Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party (GBA)

If anything shows the power of a minigame collection, it might just be the fact that Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party is a bit of a hard game to rate. This Rugrats licensed game by THQ for the Game Boy Advance with a title that is a pun on having to go potty seems like the kind of game destined to be nothing more than entertainment for only the youngest players, but this minigame collection actually has quite a few tweaks to its design that muddy those waters.

Difficulty is the main reason this Rugrats game manages to impress despite all the factors of its identity that made it seem destined for failure or forgetability. Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party has around 24 minigames to play, some simple and familiar like a quick game of Memory or a jigsaw puzzle while others like serving up mud sandwiches or trying to balance babies to grab ice cream from atop the fridge fitting the cartoon series and its characters more closely. However, while something like a jigsaw puzzle sounds like it would be an incredibly easy, especially when you see it’s only a nine by nine puzzle, there is actually an ingenious choice that helps even the simplest challenge put up a good fight. If the game would be too easy on its own, all the game has to do is set your completion goal and the time on the clock in a way where succeeding in the time frame makes this seemingly straightforward game actually somewhat tense. It’s likely you won’t even have the time to finish that small jigsaw puzzle, especially when you need to rotate pieces before placing them and the picture you’re making isn’t easily readable, and it’s all thanks to the time pressure. A minigame that could have been a boring gimme is now made into a quick and somewhat difficult challenge, and there are many more games that benefit from the designers seemingly tuning things well to ensure simple designs are paired with harsh constraints.

The goals of these simpler games are realistic as well, with the puzzle only wanting you to do a few pieces to earn a win. It isn’t a perfect system, but the game does try to improve the minigames that won’t be enhanced with tighter time limits by instead having the game itself get more and more difficult. A game where you need to spot Rugrats characters as they pass by windows gets faster and has more of the windows occupied with characters over time, the worm tossing game with Phil and Lil picks up its pace, and the game where Spike the dog needs to bounce bones to his food bowl starts adding more falling bones to the picture to make it harder to hit them all and meet the score threshold. It’s pretty typical difficulty curve kind of play and evokes Mario Party in how some of these really seem to have a good feeling for when to ramp up to let the player learn first and then start making winning a decent challenge. Were this a pack of tightly designed minigames, Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party would be on its way to a recommendation, but while the smart decisions in game construction come as a surprise, there are still some areas this Rugrats game fails at.

The types of minigames are important since they carry so much of the experience, but there are quite a few duds amidst the more well rounded ones. Piloting the Reptar Raft down some rapids while collecting baby bottles is slow thanks to the ease of bouncing off rocks and the shore while the goal is too lenient to worry about. Games like Angelica playing essentially a shell game with you are no more challenging than a very slow version of the game’s real life counterpart, and the racing game inserted just feels like a worse version of a Mario Kart: Super Circuit track, the driving lasting a while and not offering much besides boosts to really offer more than just taking corners correctly. Most minigames are just a single player playing on their own against a challenge, but some like digging through a sandbox with the goal of clearing out the most sand or navigating a maze to collect cookies reveal AI partners who need a little work. Some games like Spike needing to alternate his eating and drinking based on a cue are just about mashing one button or the other quickly, and even with the time crunch, some like spotting the odd picture out or putting toys in the correctly labelled toy box can be done with no trouble at all if you don’t rush yourself.

While some of the weaker games might not excite in difficulty or concept, they could be easily passed over to reach the better cases of difficulty balancing. Only a few really flop as designs, such as the earlier mentioned game about getting ice cream on the fridge involving a finicky balance system that can be hard to manage even once you learned it. Games do begin first by explaining their controls and goals, but sometimes the exact execution isn’t quite captured in just being told the kind of game you’re playing, meaning you might lose a time or two until you’ve figured out what the game expects beyond the simple description. One area Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party definitely fails at though is how the player accesses these games, because while you might need a trial run to understand a game or really learn how its limitations will impact play, you only get one shot in the game’s main mode of play.

For the single-player mode, Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party takes on the form of a hide-and-seek game around the Pickles family house. You are locked out of certain rooms and areas at first, but as you find some of the babies hiding around and play their associated minigame, the house will open up. The kids aren’t hidden well so this is pretty much a glorified game select screen but without the knowledge of what you’ll face until you’ve clicked the kid, but despite being a somewhat slow and unexciting method of accessing the games, it’s not the real flaw with the single-player. Instead, that comes in the Chances. The player begins with a few cookies that represent your Chances, with these increasing when you complete some minigames or decreasing any time you fail to hit the expected goal of a minigame. While the limitations and control problems could have been overcome with learning the game through play before, the Chances system means you might lose cookies to the design choices that help these minigames otherwise, and after a game is lost you don’t get to retry it. Younger players may even need to retry this mode, although there should be enough easier games that most older players should be able to get through it all without too much concern over the cookies. Players can even shoot for higher ratings on the minigames, the quotas for success in a game less than the potential score you could conceivably achieve in the time limits. However, having brief brushes with some minigames is more likely to make some frustrating since a failure could catch you off-guard.

There is, thankfully, a way to just play the minigames without the Chance system or the hide-and-seek element, but unfortunately, the game messes this up to. You must first play a minigame in single-player to unlock it for free play, the player not even given five to start with unless they plunge into the main game. However, the game uses a password system instead of a proper save system, meaning that on reset you will have all the games locked again save the default ones. You can input a password to bring them all back of course, but it is an unfortunate inconvenience and it feels like the target audience might both struggle to unlock these games and then have issues with their passwords when they want to play the game again or play it in multiplayer. There are decently challenging minigames that are enjoyable for their limitations in Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party, but sadly they are made harder to enjoy thanks to the layers of inaccessibility put in front of them. At the same time though, some of the games are only interesting within the framework within single-player. The pressure to succeed at a fast paced jigsaw puzzle is lost when it can just be retried infinitely from a menu with no penalty, meaning even when it comes to some of the more interesting or challenging games, removing them from the flawed framework robs them of what made them challenging.

THE VERDICT: The minigames in Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party show a surprising understanding of designing a good but brief bit of challenging gameplay. If a minigame is simple in control or concept, its time limit or score quota will be adjusted to make the task difficult enough for even an adult to enjoy, so despite a few games that are straight up duds or still too easy, Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party had potential to be quite enjoyable. Sadly though, it erects too many walls to accessing the minigames. The free play mode only has a few minigames unlocked unless you put in a password you earn through its single-player, where the hide-and-seek format is slow and the lack of retries makes losing games annoying rather than a byproduct of challenging design. Were this a straightforward pack of 24 or so minigames, the passable ones and weaker designed games would be easily ignored in favor of the ones that do mix challenge, difficulty progression, and decent concepts well, but too many barriers to just enjoying those games make this party a lot less exciting.

And so, I give Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party for Game Boy Advance…

A BAD rating. It’s actually quite surprising how fun Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party can be at times simply by tightening its requirements up enough to make even the most basic minigame designs more exciting, but when it comes to limitations, this game just took things a bit too far. Having to unlock minigames through a single-player that boots you out of a minigame if you fail it makes learning the rules and embracing the tougher little games a task. Some you’ll only really get to enjoy after you’ve worked out what the game meant with its awkward tutorials, some are only interesting within the context of the single-player, and some are just so simple it would be hard to lose them even with the constraints placed on you. Making everything harder to access does the game no favors since the single-player is so bland in concept otherwise, the hide-and-seek a glorified menu system and the Chances system holding you back instead of adding any needed pressure. The small failures in minigame design are only amplified when most of your experience ends up being brief brushes with the good stuff as you learn its design or difficulty followed by breezing through the boring stuff.

There is a kernel of an alright game in Rugrats: I Gotta Go Party, in that its minigames had the potential to make a fun game for adults and a difficult one for kids. Adding structure to how you experience the game only hampered it though, the games that put up a fight less important since you can survive single-player on the weaker stuff and the free play mode keeping you from embracing the better minigames until after you’ve pushed through the hide-and-seek game. Even the strongest games aren’t substantial enough to counterbalance the barriers to playing them, so while you still might have moments of fun here and there, your party is going to get frequently interrupted and blocked as efforts to add a structure to the experience clumsily interfere.