ZZZZ...huh, what? Oh, Spyro, right...

The Gist
I bought this game recently, remembering the cool PS2 commercials I saw a few years back when Spyro first came out. This being the first Spyro game I've played, I can't say that this review reflects all the other Spyro games, but oh my, this is a very, very dull game. I suppose that it's good for my two year old daughter, who likes the bright colors and the little purple dragon, but for a person who likes video games, uh-uh. Maybe it would make a good first-platformer for the blooming gamer. Maybe. But my senses were dulled while I played this "collect a thousand jewels, listen to a buzzing dragonfly and slow speaking dragons" game.
The Shiny
First off, I do give congratulations to the crew in the graphics department. Vibrant colors, nice details. But when they cram hours of slow spoken dialog into an already slow paced game, it just makes for sleepy time. The kids, who this game is clearly targeted to, sure don't have the attention span to sit through all of the speeches you get in this game. Every time you rescue one of the sage dragons from imprisonment, he goes into this loooong speech about "How brave you are", "you will make a good dragon yet", blah blah blah. Come one, give me some direction as to where I should go, or an upgrade or something! Sheesh, but please, spare the monologue for the "Crossfire" show. And I was most disappointed to the fact that Spyro, a dragon with wings, has a very limited flying ability, which you cannot initiate at all except for bonus levels, which is a shame, because flying is one of the more fun parts of the game. Spyro can glide and then hover at the end of his glide. But this flying dragon acts more like a stinking pterodactyl, because he has to climb a hill and jump off the glide to anything higher than he can jump. Lame-o.
Sound FX
The amount of spoken dialog is impressive, but that's not enough to offset the poor quality of voice acting, oh, and did I mention the hair pulling slowness of it? Granted, you can press the A button to skip the speech, but then you have to squint at the text to know what the heck's going on. When you meet someone new to yak at, it's like a traktor beam takes over your control, and slowly positions you in front of the schmuck you have to listen to. The music is rather sleep inducing. It reminds me of 80's type pop. The noise of Spyro's footfalls gets quite old quickly, too. So does the water when you run thru it. It's all just on a very short loop that repeats over and over.

The Rundown
The object of the game is to collect all the crystals in any given level to unlock the door to the next level. There are several mini games, the most entertaining one I played was flying around through hoops and blasting rickshaws on a racetrack. His fire and ice breaths are cool, but the enemies are one-hit-wonders, in that they take just one fire breath to knock-out. The baddies are mostly other dino-type creatures, some being ninja clad, others with bandanas, but all are the same as far as attacking them goes. Huff and a puff, see ya later! A lot of this game is spent waiting...waiting on speaking characters, waiting on loading times, waiting on silly animations, etc. etc. etc. I honestly don't know how long the game is, because I quit playing somewhere in the second level. But I doubt that I gets any better.