Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys

Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys
"This is terrifying. This isn't Snow White. This is more like evil porcelain dolls come to life." — The Angry Video Game Nerd
Genre(s): Puzzle Platform(s): PlayStation 2 Release: December 16, 2006 Developer(s): Aqua Pacific Publisher(s): Phoenix Games Country: United Kingdom

"Even though the actual animation itself is of much higher quality than Dalmatians 3, this is easily the worst PS2 game out there because of the complete lack of absolutely anything! For the time that it came out, the lack of quality control, care into improve at all from Phoenix Games, blatantly horrendous copy and pasting, no difference in mini-games, THE FACT THAT IT'S OFFICIALLY LICENSED BY SONY THAT IT COSTS MONEY INTO IT--"

— Caddicarus

Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys is a puzzle game developed by Aqua Pacific and published by Phoenix Games, and was released in 2006 for the PlayStation 2 only in Europe. The animated film was made by the now-defunct Polish company Longsoft Multimedia, which specialized in developing games and low-budget animations.

Much like Nice Cats and Countryside Bears previously, Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys was met with overwhelmingly negative reviews by critics and fans alike, and is both considered one of the worst games released by Phoenix Games, as well as one of the worst games for children, the worst games on the Playstation 2 and even one of the worst games of all time.

Plot

The only bit of plot in the animation is that the dwarves go to Snow Queen's house and she just sings there, that's all.

Gameplay

The game consists of several mini-games that consist, for example, in arranging puzzles or finding two of the same elements, there is also a 6-minute animation trying to resemble a movie.

Why It's Not Clever

1. It's not really a video game, it's just a compilation of mini-games and a movie. It's more like a compilation of free downloadable online games like Mahjongg.
   • It is a seriously poor port of the Snow White game from the Familijny CD-Romek games.
2. The mini-games are both boring and repetitive as they consist of solving puzzles or looking for the same pieces, not to mention that it's all based on just a few snippets from the "movie".
3. Weird and laughable dialogue that sounds like someone is putting a gun to the voice actors' and actresses' heads. For example, the narrator says that Cubby "is like a small bear", Big Basil "was huge - well, for a boy he was huge", and Snow White sings a song that begins with "This is my song/I'll sing it now". Some of these examples were probably the result of the English translation of the game trying to convey the original Polish script quite literally to the point that the narration in the dub isn't written in verse.
4. Weird scenes, such as the face on the chimney, Joseph Jr. walking on water, and the extremely anachronistic fact that the characters have access to fully-functioning microphones and disco lights in the time when Snow White takes place. These scenes clearly show that the authors of the "movie" didn't even have the source code of the original Disney movie.
5. The characters in the "movie" are incredibly lazy and weirdly designed because most of them don't look like dwarfs at all, one of them has an unnaturally long head and the other one looks rather like a beetle.
6. The song is badly written, as Snow White says "jealous" a total of 6 times (4 in one of the beginning stanzas) and it does a poor job of telling her story. It doesn’t even specify what the Evil Queen is jealous of in the first place! (In the Walt Disney film, she is jealous of Snow White's looks, but the song's lyrics make no sense and fail to specify it.) It sounds like she made it up and sang it in the shower. To spend here right away that the creators did not even have an idea to create a more interesting song, they just made it as soon as possible, which of course results in the fact that it is very repetitive.
7. The story presented in the "movie" is incredibly lazily designed, just a bunch of dwarfs (or in this film's case, boys) going to the house of the snow queen who is just singing there.
8. The animation for the "film", while a HUGE step up from previous films that were made by Phoenix Games/Dingo Picture and can look decent, is poorly done(especially in the musical part, it's so bad that you can notice some parts that were just looped with slight modifications), Not only that, the 2D animated characters are placed in a 3D environment, which looks awful and makes the movie part look like it was made in 3D Movie Maker. The animation also clearly shows the low production budget and the fact that the creators not only could not adjust anything in the graphics, but also the models quite often look as if they were made in MS-Paint, the animation and models on the main cast also look dated, most of which look like rip-off of Hanna Barbara characters.
9. The box art is downright terrifying and disturbing, just like Phoenix Games games (not all), The box art it's just very poorly rendered and unfinished CGI, and you can even see the vertices, which makes a kid easily get scared and certain youngs/adults, with AVGN describing the characters as "evil porcelain dolls come to life". Additionally, it is a false advertisement for 3 reasons:
   • None of the characters look like the Disney bootlegs on the cover, with the biggest example being the 7 Clever Boys (they look like old dwarves on the cover, yet in-game they are ordinary boys).
     • Snow White also is inaccurate as well, her hair is black while she's actually blonde in-game, her lips are normal while puffy in-game, and her skin is paler than in-game, and lastly, her in-game dress looks nothing like the dress on the cover beside being a dress or having puffy sleeves.
   • The Evil Queen in her hag form is never seen on screen (just her shadow), despite being in the front of the box art.
   • Almost all the characters on the cover have unnaturally large eyes, so children themselves can be quite frightened by the sight of characters that look like dead corpses, mainly the model without texture and being polygonal, or worse, it's comparable to the rat models in the infamous Video Brinquedo movie Ratatoing, but unlike this rubbish "game", the character models in Ratatoing are not scary and are funny.
   • The animation and art style are lies as well. In the box art, the characters are in 3D, but in the game, they are animated in 2D with the backgrounds and surroundings being set in 3D.
10. The apple is shown bleeding (the "blood" is supposed to be poison), which is rather graphic considering this is a kids game, not to mention that fruit doesn't "bleed" like animals do. Apple juice is yellowish rather than red, and it doesn't look like a children's game because of that.
11. The black clever boy, Sonny, is depicted in blackface and has rather thick red lips and this can already be considered racist considering the fact that the appearance evokes uncontrollable bursts of laughter as if the creators wanted to deliberately ridicule black people.
    • What makes the matter worse is that the boy in the original Polish version of the game was named Blacky.
12. The game's movie is very short, lasting about six minutes, even compared to a single cartoon episode it is extremely short and more like 1/3 of a cartoon episode at best.
13. Snow White's singing voice sounds like she's bored out of her mind and rather than how it fits the mood and isn't interesting either, rather she sings as if she is very tired from some heavy exercise even though she doesn't look like it.
    • The same woman sings in the Polish version, where she sounds more enthusiastic which is rather unforgivable because it shows how lazily designed the English dub is.
14. The narrator's voice, although not the worst, speaks through almost the entire animation which tries to resemble a movie, which can become irritating and make you want to mute the speakers, especially since, apart from the singing beauty, he is the only vocal in the entire "movie".
15. Of the 4.7 gigabytes available on PS2's DVD discs at the time of release, the entirety of the game only used about 300 megabytes. That's not even a tenth of the available space and at the same time shows the laziness of the developers because not only is the film ridiculously short, but there are only a few games where they could have put much more into it.
16. No real ending for the "movie", we don't even know what happened to the Evil Queen.
17. If you sum it all up, this game literally looks like it was literally pre-Playstation 1 and yet it's quite a late game for Playstation 2.

The Only Redeeming Quality

1. The game and the animation can be considered so bad it's good due to poorly-written song and awful animations and design of characters.

Reception

Snow White and the 7 Clever Boys, while unnoticed by critics, was bombarded by online reviewers and was voted one of the worst games released by Phoenix Games, one of the worst games for kids and one of the worst PlayStation 2 games, and even one of the worst games of all time and is widely known among crappy games.

BartekGM reviewed it as part of the Phoenix Games games, where he gave all games from the list an absolute PIERDOLONE 0/10.

Lyrics of song

(A big thank you goes to Lemon Melon for the lyrics transcription.)

"This is my song, I'll sing it now.

The one of the mirror and the evil queen.

Sparkling mirror, the truth it can see.

Oh say it please, who is more beautiful.

She is so jealous, jealous of me. So very jealous, jealous of me.

Show the miracle of beauty in the lake of your glass.

Her heart's so hard, it won't let me pass.

She has chased me, hunted me. Alone and crying, in forests so dark.

I know that you really care. Let me stay, our lives we can share.

She is so jealous of me, so very jealous of me.

It lives in her evil heart, unlike mine.

She has chased me, hunted me. Alone and crying, in forests so dark.

I know that you really care. Let me stay, our lives we can share."

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