Overall Rating: 1/5 Stars
The year was 1990. The developer was Hi Tech. The NES video game was Big Bird’s Hide And Speak, based on the Sesame Street children’s television series. The result was a boring no-fun mess.
Gameplay
We are going to try to get through this as quickly as possible, because the game is impossible to enjoy, and writing this review does not hold much of a chance of enjoyment either. Hopefully the reader is the luckier party in this partnership.
Big Bird’s Hide And Speak is a collection of six mini-games supposedly designed to be educational for children. They are not, and the valid argument can be made that they are more of a detriment to developing minds than a benefit. For example, the four distinct directions on the directional pad are ignored, and cursors move through options in a set order, rather than obeying the direction pressed. In fact, if the player tries to select an on-screen element that is not valid for selection, Big Bird will actually say “Use the big black button.” Referring to the entire directional pad as “the big black button” is not only completely incorrect and utterly stupid, but serves to “dummy down” the experience for the child, rather than potentially serving as an appropriate setting to introduce them to cardinal directions and controller use.
Every single mini-game is organized in the same manner: There is a house with four windows that Big Bird stands next to. Four Sesame Street characters, selected from a possible roster of five (being The Count, Elmo, Bert, Ernie, and Grover, if you really care), enter the house, each taking a position in one of the four windows.
The first game just has the player try to select the character that Big Bird names, a test of Sesame Street character recognition. The second game has the same goal, but the windows close before selection, thus adding a memory element. The third game is identification, but for letters, with each character having one next to them. The four game is the same; but, of course, with the windows being shut before selection, adding a memory element. The fifth game has the player spell the word Big Bird says, using the four letters available, selecting one at a time. Finally, the sixth game has the player spell as many words as possible, given sets of four letters that change with each completed word, before the little sunglasses-wearing sun sets.
It is, perhaps, an unprecedented gameplay concept for an 8-bit machine, completely relying on recognition of the speech effects involved. Big Bird knows all the characters, all the letters of the alphabet, dozens of words, and several phrases, either consoling or congratulating. The most amusing is probably the successful spelling of the word “men” combined with Bird choosing the congratulatory message “Oh boy!”, resulting in the rather flamboyant congratulations of “Men! Oh boy!”
The pacing of the game is very, very, unforgivably and painfully slow. The cursor does not move instantly, no; instead, it is animated as Little Bird, fluttering to and fro from one selection to the next. And, remember, the game does not care which direction is pressed on the d-pad; no, Little Bird has to flutter to each window in clockwise order, even if that requires three painstakingly slow, animated movements to get to the desired selection. This means that the bulk of the game consists of taking several seconds just to select a single letter. If a parent is truly too dumb to come up with a more efficient way to teach their kids how to spell a simple word, then the child is doomed.
And what reward is there for, say, finding all four character in the first or second game? A sequence where one of the characters exits the house, moves to the left of it, and against a bit more of a blank background element, like a weird little alleyway or something, performs some sort of victory move. Even these are slow-paced and awkward, whether it is Elmo blowing up a balloon that carries him up-screen when it inflates until popping and sending him back and forth across the screen back to Earth, or The Count juggling balls labeled 1, 2, and 3, so many times that it seems inhumanly possible that someone on the staff actually made the decision for the sequence to last so long. It is as if the programmers has never met a child before, and somehow assumed that their attention spans were a hundred times longer than an adult’s.
Graphics
The game looks fine. Whatever. The characters are recognizable, there are some colors involved, the house sure looks like a dang house, and Big Bird shows up all over the place in a big way. Hurray. The most impressive part is the screen-filling Big Bird, massive sprite that he is, roller-skating across the title screen to start the festivities.
Sound
The speech effects are among the best on the console, and the classic Sesame Street is recognizable on the title screen. Beyond that, there really is not much sound to speak of. There is a triumphant little ditty song that accompanies the victory animations, which is fine, but then we have the same “swish swish” sound used to denote both the fluttering of Little Bird and the walking of the characters. This is doubly ridiculous because both animations are so starkly unnecessary in their length anyway.
Originality
Originality? Okay, it was among the very few NES cartridges to overwhelmingly focus on voice effects. Otherwise, meh. There were other “educational” games, even ones that failed in their very goal; and there were plenty of games based on children’s television show licenses, especially if you count titles like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Let us never give it credit for creativity or quality. This is a game that gets one star out of five in its rating. Make no mistake: It is bad.