Cartoon Kingdom

Cartoon Kingdom
Dress your favourite Dingo Pictures characters in a way that will make them hate you!
Genre(s): Puzzle Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Release: 2006 Developer(s): The Code Monkeys Publisher(s): Phoenix Games Country: United Kingdom

Cartoon Kingdom is a puzzle game developed by The Code Monkeys and published by Phoenix Games for the PlayStation 2. It is a collection of memory games, puzzle games and dress-up games based on films developed by Dingo Pictures, and is the only Dingo Pictures-related game that doesn't feature a film.

Gameplay

This is a collection of minigames that involve, for example, connecting dots, dressing characters, arranging puzzles, matching two of the same elements, etc. The collection has a little more minigames than other collections from Phoenix Games.

Why It Sucks

1. It's not even a game, just a collection of minigames created without ideas for a more interesting game to release the product as soon as possible.
2. Unlike the other Dingo Pictures-related games, Cartoon Kingdom has no feature film on it. Even with the game featuring more minigames than any of the other "games" in this series, it is still one of PlayStation 2's worst games for content, and still nothing justifies the laziness of the developers who worked on this game, and the reluctance to put more into the collection, and make them hastily.
3. Barely any music or sound effects, which can mainly lead to silence, and also shows how lazy the developers are.
4. The entire thing can be experienced in around 10 minutes. It cannot be "completed" as there is no hard mode. You just play until you get bored or frustrated enough to turn it off. In other words, it is one of the shortest, if not even the shortest game you can find on PlayStation 2, and also one of the easiest, if not the easiest with virtually no challenge.
5. It features puzzles from several Dingo Pictures movies, all of which have different names that are not used anywhere else for unexplainable reasons. For example, "Countryside Bears" is listed as "Crazy Bears".
6. The dress-up game is badly designed. Clothing items clip, and some of them barely fit, or don't fit the models at all. It's as if the developers didn't even check the character models and clothes themselves, and just randomly added it all.
7. If you make a mistake in connect the dots, there is no back function, you have to start again. It's as if the developers were so lazy that they didn't even bother to add such a simple function as to reset, and just made this minigame in a hurry.
8. There's a strange emphasis on the Jester character, like Code Monkeys expected them to catch on which is actually idiotic, because this character can get irritating quickly, and doesn't really matter much.
9. The characters in the dress-up games aren't even the ones from the movies that they are from, such as the brown bear from "Crazy Bears" who doesn't resemble ANY of the Countryside Bear cast, which already proves that the developers were not even faithful to the source material, and did not want to understand it, they just decided to create their own characters that were not in any of the cartoons.
10. There's a Simon Says minigame that's as exciting as it sounds, which is actually not exciting at all, because there is virtually no gameplay, and is just an attempt to justify the laziness of the developers who made this game.
11. The branding has such poor quality, that it reaches the stage of making it look like it's a pirated game, or an illegal emulation of a PC game.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. The game itself is a slight improvement over other builds from Phoenix Games:
   • They offer more minigames than any other games in this series.
     • There are new minigames, such as dress up and connect the dots.
   • There's some new animations for the frightening jester characters.
   • Unlike most games produced with Dingo, it doesn't permanently wear out the disc the first time you complete it.
   • They finally did recolor and redesign some assets.

Reception

Going unnoticed by critics, the game was criticized by gamers, online reviewers and YouTubers, and was named one of the worst PlayStation 2 games, along with other Phoenix Games compilations.

Comments

Loading comments...