Not the best...

Another title from the Time to Ride series! The first two games were pretty good despite their flaws, and even had endings that could satisfy this "big" girl. Saddles and Stables is somewhat of a stinker. If you're a teenage girl, I think you'll be thrilled with this game. Everybody likes a good story though, and the one this game provides is so sadly bare boned. The developers should just abandon the Virtools platform and work off a decent gaming engine that would allow them to do more - the horse gets stuck on fences and trees and sometimes the viewpoint is obscured. I really don't know what's with the weird camera angles as well - a lot of the chores play out viewed from above. There also isn't a way of gaging when to jump as in the other games, except to hit the spacebar and hope for the best :-)

The heroine of this game is a plucky red haired teenager named Amanda. She and her father leave the city to live on a horse farm. Not much happens as you try to level your horse up through cross-country, jumping and dressage. The dressage part was very mystifying as the manual didn't have instructions for it. The pattern you are supposed to follow does change colour, but in the end I gathered that your score depends on how smoothly you take the turns and how straight you can go in a line. There is actually only one competition, a jumping one, and it's essential to the plot. There are two "dreams" in this game, which were kind of neat. The goal is to get Amanda's horse, Sapphire, to follow a light in a dark forest while being pursued by a strange force. The second dream is very hard because Sapphire gets stuck on trees, and the view is often blocked by trees too!

This game differs from the others in several ways. First of all, it's very linear and they made things as dumbed down as possible. For example, question marks appear near places of action, so players don't have to go blindly searching around for things. Secondly, the long distances between places has also been removed; now when Amanda wants to travel, she simply exits the farm and you get to choose between the town, where some smart mouthed kids hang out behind the tack shop, or the riding club. Amanda also has a bedroom in the house, where you can change her outfits.

On the other hand, the graphics and music are very nice and pleasing. It would be nice if there was more of a "free form" place to ride as in the other games. The chores are also much easier to do, even if there are more of them. It's more apparent when a task is done as well. Sometimes you only need to do a couple of tasks and upon exiting the barn, you'll find that the ones you didn't do have checkmarks.

The ending seems to indicate that there might be a sequel. I don't know why I keep getting suckered into these games. My husband watches over my shoulder and shakes his head. "You do know," he said once, "that all these games are basically the same?"

I know, I know. But I keep hoping that one of them will be decent too.