To make good on the game for a typical 'kid movie' is to include some gameplay that follows the setting of the movie, throw in a few pieces of story and maybe some dialogue or text that supports the movie connection. But,
Wild Thornberry's on GBA is actually a free-standing attraction, every bit as solid as any children's game on the market, movie tie-in or not. In fact, this is probably one of the most appropriate licensed products for this age group I've seen on Game Boy. The problem usually is that a game is dumbed down to meet the younger gamers, who in fact don't need any dumbing down and can play as well or better than older kids. So, the challenge becomes attention span. To meet the challenge, some games appear to give up all hope of being fun after 5 minutes, as if the developers were hoping kids would check out after a while and not notice how much the rest of the game stunk. The perfect answer to the attention issue is what
Wild Thornberry's does in providing lots of fun mini games for kids to tackle. It seems a fairly common theme these days for younger properties like
Rugrats,
Rocket Power and any other Nickelodeon asset, but
Wild Thornberry's manages the difficult task of balancing mini-game gameplay with other exploration and action gaming. In a nutshell, the exploring part of the game is done well enough, so it never gets in the way of the little mini-games. And, the in-between levels manage to still convey some teaching stuff that is fun, like matching shapes and colors or counting and recognizing patterns. Kids can be really good at this stuff, but
Wild Thornberry's does a lot to help a kid flex his mental muscles during the game.
The entire game feels like a series of mini-games, but some of the actual mini-games come ready for Multiplayer, which is a hoot! Alone, kids have plenty to do, and although stages can seem a little complex at times, they resolve to pretty simple objectives. In one of the stages, you have to keep a bunch of cubs from being taken by poachers. The poachers hover over a field in a helicopter and will periodically come down to grab a cub. You can tell they're coming down by looking at a shadow on the ground. The cubs will wander away, there are zebras running through the field to confuse things, and most kids won't get it right on the first try. Luckily, there are short descriptions and hints in the game manual and in the game itself. With half a dozen actual mini-games, you find a more relaxed pace and puzzles that require matching shapes and colors or counting skill. The Multiplayer mode, using linked GBA units, has 3 mini-games for play with up to 3 others gamers. These are mostly races, much more action oriented than the 1-Player games, but fun for that reason.
