Where's Waldo: This should have never been a game

If you are old enough, you probably recall the immense popularity of these books. I first encountered one at the dentist's office during the obligatory half and hour to an hour wait in the lobby that I could never understand (seriously guys, is the timetable really that difficult to sort out?)

The manufacturer of these books must give them away to dentists for free because just like Highlights magazine, they were always in every one of them. I presume there is some sort of promotional reason behind it. I feel as though the Where's Waldo books were a bit of a letdown and probably lead to eye strain injuries for children all over the world. Plus the fact that after you have actually found Waldo (or Wally if you were in Europe) there isn't much reason to ever open the book again. I feel silly having said that already since almost all books have no "replay value." That being said, video games are supposed to have replay value and normally shouldn't be just like books.

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I suppose you can combine this with the fact that the graphical limitation of game consoles back in the 80's and 90's weren't exactly something you would want to pipe through an HDMI cable to make an overall lousy experience. The non waldo characters are almost indiscernible from the Waldo ones and this resulted in us sitting a lot closer to the television than our parents would like us to.

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Go ahead, have a look in there and see if after you find Waldo that you don't feel as though you need to make an appointment with at least an optometrist. This is very lazy programming on the part of the game creators and the game did not sell very well until SNES made the game a bit better by allowing you to zoom in and you were searching for more items than just the striped shirt wearing fella. I still ran away after just seeing a little bit of it.

Also, what exactly is going on in these scenes? The repetition of character graphics just adds to the laziness behind this title and how they were trying to capitalize on the fame of a beloved book. There is a VERY FUNNY website dedicated to fans attempting to recreate what some of the people or things in these images are actually meant to be.

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Unfortunately, the above is not a Jackson Pollock painting, that is an actual screenshot from the SNES. Do your eyes hurt yet? Mine do, and not just from the memories.

One particular reviewer that rates games in 5 categories and gives games a score of 1 to 10 in each gave Where's Waldo an overall rating of -49 it's highest score in the music category where it was awarded a mere -9.

There were a lot of great games on the NES but this was not one of them. It was so terrible that it boggles the mind that they bothered to make an SNES version. I have no idea if the game sold well but I can't imagine why anyone would buy one of these in the first place. I can only imagine that grandparents that have no idea what their kids like might have purchased this as a gift.

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Where's Waldo on NES is likely one of the most pathetic games ever made by anyone and was a blemish on mostly otherwise wonderful library of games. Thankfully, when I saw it for sale in stores, despite only being near 10 years old, I had enough sense to not be interested in it at all.