Toy Story 3

The reason for Toy Story appearing on the list is that I was subscribed to Boomerang Games in order to rent simple games instead of paying real money for them. I had James’ Cameron’s Avatar sitting on my shelf gathering dust for the best part of three months before I realised this endeavour was a giant waste of fake money. So I returned Avatar and cancelled my membership – but not before they dispatched Toy Story 3. This effectively gave me a week to complete and return the game to avoid being charged – cue an epic three days of charging through the game.

Playing the game at breakneck speed made me notice all the massive flaws with it, but I will break this down as I go through. The first thing I noted was that, considering the age recommendation of ten-plus, this game is insanely difficult. I remember watching my nephew play it a few years ago and he was just wandering around the Wild West and I thought to myself, this could be an easy 1,000 points. How wrong I was but I’ll cover that in the achievement section.

The first thing that pissed me off was that, after completing the first ‘real’ level, you are put into the mini-game environment of Woody’s Roundup. I say ‘mini-game,’ but in essence this portion of the game will take you longer to complete than the actual levels.

However, this wasn’t the frustrating thing. In a game designed for ten year olds, I thought that I had to actively find the next level within Woody’s Roundup. It wasn’t until I got fed up with it and turned it off for the evening, that I found out that the main missions were outside of this area. There was no instruction on how to get back to main game board and it was only after playing round up for a little while longer that I discovered there were warp areas that take you back up there. A prompt would have been nice, or even better, as this is a game for ten-pluses, a walkthrough of how to do it would have been more appropriate. To be honest, I may have missed a prompt, but if I missed it, how is a ten year old supposed to get it??

Now for my favourite subject, and not one I get to talk about a lot – glitches. This game is glitchtastic! There were several instances of being caught on scenery, crashing into invisible walls, and falling through the floor, which all adds to a fantastic gaming experience.

Vehicles make the game even more impressively shit. The controls for vehicles are shoddy at best. The driving functionality seems to stop at, ‘we managed to make it go forward and turn left and right and plug it full of boosts and power ups.’ Either no one said, ‘great, now let’s work on putting those functions into the gaming environment and smooth it out so that it works properly.’ Or no one cared about it in the first place. I think the latter is more likely because it was released at pretty much the same time as the movie and so I can only deduce that this was done as a money spinner.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, graphically it’s a pile of wank (hence the glitches as well) and also, as much as I like a sound track to stay true to its source material, the Toy Story theme is annoying at best but after listening to the clinky-cluncky bullshit in a repetitive game environment, it actually becomes quite depressing.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 38 Achievements

The main focus of the Toy Story 3 achievement set is collectibles – 11 out of the 38 achievements relate to collecting things. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with this because generally speaking, games will have one of two things; an inbuilt way of tracking what you’ve picked up or a useful non-official site where you can create your own tracking of what you’ve collected. Toy Story 3 really goes out of its way to make this harder for you because not only does it not have an in-game tracking system for the 100 plus collectibles scattered throughout Woody’s Roundup but once you’ve collected one, it doesn’t tell you which one it is anywhere, meaning that you can’t track what you have and have not collected yourself, which again feels like another shortcut. I mean, how difficult would it have been to put the names of the collectibles under the collectibles once you have collected them? I suppose it is a lot of work if you are trying to rush a game out to match the film release.

This essentially means that if you want to track what you have and don’t have, you need to know about the achievement before you start playing Woody’s Roundup – which, in my humble opinion, is stupid.

The remaining achievements are story based and you don’t have to go too far out of your way to get them. However, the glitchy nature of the game made even the easiest of tasks very tiresome.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I will never play this game again for fun because it’s not. I’m glad I rented it and that it doesn’t have to sit on my shelf collecting dust. I managed to get through all the achievements in three days and I will tell you now, these were the longest most arduous three days in my gaming life.