Hanna-Barbera's Cartoon Carnival

Egad, this is a horrible game! Never has my first reaction to a game been "Egad," either, so believe me when I tell you this game should have either been reworked considerably before being released, or not released at all. And people wonder why no one liked the CD-i ... do people wonder why no one liked the CD-i?

Cartoon Carnival is a coming-together of all those Hanna Barbera cartoons you watched growing up, then never again. This random assortment of sort of popular characters mixed with a hefty collection of "other" assumes the form of a collection of mini games. There's the Scooby Do frustrating, slow maze game, the clunky George Jetson Space Race, the Fred Flintstone collect balloons for no reason game, and Top Cat's trivia game. Of all the people to host a trivia game, couldn't they have picked a character that this generation might actually remember? That notwithstanding, this game reeks of tedium and has no discernable objective; play the games, see a goofy animation upon completion and repeat.

The actual gameplay is, again, MIA. I've played some poor-quality titles on the CD-i these last few months, but this outshines them all in the worst way. The characters are slow and barely animated, and the objectives are hard to determine. Actually, I may have been incorrect in assuming these games even HAVE objectives. Why Fred Flintstone is in pursuit of balloons in the first place leaves much to be explained, and little to be desired.

The Scooby Do maze hunt is also too slow and clunky to be enjoyable. When you guide Scooby to a fork in the maze, the wall slides up or over, to block the direction you were going and, in turn, force you to proceed in a different direction. It could have been fun, had they implemented it with any consideration for how a character should move. Ditto for George Jetson's Space Race. Avoiding obstacles is damn near impossible, but that doesn't matter since you have to try much harder to fail a game than to win it. This game assumes the "Everybody's a Winner!" approach, but does so in such a poor way that I cannot give them the benefit of the doubt. I understand that this game is intended for children, but eliminating the possibility of failure due to their inability to work the bugs out of the gameplay is unacceptable.

I haven't found an enjoyable way to experience this game. It's horrible to play alone and I wouldn't dare let my friends know I own it; if I had friends. This one should be avoided, plain and simple.