Beastly: Frantic Photo
Rating: E - Everyone

A nice little movie that hits a soft spot with an arrogant, privileged, good-looking college boy being spelled to appear as ugly outside as he is inside. Wouldn't we all like to have that spell in our back pocket. His only hope for redemption is to be loved in his ugly state.

The game involves finding the difference between the pictures in the top and bottom screens. Taking advantage of the story, scenes that are solved are saved and eventually provide a recap of the motion picture. There are 30 photos for each difficulty level and five objects to find in each photo. Every five photos there is a puzzle based pretty much on "spot the difference". There are help icons that will freeze time, and show one or all objects. Left and right shoulder buttons reveal and hide the scoring/info screen.

"Hidden object" and "find the difference" games are staples of the game world and were originally played on a PC-sized screen. Translating the genre to the small sized DS screen poses problems of visibility. Occasional attempts to fix this by scrolling the screen or providing a magnifying glass are not available here.

The idea of making a simple "spot the difference" or "search and find" from movie stills is clearly an easy way to reuse assets but to make it a satisfying game, more work has to be done on the visibility problem.

Fun Factor: Only if you loved the movie
Female Factor: Good role for teens
Player Friendly: Some items are too small to find

Reviewed by: Editor - Apr/11