Napoleon Dynamite (DS)

GameSpot editors' review

• CNET editors' rating: 2.0 stars Mediocre
  Detailed editors' rating
  Overall score: 4.0 (2.0 stars)

• Reviewed by:
  Alex Navarro
• Reviewed on: 01/04/2008
• Released on: 10/30/2007
• Originally published on GameSpot: Napoleon Dynamite (DS) Review

It's difficult to imagine a less needed game than Napoleon Dynamite: The Game, and yet, here it is. This handheld collection assembles a series of less-than-stellar minigames and builds them around a number of wacky characters and situations from the 2004 oddball cult-classic comedy film. This is the sort of game you'd see quickly churned out to coincide with a film's release or at least some kind of DVD release. That's not the case here. The developers at 7 Studios and publisher Crave decided that more than three years past the film's height of popularity was the right time to strike with a game adaptation of Napoleon Dynamite. That error in timing might have been forgivable if the games were even halfway amusing, but sadly, no such luck.

For Napoleon Dynamite, the developers cobbled together a collection of minigames that seem like they were cribbed from the most mediocre cell-phone games imaginable. There's the "toss the object farther than someone else" game, the half-baked target shooting game, the idiot-simple bowling game, the occasional attempt at a scrolling shooter, and, of course, the requisite dancing game with PaRappa the Rapper-style mechanics.

The games occasionally break out of the realm of pure mobile-phone-download mediocrity, but these attempts tend to be aggressively unpleasant as opposed to merely boring. The few bouts where Napoleon takes on the role of a Rex-kwan-do master, fighting a lot of hapless ninjas and such, are so bereft of coherency that all you need to do is mash random buttons and most likely you'll end up a winner without even realizing it--though "winner" in this case is definitely relative. Then there are the occasional awful sports games, like the hopelessly dull tetherball game and the world's most awkward dodgeball game not to feature Stephen Root in bondage gear. Dodgeball is especially bad. You're partnered up with your best pal, Pedro, but you can control only one player at a time, and the CPU player is terrible at dodging enemy attacks. The good news is that you can use the same dashing jump attack and hit an opponent square in the face 19 out of 20 times.

Dodgeball is hardly the only game to suffer from problems like these. The PSP version of Napoleon Dynamite offers about 30 minigames, and the DS version includes around 25. Out of these, maybe two or three are enjoyable. That's not exactly a great ratio. It's worth noting that the PSP and DS versions of the game offer essentially identical minigames, though the mechanics tend to differ slightly based on each system's control mechanics. However, the differences are slight, and the problems are almost always the same across the board.

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