The Haunted Hoard: Casper: Animated Activity Center (PC)
The short period of time where the minigame collections for kids known as activity centers thrived would see many popular brands and media franchises get in on providing associated games. There were quite a few Casper associated activity centers due to the franchise’s spike in popularity that coincided with the live action film, but Casper: Animated Activity Center is actually neither a broader tie-in to the series or an effort to cash in on that film. Instead, this PC title has direct ties to the direct-to-video film Casper: A Spirited Beginning, which provided a bit of an origin story for the ghost boy who can’t bring himself to scare people. In fact, this game sometimes even goes by the name Casper: A Spirited Beginning or Casper: A Spirited Beginning: Activity Center, but like most activity centers, it borrows the iconography and characters of the source material and then invents tangentially related tasks to potentially keep young players busy rather than deeply entertained.
Casper: Animated Activity Center provides a selection of six minigames to play, each one of them hosted by a different ghost. Initially though, the sixth game is locked, that one hosted by the big green ghost Kibosh who serves as the antagonist of the film. To get to his game, you must play the other five and earn Casper Coins, these provided so long as you actually finish a minigame before exiting, not that many of them are particularly demanding and many will just keep going until you win. There is at least a difficulty system available across all six games, the player getting 1 Casper Coin for playing them on Easy, 2 for Medium, and 3 for Hard. Considering you only need 15 to play Kibosh’s game and you can replay minigames as often as you want there isn’t too much of a barrier to playing it, but it is at least something you can work towards for a few minutes so you don’t just sample each minigame and then exit.
As for the minigames on offer in this activity center, they certainly range in quality even when you consider the young target audience. One of the easiest has to be Snivel’s Mix & Match, the simpering minion of Kibosh hosting a game that doesn’t really seem to exist to be difficult. In this mix and match, Snivel will hold up a a picture of the ghost he wants you to make, and off to the left, a ghost with mixed up parts will appear. The head, body, and ghostly tail will be shuffled around and you need to click through the options to make it look like Snivel’s image, but there is no real effort to make this difficult. This minigame mainly seems to exist just to see silly combinations though, like placing a fancy ghost’s head on a buff shirtless body and tentacle legs. The difference between difficulties here is just having more parts to move through meaning you really should play it on Hard, it not actually harder since the body parts are so distinct, but at least you can maybe make an amusing arrangement of parts. What Snivel’s Mix & Match really excels at compared to other minigames though is its rather animated host. Whichever spirit hosts the game often hangs off to the side, reacting to your successes and failures, and it is rather amusing at times to see the lanky ghost Stretch overreact to you making a mistake or the portly ghost Fatso chugging a meal over in their games. Snivel, however, has the widest range of reactions and is very animated, this minigame certainly meant to make kids laugh despite its very shallow gameplay.
Casper’s Spinning Squares, on the other hand, has very little good to say about it. You’ll be presented a picture from Casper: The Spirited Beginning that has been split into squares, those squares flipped to mess up the image some. You won’t have the context of what you’re trying to reveal sometimes, and even if you did, you’re mostly just clicking around until an image comes into view, the process not requiring much thought beyond identifying when pieces of this puzzle don’t line up. Casper isn’t a particularly interesting host, but when you swiftly complete the puzzle just because it’s harder not to, you’ll get to see a clip from the film. If you view all the available clips you’ll actually get a fairly decent idea of what Casper: The Spirited Beginning is about, but they’re not presented in order or viewable again save if you get the same puzzle another time, but some are at least devoted to little bits of slapstick or comedy so perhaps a child might be content with such a reward. Something that serves as a better challenge but not exactly an exciting one for kids is Stretch’s Memory Game, where you’re presented with a clock face and need to essentially play a game of Simon but with times on the clock. The difficulty determines not only how many numbers are on the clock but how many correct answers you need to get in the evolving pattern, the number resetting if you make a mistake so Hard can truly be a bit difficult. It’s a straightforward memory test that doesn’t have much to draw you back to it, but at least Casper: Animated Activity Center can say there’s something in here that might even trip up an adult.
Stinkie’s Goo Toss also won’t just hand over wins, this actually being the most active minigame of the bunch. Playing as Stinkie you find yourself in a graveyard where other spirits are popping up over tombstones to tease you. Click on a ghost and Stinkie will hurl a glob of goo at them, this essentially a test of your ability to click the ghosts quickly before they pop back down behind the graves. On Hard they can be fairly fast, but since you are just moving your mouse around clicking on what’s on screen, success probably depends most on how accustomed you are to moving your cursor at speed. There is a ranking granted after the timer ends so you can try to hit the top rank of Specter! for something extra, but it’s again a minigame that will probably lose its appeal quickly thanks to its simple design and how overcoming it doesn’t require too much work.
Despite the box promising that Casper: Animated Activity Center will provide some learning skills, it’s hard to call any of the games in it educational or dependent on much logic save Fatso’s Kitchen. The aptly named ghost wants you to throw specific ingredients in his big bowl full of green gunk, but the clues for what he wants are presented on a notepad beside quite an array of different foods. What makes Fatso’s Kitchen so impressive is it actually requires a decent understanding of the food on offer to properly play, even when you’re not in the deep end of Hard mode. Sometimes the clue may be something as simple as asking for you to use the shaker that is the same color as a recognizable object, but other times it asks you for something that requires a bit of thought. A kid might not know immediately what white meat that comes from a farm animal might be, especially since the options include chicken, ham, and a hot dog. A young player might see the clue that says eating potato chips might leave this on your lips ties to salt, and the clue for gumballs actually alludes to gum coming from a tree. There’s room for some learning even if its by trying out the ingredients and seeing if you’re right or wrong, Fatso’s Kitchen tickling your brain more than any other minigame present save the memory one, and it does it in a much more interesting way than Stretch’s game.
However, once it’s time to play Kibosh’s game, prepare for incredible disappointment. Kibosh’s Magic Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle that never seems to have more than ten pieces, but they’re all so uniquely shaped it would be quite difficult to make any errors placing them on the outline that already gives away their placement. You do get clips for clearing this, much like in Casper’s tile game, but this jigsaw puzzle doesn’t even have the advantage of a regular puzzle where you sometimes need to compare similar pieces. Having unique shapes for every piece is a neat touch for the few seconds before you realize it means there is not really anything difficult about the task before you, and it’s ultimately fortunate this last minigame isn’t hard to unlock since it would be an even more sour note to end on in an already shaky collection of little amusements.
THE VERDICT: Casper: Animated Activity Center is a mostly harmless collection of minigames that might amuse a kid for half an hour. The tile shuffler and Kibosh’s Magic Puzzle are absolute bores due to their simplicity and Stretch’s Memory Game can be a bit tougher than the rest despite that not coming with an increase in entertainment to match, but a few games have a bit of value. The goo hurling graveyard game is a little lively and Snivel’s Mix & Match might create a silly sight, but Fatso’s Kitchen feels like the only place with much thought put into it thanks to its broad range of clues that could require a moment of thought to overcome. It’s still a lean package where even its slightly serviceable games run dry quickly, but it’s not exactly demanding and often just dull when at its worst.
And so, I give Casper: Animated Activity Center for PC…
A BAD rating. While Kibosh’s Magic Puzzle being so basic and easy is fairly egregious, mostly this assemblage of minigames is a low effort but not totally flawed collection. Fatso’s Kitchen feels like it hits the mark on being clearly for kids but also slightly enriching, its design not feeling too educational but asking a young player to think a bit. The clock game on the other hand is a fairly basic adaptation of a game style that also can’t give you the satisfaction of proving your smarts by playing it at length thanks to its set end points. Stinkie’s goo throwing game doesn’t hurt to play but doesn’t have substance worth returning to, and Snivel’s ghost mixing is hard to be entertained by unless you’re a little kid where something weird looking still gets you to giggle. Throw in Casper’s actually fairly bad tile flipper and it’s not a good collection by any measure but you pick which games you want to play and their difficulty at least and some love was put into animating the ghosts. It probably won’t even take half an hour to see every minigame on every difficulty though and movie clips is hardly a motivator to return to the weakest games on offer, but you can only get so worked up over an activity center that doesn’t make much of an effort beyond the basics. It could at least do a better job pretending its educational or throw in some more games along the lines of Stinkie’s and Fatso’s so there might be something worth returning to, but instead, much like Casper: A Spirited Beginning, it came and went and is bound to be forgotten by all save those who have some nostalgia for it.
Casper: Animated Activity Center was developed by WayForward Technologies, something that may sound surprising if you mostly know them for better fare like the Shantae and River City Girls series, but their work often comprises of low effort licensed games meant to keep the lights on between such passion projects. I can’t resent them too much for taking the easy paycheck and it is likely the decent animations of the ghosts was a bit of their true talent slipping in, but it’s easy to believe they deliberately didn’t put much work or thought into the project since it is not like expectations for it were high. Activity center is also a term used to describe a small plastic table full of simple toys for an infant or toddler to mess with, games like this just being the digital step up once they can better do things like read and manage a mouse. Casper: Animated Activity Center was almost guaranteed to not have much to it, but at least it wasn’t much worse than a low effort but manageable group of minigames to briefly mess with.