Completion Time: 3h:26m:00s
Rating: 4/10

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Oh, Bother

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Back to Pooh and pals so soon, eh? October is coming up, so I'm stocking up on horror games to blog about, and now I'm even in the midst of a move! So I felt that "Winnie the Pooh" was just the kind of simple fair I could get taken care of and written about easily and cleanly. So I did just that! But I was not expecting this to be basically the same game that I played and wrote about in January of last year. Boy oh boy, this was some of the most boring 3 hours I've spent on the GameCube, but I'll certainly get into that below.

Let's remember birthdays past, that's a phenomenal game concept!

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Birthdays Galore

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So I knew this would be a shorter venture, an easy experience with Disney's most well-known franchise, their adaptation of "Winnie the Pooh". What I didn't know was that this is basically just built on the bones of "Piglet's Big Game", which I completed and blogged about early last year. I should've known, really, and it isn't like it's an uncommon practice to do so. But taking an adventure where Piglet jumps into people's nightmares to confront his fears and turning it into a game where Pooh jumps into memories of people's birthdays is a bit of a step backwards in my opinion. It doesn't help that the game barely adds anything to the formula aside from a slight diversion or two.

If riding around on Eeyore can count as a diversion, I think I'll have to add it to the list

So what's the game? Like I said, you're Pooh Bear, running through your memories of different birthdays of all the characters of the universe, with a few exceptions. You don't go to Kanga's, because mom's don't have birthdays. You don't go to Gopher's, because he's more of a tutorial character. And you don't go to Rabbit's, because that would mean the Hundred Acre Woods gang respected him at all. Pooh, and by extension you, need to solve puzzles in order to throw the best party ever for each of your friends. Except for the last level, Pooh's birthday, which falls apart a tad as you're just doing a scavenger hunt for a map or... something. But yeah, you need to create platforms to cross lakes, ride around on Eeyore to hunt bugs, and yes, even collect honey pots to fend off bees. Knocking objects around the map to collect honey returns from the "Piglet" game and works in the exact same way even. Collect a certain amount and you can get the bees to exact an area and free up some item you'll need to solve another puzzle. Awfully convoluted way just to have a party that only two people will attend.

Why on earth would the treasure map itself be buried?

Another aspect of this game that mostly comes from the "Piglet" game but is perhaps slightly expanded on is how you use your friends to accomplish some sections of the levels. I already mentioned how you can ride around on Eeyore to catch butterflies and frogs and whatever else, but you also have dedicated segments to play as both Tigger and Piglet. Tigger has to sneak around and avoid the roving Heffalumps and Woozles to grab whatever he needs to grab, but Piglet can access small areas and completely clear the area of these enemies through the fear minigame that is ripped wholesale from "Piglet's Big Game"! This is the most egregious, because it's solely a mechanic built as a power fantasy for the franchise's most timid character, and it makes sense thematically for a game all about conquering his fears and relieving nightmares. But here, it's just an instance of just keeping what already worked to avoid implementing something different in the code. It is the same engine, the same codebase, all of that. But it comes across more lazily than anything because it has no real purpose here. Also, Pooh avoids the enemies and pops a balloon in the area to scare them all, whatever. This forest is very unsafe and crawling with these things, someone needs to do something other than throwing birthday parties all the damn time!

What, you monsters not learn your lesson the first time around?

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Completing the Game

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There are only 5 chapters to complete, and while the honey pots need to be collected to solve puzzles, there are much more available in any given level than necessary to collect. Even still, grabbing all the honey pots in a chapter will earn you the proper marker on the chapter selection pages, so you can know that you did it. That's all it really gives you, but were you expecting more?

No wonder he's gotta grab so many, these things are tiny

The one interesting saving grace of the completion here is the introduction of three additional hidden items in each chapter: musical notes. They can be found the same way as the honey pots (should I have been saying hunny this whole time?), running around and shaking things in the environment. Sometimes you'll notice an object is flashing slightly blue, that means it has a music note hiding in side! Shake the object, catch the note, and once you have all three for that chapter you'll unlock a piece of music that can be played in "Pooh's Music Lab" or whatever it's called in the hub world. It's not much, but it's at least something! And at this point I feel I'm grasping at straws, but anything is better than nothing at all. And frankly, it's just nice to see this game try and do something that requires a bit of new implementation.

Oh, "Pooh's Music HALL"... not much better

I don't know if Pooh and friends will make further appearances on the GameCube in the future of this blog series, but this was the last of the "Winnie the Pooh" specific GameCube games, so I can wipe those off the slate. I sort of wish I had started with this one and then gone backwards to "Piglet's Big Game". That wasn't a masterpiece or anything, but I would've been much happier ending off with that strange, surreal journey as it felt more like a kid's game rather than baby's first puzzle game. C'est la vie.

This is another entry in a series where I go through and complete every GameCube game, as it is the largest part of my video game collection. GameCube Games: 44/652