Great Starter Game - A must have!

BE CAREFUL THIS GAME IS HIGHLY ADDICTIVE!

OK here the situation, I have a 7-year-old daughter and a 2-year-old son. I was thinking about buying a Play Station 2 for Christmas, but my wife and I were not sure if the kids were old enough to enjoy it. So we went to our local Blockbuster video and rented on for a week. I also rented 3 games; Crash Bandicoot 2, Tony Hawks Pro Skater, and Red Faction.

So, we get the PS2 home, plug it in and the first game we try is Crash Bandicoot. The idea behind this game is that you control a character named Crash. Crash looks a bit like a fox with a huge toothy smile and the agility of a gymnast. You choose from a variety of different situations where your goal is to collect a gemstone and as many of these little balls as possible. It harmless, clean fun there is no violence of any kind and the charters Disney-like in their demeanor, that is to say they are basically harmless.

What is so cool about this game is I had as much fun playing it as my daughter did. There are no complicated rules to follow, the controls are very basic. You can jump, duck, crawl, run, turn and do various combinations of these functions. One of the keys to making this game fun for little kids is that as you progress you hit checkpoints. This means you won’t have to start from the beginning each time Crash “dies” (note: he doesn’t really die, he just gets tagged or runs out of time, or steps on a trap). The other thing that makes it great for kids is the fact that it is very easy to get additional lives. While my two-year-old is a bit young to enjoy playing this game, he loved to watch his sister play it, and he like watching the characters move around on TV.

I think they could have improved on this game by making it multi-player. I have seen several games where the screen was split to allow two players at a time to play. They could have even set it up for player 1 and player 2 to allow for some competition. The other thing my daughter wanted was to play the part of Crashes girlfriend. I don’t know her name but she is featured in the opening cartoon. None of these are big deals but would make the game just that much more fun.

My daughter loves the fact that the characters tell the whole story before the game starts. She also spent countless hours playing this game and never got bored or frustrated. I spent some time playing the other games we rented, but for family fun Crash is our top pick. It looks like we will be buying a PS2 any day now and Crash will definitely be the one of the 1st game we get.