Carnival Games

Amazon Price: $33.99 (as of 10/12/2008)

I had no intentions of buying this game, but after seeing so many glowing reviews I decided to give it a shot. I'm glad I did--Carnival Games is an incredibly fun collection of mini-games that are fun to play and remind you of a real carnival, though with much less potential damage to the wallet.

Carnival Games features over 20 carnival style games, most of which will probably be familiar to most people. There's an Alley Ball game (Skiball), dart throwing, a shooting gallery, frog launching, a dunk tank, and many, many others. There are also unlockable "super" versions of some of the games, variations which don't give prizes but instead record a high score. An example of this is the game where you knock over milk bottles--the super version has you knocking over enormous stacks of bottles. It's silly and an interesting twist on the original.

Each game you play rewards prizes in three sizes--small, medium, or large--and gives tickets which act as a sort of currency in the game and allow you to purchase unlockable items for your character (like a bike helmet or a guitar) and access other activities like the love machine and a fortune teller. In each game you can trade prizes up just like a real carnival--4 small prizes for a medium, 3 medium for a large, etc--in pursuit of a jumbo prize in each event. The prizes are nothing special at all, and they're really just a way of keeping track of how you've done in the events.