Nickelodeon's Barynard is a single player adventure game, but with a large

portion of mini-games. As an amazing bipedal cow, the player embarks on a

quest to win the recognition of the other farm critters and become the

"ultimate party animal."

Starting as the new cow in town, players can select the gender,

appearance (from about five cow breeds) and name of the character. Now

placed in the barnyard, the cow is free to talk to other characters,

smash crates, pick flowers, churn butter from milk directly from its own udders, and various other marginally productive shenanigans.

To make real progress, missions from other characters must be accepted.

These, much like me and my cohort's endless World of Warcraft jokes, start

at characters with big yellow exclamation marks over their heads. They're

easy to find, so getting stuck not knowing what to do in Barnyard is nearly

impossible, and after getting the epic mount bicycle, it's even more

convenient to go from mission to mission. Some of the missions are just

fetch quests, but many are actually fairly fun mini-games. After completing

these, they are available for play from the main menu, and the game tracks

and saves high scores as well. The downside to mini-games is that they're

only single-player, even though many of them seem perfectly ideal for

multiplayer. Go figure.

The best mini-games seem to be inspired by Gary Larson's The Far Side. Teasing the mailman

by dancing around behind his back and reverting to all fours when he turns around is pretty funny, and taking the farmer's truck for a street race

is fun stuff, too. My personal favorite is the whack-a-mole mini-game, pretty

much only because it has the best hoe-down banjo dance music in a game since

Blast Corps. It's true, I replayed it numerous times just to listen to that

music again and again. I am also a complete psychopath.

There's another side goal, too. Coins earned or collected can be spent at

the gopher's shop. By purchasing furniture, games like pool and darts, etc.,

these items can be added to the happenin' barn/night club. How very Animal

Crossing!

In the category of things that suck about this game, the graphics are fairly

choppy, and the load times are strangely long and also cause a lot of noise

from the disc reader for some reason. The game also froze on these loading

screens a few times, and without auto-saves, that's definitely an extra

helping of suck. Also, like every other reviewer on the internet, I'm pretty

much obligated to tell you that the male cows have udders, and a portion of

the game is spent blasting other characters with them like some

sort of god-awful bukkake party.

Barnyard isn't really the kind of game I could see readers of this site

buying, but some fun can be gleaned from it. It would be an all right buy for

younger kids if they really, really like Barnyard or 3D adventure games that

aren't too complicated.