Barbie Sparkling Ice Show

Rating:
Summary: Not just for little kids!
Review: "Barbie Sparkling Ice Show" is a fabolous game and can really inspire creativity and imagination, and that's coming from someone whose 13 years old! This game allows you to pick routines, music, costumes, and fun stuff like decorations and ice color and put it all together to make fabolous routines for Barbie, Christie, and Teresa on the five stops of the Sparkling Ice Tour. But once you finish the tour, the fun doesn't end there- you can continue on skaiting cool exhibition shows using all of the details of previous shows.

To work the game, you start off by preparing for the first stop of the tour and practice a routine that you pick out of a few selections with the skater you have chosen. You can pick from three levels: easy, intermediate, or hard, and each one provides more challenges than the next. If you skate the routine well and do a good job, you will be able to do all the "good stuff"- choosing your music, costume, decorations, etc. for the tour. The game continues on like this for different tour stops such as Rose Garden and Island Paradise, with your goal to make it to the secret surprise location where you can even create your own routine.

I found this game to be a lot of fun and not at all boring. Granted, it may be a little bit too easy to get through all the tour stops, but the fun doesn't stop since you can create a user name and start all over again or continue doing skating exhibitions. It is a fabolous game for all figure-skating and Barbie fans, not to mention that it is so much fun! Anyone ages 5 and up will enjoy this wonderful game.

Rating:
Summary: IT'S GREAT!
Review: All the other reviews say this product is boring and "save your money"....Well my daughter & I LOVE IT!You get to pick one of three pretty girl skaters, You pick her one of, AT LEAST 15 costumes. Somebody said the skater "never falls"?? Thats boloney. She falls plenty until you develope the hand eye coordination this FUN, FUN game takes. It's a GREAT cd.rom for any age. Have some fun for pete's sake! This world is SO NEGATIVE! I Highly Recommend Barbie Sparkling Ice Show!!!

Rating:
Summary: Bad skating technique
Review: I didn't buy this game, becuase I can tell by the pictures that Barbie has very bad skating technique (see below). This game is not for kids who want to have fun while seeing a good skating program.

Pictures on Amazon
1) Box picture -- I can't tell whether or not Barbie is stroking or doing a bad spiral? Either her leg is too high if she is stroking, or her body and leg are not in the right position if she is doing a spiral.
2) Layback -- Although it's hard to see, it looks like Barbie might be spinning on her toe pick.
3) Split jump -- Barbie does not have enough skating muscle for the jump. She is also not kicking her boots up.
Pictures on vugames (makers of the game)
1) Stroking -- Barbie's body is crooked. She doesn't have her weight over her stroking leg, and her body is leaning to the side. I've never seen anyone stroke like this.

Rating:
Summary: Pretty Disappointing
Review: In the words of my 6 year old niece: "This is Really Boring (sigh)".

Does being able to choose the color of the ice and Barbie's outfit compensate for what is a fairly limited program with mediocre (at best) graphics? In the eyes of that young Barbie devotee, obviously not.

To make matters worse, the game's producers apparently decided to create a "multilingual" product by relying on icons without any text for most operations. This approach often makes it quite hard to determine what each does without the manual.

Can't you just discover the actions of different buttons you wonder? Well, the game designers often chose to not provide any feedback that something was happening that may take a while. No hourglass, no clock, no spinning skater cursor. So for those operations that take more than a few seconds (e.g. loading a new scene) the player ends up thinking their click did nothing and they try clicking something else with unpredictable results. Frustrating.

A final word about the graphics. Sure you can dress her and her friends in five different outfits, but shouldn't we expect something a little more than 640x480 resolution these days?

It didn't crash, but you should save your money. If you could skate Barbie into a wall it MIGHT have been worth it. After 45 minutes with this program, that is what BOTH of us wanted to do.

Rating:
Summary: DO NOT BUY, A WASTE OF MONEY AND TIME!!!
Review: My 6 year old likes changing the costumes of the barbies, and enjoys the game somewhat. But it definately looks cooler than it is. She gets pretty bored with it, pretty quickly. It's not super user friendly.

Rating:
Summary: Eh. Save your money.
Review: My daughter (almost four) begged for this game all holiday season. It was the sweetest thing, because she shyly told Santa this is what she wanted, and told people all December that Santa would bring it for her. Well, he did, and his reputation is tarnished in our house now!

She was bored with it the first time she played with it. Your child's interaction consists of choosing which girl of three to skate (fun), choosing which outfit of five to wear (fun) and pressing the up or down arrow to make Barbie skate faster or slower to do the jumps (zzzz). Not by your own choice, you move the arrow to match the color of the line on the ice.

Freestyle mode wasn't much better--go 'round and 'round in circles. There may be more to it but who cares at this point?

My own personal mommy beef: Barbie never falls. Barbie either does the jump perfectly or doesn't do it at all. I figured they could put a little extra effort into the design and give the kids the all important (even if subliminal) message that it's okay to not be perfect, and that it's NORMAL to fall, or fail as the case may be. But again, it's Barbie, the perfect girl with the unattainable proportions, so what can you expect? :)

Rating:
Summary: Bad skating technique
Review: My daughter received this cd for Christmas. It is very slow loading lots of wait time for things to happen. When she finally chose the skater and where she should skate (only one choice worked), my daughter kept asking what she could do now. Most of the time we were watching Barbie skate beautifully. Not very interactive. I consider this a waste of space on my computer, a waste of time for us to use. I would recommend saving your money and get something worthwhile.

Rating:
Summary: A complete waste
Review: My daughter received this cd for Christmas. It is very slow loading lots of wait time for things to happen. When she finally chose the skater and where she should skate (only one choice worked), my daughter kept asking what she could do now. Most of the time we were watching Barbie skate beautifully. Not very interactive. I consider this a waste of space on my computer, a waste of time for us to use. I would recommend saving your money and get something worthwhile.

Rating:
Summary: DO NOT BUY, A WASTE OF MONEY AND TIME!!!
Review: My daughter wanted this for a few months before I finally gave in and bought it for her. She was so excited. We got home and played it for one hour hoping that something different or better would happen. The game was so so boring. You get to choose music, outfits, and which of the three skaters to skate. That is IT. Everything else is controlled automatically by the game. Barbie does everything perfectly whether you do or not. My daughter hasn't played it since and is so disapointed in it. The store I bought it from won't let me return it because it has been opened. They will let me exchange it for the exact same game but hello that is the problem. This game was a waste of time and money.

Rating:
Summary: Great Game
Review: My daughter, almost 7, loves this game. She got it a few weeks ago and still plays with it every day. We did have to upgrade our system, but the game hasn't crashed since and hasn't been slow. Despite what others have said this game has lots of levels and takes lots of practice to master the freestyle levels. (The skaters will do lots of different tricks once the user learns how to do them.) This game has even seemed to help my daughter's actual skating - she just went yesterday for the first time since receiving the game and had lots more confidence and moved more smoothly than she did the other times she went.