Hey kids! Do you like monkeys? Do you like custom buzzers (sold separately)? Do you have three friends with you at all times? Are you a tween with a penchant for slamming your digits into colored buttons? Do you often answer questions while reading a review? If you answered yes to all of these or you're a 20-something college kid that's currently in the middle of a study on the effects of rapid alcohol ingestion while playing video games, Buzz Junior is for you!
If not, there's a good chance Jungle Party isn't exactly going to get your motor runnin'. For starters, it's clearly skewed toward a younger crowd, which is fine; just because a game is made for kids, that doesn't automatically rule it out for older gamers, but with an overly-cutesy announcer and the most basic of objectives all centered around a controller with a big red button and four colored ones, there's just not a lot here to keep the non-inebriated from really having a good time at length.
That doesn't mean the game can't be fun in small doses, but there's an awful lot of cutting/pasting of basic concepts with the setting changed. Granted, the concepts as a whole are sound -- holding onto an anvil while skydiving to gain points only to pitch it over to someone else right before hitting the ground creates a great risk/reward scenario -- but this same idea is repeated with sliding down tree branches, sticking a head in a lion's mouth, stealing an ostrich's egg and so on.
The same goes for a handful of shooting games that range from lobbing coconuts to popping balloons and quick-fire color matching challenges that have you chopping through totem poles or juicing up rockets. Again, none of these concepts are bad, but they're stretched perhaps a bit more than they should be and more variety would have meant the game could have been expanded to longer play sessions and a wider audience. Of course, to even play the game at all, you have to buy Buzz! The Mega Quiz, which is absolutely aimed at an older audience, so perhaps this is Sony trying to cover their bases.
Regardless of repetition and recycling of core concepts, the work that developer Magenta Software put into the game shows. The little simians that make up your in-game avatar are adorably animated, exhibiting plenty of little touches like smooth transitions between animations (for instance, a monkey clapping in approval will eventually seamlessly transition into the same basic idle animation as a monkey that just got zapped by lightning). The limited scope of the mini-games means a nice amount of detail and stylized modeling could go into the jungle environments, and for the most part the textures are certainly palatable.
With the exception of one Becky Boxer, the game's almost condescendingly sweet announcer, the only sounds coming out of your speakers will be driving jungle rhythms, heavy chanting and generally tropical, plucky tunes. Throw in a bunch of monkey screeches and you have a game that actually sounds rather good. Sure, ol' Becky and her overly cute voice can grate after a while, but the rest of the audio is really quite nice.
The Verdict
I know this is a fairly short review, but there's honestly not a whole lot to Jungle Party. That doesn't mean it's a bad game, but with an obviously younger slant to the presentation and only 25 games to play -- a good chunk of which are eerily similar to other game types -- this isn't a shindig that will be able to lure the whole family to the PS2.
