A Poor Movie Tie-In Game (Finding Nemo (PC))

Member Name: CaptainD

Product:	Finding Nemo (PC)
Date:	22/03/07 (169 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Quite nice for young children...

Disadvantages: ... far too easy for anyone else...

Finding Nemo: Nemo’s Underwater World of Fun is a typical example of a movie tie-in game gone wrong. Sure, it’s very nicely presented and has some clips from the movie for you to watch, but there’s no substance to it at all.

Basically what we have here is a collection of simple mini-games, which when completed let you play a different mini-game. When you’ve completed that… you’ve completed the game. (To be fair you can go back and play any of the seven different games again, and the difficulty level will go much higher than needed for to complete the basic game, but why would you?) The best thing about the movie was that although kids loved it, it was just as enjoyable (perhaps even more so) for adults, because of the different layers of humour. With this game it’s purely for young children (who may love it) – the games are very easy and it took me a grand total of an hour and a half to complete the game (including watching the movie clips!).

The graphics are very nice and look authentic to the film, and the animation is reasonably good (apart from the lip-synching). There is some decent music and the voice-acting is good, though the sound-bites from the movie get very repetitive. It’s all very prettily presented though and pretty much all of the characters from the movie are here somewhere.

Nemo’s father explains when you begin the game that he’s going to build a racecourse so that Nemo can prove himself to be a super swimmer. Before this however Nemo needs to win some items by playing the sub-games. You swim round looking for these games (with a few animated bits you can activate along the way by clicking on them). There’s a game where you have to guess which shell a little critter is hiding from – there are only three which get shuffled around, but it is extremely easy to keep track of where the critter is. You also have to feed kelp to Bruce the shark in a breakout / pinball style game, and help Dory with a shape-order memory game with the ever-moving shoal of fish, and play a match-it game which is also far too easy because it’s only on a 4x4 grid. By far he best of the games is one where you swim through the gulf stream with the turtles, collecting shells along the way and avoiding collisions, and have to exit at the correct point. Once you’ve completed a game at level 5 you get to see a related clip from the movie, and you also collect a shell. When you have the shells from all 5 games, you go to the main race.

This is somewhat like the turtles game and involved trying to collect the singing clams against a time limit. Various obstacles slow you down but there are power-ups to collect that can help you. The controls for this part of the game seemed a little sluggish, but at least with the power ups etc there was more going on in this than most of the other parts of the game. Complete the racecourse at level 5 and you win the game. Roll credits…

Once you’ve done that you can race again or play any of the other games, and they do get harder as you go along. There’s also another weird game where you help the gang from the fish tank create weird and wonderful music. Well… mostly weird. For a very young child who loved the movie and hasn’t yet developed any kind of advanced co-ordination skills this would be a very good game, but for anyone who’s played computer games before it’s far too easy and very, very simple. It looks and sounds nice for toddlers, and they may enjoy it, but I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone else. I can’t really knock it too much for being appropriate to its target market, but since the movie was hugely enjoyable, I don’t see any reason why the game couldn’t have appealed to a wider audience. For me by far the best feature was actually watching the video clips from the film (which are tolerably good quality), but it’s not worth getting the game just for those.

You don’t need a high-end PC to run this game. Here are the system specs

OS: Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/x64
CPU: Pentium 2 266MHz or above
HDD space: 440Mb
Memory: 128Mb or above
Graphics card: 8Mb or higher card with DirectX 8.1 or above

<b>Tested On:</b>

OS: Windows XP Home Edition SP2
CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz
RAM: 768Mb
Graphics card: 256Mb GeForce 5500 FX
DirectX 9.0c

I experienced no technical problems whatsoever playing Finding Nemo: Nemo’s Underwater World of Fun.


Age rating: 3+ (my guess is it's most suitable for 4-8 year old's, give or take a year maybe).


(This game CD contains both the Windows and Mac versions of the game.)


I picked this up at Morrison’s for £3.99 and then passed it on to a young friend, so it wasn’t a total loss. Amazon have it for £4.98 new (from £1.99 on the Marketplace but with the postage costs you’re still better off at Morrison’s if you see it there), while Play.com have it for £4.99 or in a 3 for £10 range (which may possibly be better if there are any other games you want in that range – if the promotion is still on when you read this, you can find the complete list of games in this range at http://www.play.com/Games/PC/PROD/2-/2019/2-/Promo .html Unfortunately they only have kids' games in this promotion, so it's a parents-only domain really!).

Summary: Young kiddies might like it, but otherwise very disappointing.