>46 I just never really see DC mentioned but then again i'm not a /v/ermin. >>44 >summoner 2 shit im pretty sure i used to rent this from blockbuster. I used to have albion on a demo disc as a kid and would would what i can of it for hours on end.

Obvious answer but it deserves the recognition, what can I say

>>55 >Obvious answer

Thrillville: Off the Rails Developed by Frontier Developments Published by LucasArts Release Date: October 9th, 2007 Platforms: Windows, PS2, Xbox 360, Wii, DS, PSP I am going to keep it brief since I do not have a lot of available time to go in-depth with the game, so I am going to go through the highlights of the game. The main thing the game has going for it is the ease of managing the park while you are also doing missions that has you play games, build coasters, manage the park, etc. There are countless amounts of minigames, so you should be fine with having fun (even though the 2-D games are Flash tier, but that’s the mid 2000’s charm). You can customize your own rollercoaster, go-kart tracks, and mini-golf courses, so the possibilities are endless. The music is eh, I prefer the instrumental tracks from the minigames. You can even build relationships with NPCs in the game, you can even get intimate if your player character is a teen with other teen NPCs of the opposite sex. There is story, but I think you will only enjoy it if you play the previous title or like light-hearted stories about the rival (GloboJoy) being the epitome of boring and trying to sabotage the park you are running. While the game is on Steam, you can easily find a crack for the game online. Again, I am keeping it brief because the game has so much content for it to come as is, since this game is the same as the original but revamped graphics and updated the minigames(you can even play some of the original minigames in party mode and unlock prizes from sideshow games). It is a fun, quick game to play if you want a park manager simulator with a lot of content.

>>70 >I am going to keep it brief since I do not have a lot of available time to go in-depth with the game says the guy writing a synopsis for a game on a board with no users