Disneyland Adventures review

Disneyland Adventures is the latest Kinect title for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 accessory aimed squarely at the kids, but can get you to fall in love with the magical kingdom all over again?

We doubt there are many kids who don't love the magic of Disney, and while it no doubt drives many parents mad with its merchandising. We have to ask, is this game more Toy Story, or Cars 2. We got the kids out to help us review the game.

Meeting new friends

Core to the game is the ability to walk around the Disneyland park in Anaheim and all it has to offer. Aside from a good smattering of other visitors who are just there to get in your way, you’ll find a perfect replica of the Californian park; complete with rides, and more importantly the Disney characters - there are 40 of them.
When you aren’t going on the rides you can chase down your favourites, wave hello, dance with them, get their autograph and give them hugs. It's rather charming, and younger children will love it.

Without a storyline - you don’t have to save Cinderella for example - it is here you get the interaction element to Disneyland Adventures rather than it just being a series of mini-games.
From the start Mickey has you on errands that he is too lazy to do himself. While they soon get boring for us older folk, you just know that to the target audience, your 7 year old, the thought that they are really helping Mickey is the best honour in the known universe.
This being a Kinect game, walking around the park isn’t a mere button press or moving a joystick. Thankfully it isn’t all on rails either. Instead you have to hold your arm out in front of you to run forward. Other controls include waving to talk to characters, giving the hug gesture to do just that, or holding your hand up high to access your inventory, be it a camera or magic wand.
Once you tire of the walking; there really is only so much you can take from the eternally happy Mickey, you can go off in search of the rides. To distract you along the way is the chance to collect coins. These coins can then be spent in any of the eight shops to buy more autograph books, clothes and other virtual memorabilia.

Cutting out the time wasting

If the walking around the park is the exploring element to the game, the 20 rides are the fun bit.
As with the real Disneyland, the rides are dotted around the map in areas like Tomorrowland and Frontierland, and you can either walk to them or as we found, simply talk to the game and tell them what you want to do next, thanks to voice support from Kinect.

Get to the ride of your choice and you are transported to a parallel universe where you get to do the ride, but in the characters actual environment. That makes it a lot more fun, a lot more engaging, and certainly better than a beaten-up, paint chipped ride and the 45-year-old man next to you screaming with joy.
The games themselves vary widely, although all are great fun. Big Thunder Mountain Railroad involves you riding an out-of-control mine cart through a mineshaft and is similar in gameplay to some of the levels on Kinect Adventure.
The Finding Nemo levels see you swimming up and down underwater with Nemo and Squirt the turtle. Winnie the Pooh’s levels are based in the 100 Acre Wood. And the Princess level is all about dancing with your favourite Disney Princess.

It is not just fun for one

Yep there is multiplayer as well, with the chance for anyone to jump in and play at the same time co-op style. There are no battle modes, this is family fun remember.

That means that if you’ve got two kids they can play together rather than having to sit there all glum faced. And what’s really nice, is that while the games have challenges there is never a real sense that you need to complete them to progress. You don’t collect all the coins, so be it.

Verdict

Developed by the same guys behind Kinectimals, Disneyland Adventures really leverages the characters and worlds from the Disney universe. This isn’t just a chance to go to Disneyland without the cost of expensive flights.
If you’ve got young kids and they love Disney, then this is clearly the game you need to be buying to side-step the conversation with your other half as to why you’ve just spent this month's slush-fund on COD:MW3, Need For Speed Run, and Skyrim.
The Kinect controls are easy and responsive, the graphics charming and the mini games compelling enough to make you come back for more, time and time again.
We have to admit, we even found ourselves taking a breath on the rollercoaster. Just don’t tell our kids.

First Look at More Characters from Pixar Brave

"She's your anti-princess." There's a brand new trailer for Pixar's Brave, their animated fairytale movie for summer 2012, coming tomorrow (Tuesday), but in the meantime Yahoo News has a first look at some of the other characters we haven't seen in public yet. Brave, which we saw a teaser trailer for this summer, is about the red-haired Princess Merida, voiced by Kelly Macdonald, and her mother Queen Elinor, voiced by Emma Thompson, and father, King Fergus, voiced by Billy Connolly, who we see below along with her triplet brothers (Harris, Hubert, and Hamish). There's more to read on Yahoo, but check out the new image.

And here is: the enormous Lord MacGuffin (voiced by Kevin McKidd), the surly Lord Macintosh (Craig Ferguson) and the disagreeable Lord Dingwall (Robbie Coltrane), just added from HeyUGuys as well.

Brave is set in the mystical Scottish Highlands, where Merida is the princess of a kingdom ruled by King Fergus (Connolly) and Queen Elinor (Thompson). An unruly daughter and accomplished archer, Merida one day defies a sacred custom of the land and inadvertently brings turmoil to the kingdom. This was originally being helmed by Pixar's first female director, Brenda Chapman (of Prince of Egypt), but they have since brought in co-director Mark Andrews (of the short One Man Band) to take over and finish up the movie. Disney has already scheduled Pixar's Brave for release next summer on June 22nd, 2012. Looking good?

Finding Nemo Pixar Figure Collection 001

Finding Nemo is a 2003 American computer-animated comedy family drama film written by Andrew Stanton, directed by Andrew Stanton and Lee Unkrich and produced by Pixar. It tells the story of the overly protective clownfish Marlin (Albert Brooks) who, along with a regal tang called Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), searches for his abducted son Nemo (Alexander Gould). Along the way, Marlin learns to take risks and to let Nemo take care of himself.

The film received overwhelmingly positive reviews and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. It was the 2nd highest-grossing film of 2003, behind The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, earning a total of $868 million worldwide.

And now Pixar's Finding Nemo star Nemo himself is getting the Revoltech treatment as a fully pose-able figure. Yup, you heard it right – Fully pose-able fish! Includes different faces, and dizzy Dory as an accessory! Even his "special fin" is faithfully reproduced! Comes with two types of different facial expressions and the face can be removed so that you can easily change the look.

This looks like a really nice set and I'm looking forward to it :)

Accessories: Alternate Nemo "face" (scroll down to see), Dory, and coral reef base

And here's a comparison of size. I like that there's a reference and I hope that the hand shown doesn't belong to a small adult because I like the size comparisons.

Revoltech Pixar Figure Collection 002 – WALL-E

This is just too cute :) WALL•E, is a 2008 American computer-animated science fiction film produced by Pixar Animation Studios and directed by Andrew Stanton. The story follows a robot named WALL-E, who is designed to clean up a waste-covered Earth far in the future. He falls in love with another robot named EVE, who also has a programmed task, and follows her into outer space on an adventure that changes the destiny of both his kind and humanity. Both robots exhibit an appearance of free will and emotions similar to humans, which develop further as the film progresses.

WALL-E has been met with overwhelmingly positive reviews among critics, scoring an approval rating of 96% on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It grossed $521.3 million worldwide, won the 2008 Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature Film, the 2009 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form, the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature as well as being nominated for five other Academy Awards at the 81st Academy Awards. WALL-E ranks first in TIME's "Best Movies of the Decade"!

And now Kaiyodo Revoltech is bringing to us this exceptional WALL.E robot toy figure as part of their Pixar Figure Collection. WALL.E Revoltechs up very nicely, too! Fully pose-able, with a gaggle of accessories, he's ready to recreate scenes from the Pixar movie or follow your own script. I think this is one of the BEST WALL.E robot toy figures I've come across :)

Check out all the cool accessories - fire extinguisher, plant in shoe and scrap metal cube ;p I really like this Kaiyodo Revoltech WALL.E robot toy figure

The head is a combination of hinge joints and movable up and down, also can be rotated 360°. You can produce a wide variety of facial expressions by changing the angle of the eye.

Here's the basic figure without the limbs and tracks. These are attached to complete the robot toy figure.

And here's a picture to show the size of this Kaiyodo Revoltech WALL.E robot toy figure. Not too shabby for the price they're asking for.