Classic Game Room - BARNEY IN CHOCOLAND for iPod review

Barney in Chocoland, chocolate seizure here I come! Say what you will about gaming on the iPod. It has no buttons, no 30 year history in the console market and its made by a computer company which prides itself on friendly designs (yuk!). However, thanks to the relatively low barrier to entry on iTunes, youll find games for the iPod Touch and iPhone that youll never see anywhere else ANYWHERE!! Barney in Chocoland is that kind of game. At first glance it looks like its high as a kite on corn syrup and candy canes with its overly saturated color palette and portly lead character slowly jogging from side to side with his hat on backwards. Diabetics be warned, this game drowns the main character in chunks of choco. They dont ever call it chocolate, perhaps because the price of cacao has robbed them of the pleasure. You guide Barney from one side of the screen to the other catching choco chunks as they rain from the heavens above. Fruit, choco-eliminating bombs and error-removing power ups also fall like hot hail. Barney must deposit the chunks of choco into barrels on the left and right side of the screen for points, but be careful! He can only hold two pieces of choco at once and it takes a split second to drop the chunks into the barrels. It looks deceptively easy at first but once it picks up speed you realize there is an element of strategy to this game. The fruit gives you more points, but if you let any choco hit the ground you get a red X and essentially lose a life. Fans of simple, straight forward arcade games may get a kick of Barney in Chocoland, the gameplay is actually pretty catchy. It gets challenging when there are more pieces of choco in the air than you can catch and suddenly drown in the stuff. While gameplay is fun, Ill admit that I dont care for the visual style or easy listening soundtrack. If Barney was being showered with severed zombie heads and beer bottles it would probably be right up my alley.