The Great Waldo Search

Licensed games were all the rage in the 1990's whether it was an iconic cartoon character such as Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, a sports star like Wayne Gretzsky or Brian Lara every other game seemed to be licensed at one point. Whilst some licensed games were amazing ("Aladdin" on the Mega Drive for example) other were simply atrocious and "The Great Waldo Search" certainly sits in the second category.

 If you are in your late teens or early 20's you will almost certainly remember the "Where's Wally?" or "Where's Waldo?" (In the US and Canada) books that most primary schools were littered with. The books were full of colour images and you have to find items in the book (most obviously the title character). They were the sort of colorful and interesting things that would keep a small child busy for a lunch time when it's raining and they were pretty cheap and good fun...sadly someone from Radiance thought it was a great idea for a game. The folks from Radiance however were wrong, very, very wrong.

When you start playing 1 of the 5 levels (which can be played in almost any order) you notice a lot of things. Firstly the graphics, they look like a 12 year old has been told to draw and scene and just stick in the Waldo/Wally character, they look garish and completely lack the charm of the books. The music is a further off putting feature and sounds incredibly naff.

The gameplay however is exactly what you would expect, you need to take a magnifying glass and click it over the items you are searching for (such as Waldo). It's simple but a bit too simple, in fact you can play through the whole game in little more than 10 minutes, which in a way is a relief as you're unlikely to want to spend much longer having your eyes abused by the graphics.

To call this a simple cash in is to state the obvious. It must be avoided like the plague, it's garish, cheap and has the life span of a may fly.

17%

Details:
Console-Sega Mega Drive, SNES and NES
Release-1992
Developer-Radiance
Genre-Puzzle
Players-1

Trivia:
The game was only released in north America (thankfully)
The game is based on the 3rd book in the series created by Martin Handford