Reviewed: September 12, 2005
Reviewed by: Mike Colgan
Publisher
Ignition Entertainment
Developer
Success
Released: October 11, 2005
Genre: Puzzle
Players: 1
ESRB: Everyone
8
6
6
7
7.0
I remember Christmas morning, 1989, opening gifts. Wave after wave of presents that bored a 10-year-old (or 26-year-old) boy to tears: pajamas, socks, sweaters, a placemat with the Periodic Table of Elements… wait, what’s this? Could it be? It is! The Game Boy, a slightly-ridiculously-named 2-pound brick-sized machine capable of playing slightly less than 8-bit black and green graphics and eating up batteries like no one’s business. Of course, I didn’t think of it that way at the time. To me, 10-year-old Mike Colgan, with no knowledge of laptops and iPods and girls, it was the RADDEST THING EVER™.
Even better than the machine itself was the game that came bundled with it. Whoever thought up releasing Tetris as the launch title for the Game Boy deserves a Nobel Prize, if they gave out Nobel Prizes for marketing. Puzzle games are perfectly suited for the handheld gaming medium – you don’t need a graphical powerhouse to make a good puzzle game (just something that can draw squares), they’re easy to play, frustrating and almost infinitely challenging for any skill level, and great for car trips or plane rides (as evidenced by my total schooling of editor Mark Smith at Lumines during a trip to Los Angeles).
Around the time that the Game Boy’s grandson, the Nintendo DS, was born, a puzzle game entitled Zookeeper was released. Although generally critically well-received, not many people own DS's, so Ignition Entertainment wisely decided to release an adaptation of Zookeeper for the Game Boy Advance. Zooo features the same animal-arranging gameplay and maddening pace that made Zookeeper so much fun.
Zooo is simple to learn but fiendishly difficult to master. Your task is to line up three matching-color blocks on a large field to remove them and drop more blocks. You can only move blocks when moving them would make a match – you swap the block with another adjacent block. If there is not a match, the blocks snap back into place.
This sounds relatively easy, but an element of frustration is added by a timer that continues to tick down to zero. You can buy time by earning points from matches, but there never seems to be quite enough time. If you get close to zero, the blocks start shaking around and making animal noises just to taunt you and make your last-ditch effort even harder.
Almost every map starts out with obvious matches, and your eyes will catch a large number of opportunities. However, as time wears on and your nerves get more frazzled, you will spend precious seconds scanning the field for one match (often, the map can get down to only one possible match). If the game continues on, you can be assured that there is a match out there; otherwise, the game wipes the board and awards you bonus points. You are given a small number of “binoculars”, which will illuminate the available matches on the board when they are used. You must ration them carefully so that you have them when you truly need them.
The game is challenging but manageable for the first 6 levels. On the 7th level, the game throws in an extra type of block (pink bunnies), and all hell breaks loose. I have played this game probably 100 times (it’s that addictive), and I make it to Level 7 every time. I have made it to Level 9 once.
In addition to the normal mode, where the goal is to earn the highest score and progress through high levels, there are other modes which measure the fastest time to a given score, or give the player specialized tasks. These are all fun, and add more interest to an addictively simple game.
The graphics in Zooo are as good as they have to be. In a game where animals are essentially blocks for the player to arrange, the graphics are stylistically blocky. The blocks are vaguely shaped like the faces of pandas, lions, monkeys, alligators, giraffes, hippos, and rabbits. The background screens show blocky, cartoony renderings of these animals.
There is nothing special about Zooo’s graphics, but it’s a puzzle game. The most you can really ask for in a puzzle game are colorful graphics that make the game easy to play and don’t hurt your eyes.
The sound in Zooo is catchy and upbeat but as subtle as a hammer to the head. The game has one song short song that plays relentlessly in a loop as the action builds and builds.
Sound effects in the game are short and punchy, and have the feel of old arcade game sound blips to them. They help give the game a bit of an old-school feel, which adds to the fun. True, the sound and music are not as cool as in Lumines, but they have a minimalist style of their own.
Zooo is so addictive it oughta be illegal. At $29.99, it’s a steal. You will be up late at night trying to get to the next level.
Zooo is not revolutionary in anyway; in fact, it looks a lot like other puzzle games I have played. However, the bright, fun packaging and portability of the game make it a should-buy for any fan of the puzzle genre and any parent taking their kids on a car trip.
