Before you play, you firstly need to draw and colour yourself. You can choose different templates or draw yourself by your own. You are able to draw objects such as clouds, sleds, a submarine, glider, wings, ice cubes, etc. There is always something new to draw in each level.

The drawing/colouring interface has various colours available for you to select, stamps to use, change the drawing point larger/smaller, fill option, eraser, can zoom in/out, etc.

The game revolves around a book of life which was taken by Wilfre from the village some time ago. With the book of life in Wilfre’s possession, Wilfre creates dark monsters which eventually rule over the village. The village is now deserted, taken over by darkness and it’s up to you to restore the village locals and collect the pages torn from the book of life.

Whilst in a level your character can jump, slide, shoot snowballs acorns, ground pound and eventually fly when you draw yourself wings. In each level there is black shadow on some houses, on the floor, on lamp posts, etc. If you are hit too much times by the enemies you start losing your clothes and eventually lose a life.

As you progress through each level, there are 3 villagers to rescue, 4 pages of the book of life to find and some secrets. Once you’ve completed a level, you return to the village to view the people return at which point there are small quests in the town to do before the next level, for example, clearing shadow clouds so that the villages you rescued can return to their homes/workplaces, planting trees, investigating a crime, having a snowball fight with the villagers, etc.

You are able to purchase the extra features you have collected in each level by visiting one of the shops in the village. The features include more colours, patterns and stamps for when you are drawing, music and games and different abilities for your character.

The only faults I can find is the explanation of your movement, such as when learning to ground pound you aren’t told that you need to hold the A button while pressing down or when learning how to fly you aren’t told that if you press A you can fly up.The other slight issue I had is that in the village no menu would appear if you wanted to say quit the game.

If you like drawing, colouring and some game play then this game will suit you as you get to see your creations in the game; in a level you draw a rocket and then you use that rocket to fly and shoot down enemies. It’s been one of those games which I can’t really find many faults with.

More screenshots can be found below.

Whilst you are enjoying the game of your liking you can configure all sorts of options within the game at bottom screen of your DS. You’re able to change the game options such as how many lives you start off with, re-assignment of buttons, changing the screen settings (vertical / horizontal), changing the hardcore options and dip switches as you would on the real system board. There are also some handy hints for each game as well the instructions to play if you’ve never played the game before.

If you get tired of playing the single player games by yourself, you can play Pacman Vs. with your friends and they don’t need a copy of the game. You’re also able to allow them to play demos of the arcade games.

Along with the classic games, you’re given the ability to listen to all the sounds and music from each game and can create a play list if you really want to. There is also a detailed game description available for each game.

 
A neat feature is that you’re actually able to see the original instruction card and the system board of the game you select.

 
 
 
Namco Museum has a nice and clean interface making it very easy to use. In addition to the arcade games, there is a fair bit of content to read up on for each game. The only downsides I can see to Namco Museum is that there might not be enough arcade games and it’s likely to only suit those who’ve played these arcade games before or just generally like arcade games.

There were many different types of preparations skills, some include chopping, folding dumplings, baking, cutting tendon, frying, stewing, tearing, cutting, cracking and peeling an, peel an egg, tenderising meat, peeling, grating, shaping, etc.

The recipes ranged from easy to hard which include making grilled gyoza, beef steak, fried chicken, sandwich, boiled egg, pork cutlet, potato salad, spring roll, pizza, meat pie, etc.

In the main menu you have three game play modes:
Let’s Cook: make food according to a recipe
Let’s Combine: combine two recipes
Use skill: use your skills in preparation

When playing Let’s Cook you are able to select the food you wish to make and can either practice making the food which allows you to try out the individual parts or make the food in which case you won’t be able to retry a certain part if you fail it.

You are trying to prepare and cook the food correctly and as fast as possible. You are required to follow instructions and in most cases need to beat a timer. For each part in the preparation or cooking of the food you receive a rating – very good, good or failed. Once the meal is cooked you are shown your final score out of 100 and are awarded a gold, silver or bronze medal depending on your score. You sometimes unlock a new recipe when completing a meal.

On some meals you are able to place the toppings you desire on your meal, for example, pizza.

The Use Skill game play allows you to practice the skills you have learnt when making meals. There are several rounds of practicing the skill and after each round the timer or the ingredients to add increases.

One issue I have with this game is that when preparing a meal sometimes you didn’t quite understand the instructions you were given. Maybe when practicing to make a meal you should have been given exact instructions on what to do.

Another issue that comes to mind is when some parts of making the meal didn’t make sense. For example, when removing the pasta from the pot, if you caught all the pasta but not the water then you would not receive the “Very Good” rating. Another example is when tossing the spaghetti; you need to constantly toss the spaghetti up and down to receive the “Very Good” rating.

A point to add is when failing a part of the cooking process it’s sort of over exaggerated. You’ll see from the picture that if you fail, cooking mama’s eyes are burning, kind of like your effort was such a failure that it hurts to look at it.

The game is intended to those whom are interested in cooking and learning different meals but it may also be suitable for those whom enjoy simple activities. It seems to have a “WarioWare: Touched” kind of game play to it as in each part to making the meal is short and like an activity.

As in the movie, you start off meeting with your buddy Andy to learn the controls and then advance to exploring the outside world for the first time with the Pollen Jocks, pollinating flowers, flying through the rain to Vanessa’s apartment, avoiding getting hit by humans in her apartment, chasing down cars, etc.

Once you’ve covered the basics of the game, you begin to receive job offers for different positions within Honex. You progress through Barry’s adventure by completing a certain number of jobs and then returning home.

The different jobs include:

Honeycomb Collector: collect the yellow honeycombs

Crane Operator: grabbing containers from trucks

Racing: race opponents on a track

Car Mechanic: repairing cars

Honey Drafter: fill baskets with honey

Food Delivery: delivering meals to different places

Taxi Driver: driving bees around the hive

As a bee you have to avoid almost everything from dogs chasing you down to people trying to hit you with an object. You avoid objects and people by quickly pressing the number that appears on the screen.

You occasionally need to take pictures of things, for example, how the people at Honey Farms are collecting honey from the bees.

There are some skills like Bee Vision and Bee Reflex. Bee Vision is basically night vision for bees; only showing those important objects such as flowers or people brighter.

Bee Reflex is just slow motion in which you can easily avoid objects and is useful when navigating in the rain.

 
Within the hive, which you’re free to explore, there are certain terminals which allow you to change your clothes to almost anything, for example, if you really like a particular job you can change your everyday clothes to the clothes you wear at that job.

You can visit the Video Arcade where you can purchase video games that you can play and the car dealership from which you can purchase new cars that you store in your garage and can drive anytime.

There’s also a museum where you can check out your artwork from the pictures you’ve taken and hidden wax statues you’ve collected.

The wall of badges allows you to examine the different badges you have collected.

The Bee Movie Game seems to have the GTA gameplay style, as in you drive to the job that you want to do, have a garage in which you store cars that you purchase and can change your clothing. The only thing that this game doesn’t incorporate is that when in navigating around the hive, you can’t use your mouse to view the surroundings instead you are forced to use the directional keys.

The other thing I noticed was when first flying away from the hive with all the Pollen Jocks you needed to keep tapping a number that was shown in blue. At first I had no idea what to do since when the game explained other controls it showed the controls in yellow and this time it was just a number in blue with no explanation (or voice over) of what this number meant. Maybe I was the only one that had this issue.

Other than that minor inconvenience, the game is fine. The graphics could have been a little better although this game is for kids so I’m sure most if not all won’t worry about the graphics. Near the end of the game I did get a bit bored of doing the jobs over and over again. Overall it was a good game and I’d expect that if your kids liked the movie they’ll like this game.