Sesame Street: Big Bird’s Hide & Speak (NES)
Innovation can be found in the strangest of places, and if Sesame Street: Big Bird’s Hide & Speak’s box art is to be believed, this simple kid’s game managed to be the first NES game to feature a digitized human voice. It is certainly understandable why a game based on a show that targets children who might not having the reading skill necessary to navigate game menus might want to include a voice guide, but this unexpected technical feat is utterly wasted on a game that puts no effort into any other part of its design.
Big Bird’s Hide & Speak is often billed as an educational game, but what few things this game tries to teach are presented in such a slow and boring manner that it’s hard to believe a child would enjoy it more than a lecture from a teacher. Big Bird’s Hide & Speak features six modes of play, all of them featuring the same set-up. Four of five potential Sesame Street characters will enter a building, the likes of Ernie, Bert, Elmo, Grover, and The Count entering and settling into one of the four windows. Big Bird introduces each character as they arrive, stepping out once everyone has settled in to speak to the player. To the game’s credit, Big Bird’s voice is definitely recognizable and, while it has the odd robotic cadence of a voice that needs to swap in different variables mid sentence, it seems inviting and has the level of personality you’d expect of the friendly Sesame Street mainstay. It’s just unfortunate that Big Bird’s voice work is wasted on some incredibly shallow excuses for game modes.
The first and second game mode can hardly be called educational unless you think having the proper level of brand recognition for Sesame Street characters will help your toddler develop a healthy mind. In the first mode, the four characters who enter the house settle into their windows and leave them wide open, Big Bird asking the player to find a certain character and gradually going down the list of who can be picked. The second mode has the very same set-up, although the characters close their windows before Big Bird asks the player to find someone, making it a very simple memory game. Picking the window you wish to select is a little odd due to the game’s lack of faith in its target audience. The developers must not have thought that a child could figure out the NES controller’s D Pad has four arrows corresponding to the directions it can move a character, so whenever you press what Big Bird calls “the big black button”, Little Bird will move from one window the next in a set clockwise fashion. Little Bird flies slow and since you can’t skip ahead to the proper window by pressing the direction it is actually in, the character selection is a dull and drawn out process.
Modes 3 and 4 more closely encroach on possibly having some benefit to a growing mind, in that they shift away from recognizing T.V. show characters and instead want the player to identify which window has a certain letter in it, Mode 3 keeping the windows open and Mode 4 shutting them. The issue here is not so much the letter finding task as it is the presentation, and in general, the game does a fairly terrible job of presentation in all respects save for its then-impressive digital voice. The four characters who sit in the windows will do nothing but gawk at the player with blank stares until they’re selected, then either shaking their head yes or no depending on if they’re the correct option. The plodding pace of selection and Big Bird taking his time explaining everything means that if your child knows the answer, picking it isn’t particularly interesting and takes much longer than necessary, the game mostly just rewarding the child with the same repeated lines of praise for getting it right. Once you’ve cleared out the current set-up in a game mode though, the game does try to give something that might actually hold a child’s attention in the form of a Sesame Street character leaving the building to perform a little animation. The problem with these animations though is that the characters aren’t really performing anything visually impressive or mentally engaging. Bert comes out of the building to jump rope, The Count comes out and tamely juggles some numbers, and Ernie mildly rides a skateboard around the screen. Elmo’s animation is the only one that threatens to entertain, in that he blows up a balloon and it carries him up into the air before it deflates, sending him flying back and forth. It’s a simple comedic set-up and one that’s not particularly great, but there’s actually something going on that can perhaps amuse a child. Everything else feels about on par to when a parent points at a person in a mascot suit at an amusement park and says “Look, there’s Grover!” as the person in a furry suit softly gesticulates towards them as they aren’t allowed to speak. Even then though, the child can at least approach to hug the character and the actor can communicate through miming. Here, you’d have to draw a child’s attention to it only to reward them with the visual of Grover bouncing back and forth on a pogo stick for a few seconds until he’s done and goes back inside.
The fifth game type still features the Sesame Street characters sponsoring a letter in their window, but now Big Bird has a more substantial task for young players. Using 3 of the 4 available letters, they must spell out a word he says. It’s a spelling test more than a spelling lesson, and if you do select the wrong letter, Big Bird will just immediately blurt out the one you should have selected instead. As we push into territory that more closely resembles education, it’s important to state why Big Bird’s Hide & Speak fails and why a child should seek other avenues of learning. The biggest offense is clearly the lack of any interesting substance behind the weak attempts at teaching the player, something that almost seems sacrilege when placed next to the T.V. show its based on. Sesame Street has memorable songs, likeable characters, and multiple segments to all grab a child’s attention while still working in lessons about numbers, letters, and life. Big Bird’s Hide & Speak is like a really slow game of flash cards, your child likely better off if you just recorded a regular episode of Sesame Street and play it for them over and over, not to mention there are many other educational games that have elements to their presentation besides reusing the same building and set of characters save one extra Sesame Street character that can be swapped in for “variety”.
Despite all this, the sixth game type almost actually feels like a proper bit of play. Big Bird stops holding the player’s hand as much here, instead tasking you with spelling as many words as you can before the cool sun wearing sunglasses comes down from the sky. It’s a contextualization of a timer and it’s obviously quite forgiving to avoid rushing children, but here there can actually be found something that will challenge a player to see how well they can do. The characters in the building don’t come out to do their animations this time, instead appearing with the four letters that have fairly obvious three letter words to be made from them like “cat” and “sun”. After you get the word in that lineup, the windows close and reopen to present new letters, although the presentation is always fairly slow since Big Bird takes his time saying anything. While not a riveting mode of play, it does actually resemble something close to a children’s game rather than disguised flash card tests of knowledge better learned elsewhere.
THE VERDICT: Sesame Street: Big Bird’s Hide & Speak has no real value to its intended audience or to a curious gamer. While you may spare it an impressed glance for digitizing a voice on the NES well, playing it reveals the incredibly lazy game mode designs that offer very little to engage even the most easily amused child. The game doesn’t teach the player about letters or how to spell so much as quiz them on what they learned from far more engaging and effective teaching methods. Big Bird’s Hide & Speak is terribly dull, agonizingly slow, and a disservice to a T.V. show that tried to show children that learning can be enjoyable rather than a dry memorization process.
And so, I give Sesame Street: Big Bird’s Hide & Speak for the Nintendo Entertainment System…
An ATROCIOUS rating. Big Bird’s Hide & Speak has less merit to educating or engaging a child than a page in an activity book, the game only really having a recognizable brand to even draw their attention towards it in the first place. There are games where the simplicity of the design makes them accessible for a child despite being boring for anyone outside the intended audience, but this game loses out to many talking toys in trying to put something fun in a kid’s hands that might teach them as they play. Not only would it require an incredibly patient child to stick it out and complete more than one or two rounds of this game, it doesn’t really offer them anything worth the trouble of buying a video game cart for.
Sesame Street: Big Bird’s Hide & Speak is a barebones experience that doesn’t even try to do anything well save playing Big Bird voice clips. Other video games offer better educational tools that engage the same subjects but better and Sesame Street itself offers more interesting experiences in other media, thus raising the question: if it fails at both education and entertainment, why should anyone play this game at all?