Polar Express

Rating:
Summary: Nice game to play
Review: Graphics are beautiful and I had no problems installing the game at all. There are plenty of sub levels are mini games. The games vary from racing games and side scrolling platform. I can see how some parts of the movie had to be changed to make a better video game. For example there is a boss battle in the game that has you fighting against a Scrooge doll. Leading up to this battle with Scrooge has you fighting different dolls by having you throw stuffed animals at the dolls. There are several stages of these battles that you have to go through before finally facing Scrooge. If you want to challenge your childrens minds, this is a great game.

Rating:
Summary: Awful software
Review: This software makes it extremely difficult to grab objects, then penalizes the frustrated child by preventing the child from saving the game (because the child can't progress far enough to have earned the ability to save a game).

Avoid this software.

Rating:
Summary: Christmas Express
Review: THQ did a good job in the annimation of the characters, and the plot line is good.

There are several severe drawbacks though which would prevent me from :
No cameral angles. It is straight ahead only. No panoramic views, which means keyboard only and no mouse controls.

No ability to change the controls.

No manual save, the game designates save points, and on top of it, you have to go through many scenarios before a save point arrives. You only have 5 chances of getting through them all before the game ends, before you run out of "life" or "heart," Your "heart" level doesn't increase between scenarios.

Objects are sometimes difficult to capture. The game requires several complex jumps in order to capture objects, but because there is no camera, it is difficult to determine how close or far you are from the object.

All in all, I feel that they rushed this to the shelves to meet the Christmas season, and even though it wasn't expensive, I am still disappointed when games don't perform to a satisfactory level.


Rating:
Summary: Do not waste your money...horrible, poor software
Review: Working in the software industry, I know how things work. QA finds problems during testing, Development claims it takes too long to fix problems, Marketing ignores everything and give Sales the "go ahead" to sell the product anyway...and this is the result. Here are the reasons I gave 1 star (would have given -1 but...)

1. Very difficult to install (you must be comfortable with computer internals). It requires configuration changes to eliminate sound and video glitches unles your PC is brand new and has the latest and greatest in terms of video and sound cards.

2. Even though there are several Chapters with 2-3 games in each, you can only select the first game of the first chapter. Due to the level of difficulty, we (my son and I) have not been able to complete the 1st game so we haven't seen how the other ones are.

3. The (poor) booklet that comes with the S/W mentions a SAVE option, which in reality, does not exist. So, every time the little boy runs out of "lives" or if you want to quit the game, you can not save it. The S/W kicks you out and you need to start from total scratch.

4. Very poor customer support. The 800 number does not get you anywhere and the website does not have any entry for this particular S/W.

All in all, I strongly suggest that you save your money until something better comes up. I also bought my son the GameBoy version but since I haven't given to him yet, I'm seriously thinking about returning it.