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Last updated 6th Feb 2023
Most Recent Review
Barbie
Commodore 64 | 1984 | Barbie | Dress-Up
It's 1984, I'm eight years old, and Barbie is on my Commodore 64. I'm so excited to begin. Let's play!
The game begins with the phone ringing. It's Ken! "Hi Barbie, do you want to go to the gym?" he asks.
"Sure, Ken. Sounds like fun," Barbie says in the flat, joyless tones of the truly bored.
"I'll pick you up in an hour."
Now, if you know anything about Barbie, it's that she doesn't have any clothes, so she is forced to go looking for gym clothes. Barbie drives in a sportscar with the warm wind in her hair, circling past a small selection of shops and her house, as the clock ticks.
These shops let you change Barbie's hair style, hair colour (in a very limited way), choose outfits and shoes. You can even wear belts, and there are patterns to use. It reminds me very much of my beloved Barbie Fashion Plates toys as a kid.
And I've got to say, this part is amazing. Barbie can look outrageously—oh no, that was Jem.
Heart full, Barbie goes home to meet her beau. The phone is ringing...
"Hi, Barbie. Do you want to go to the prom?"
What the hell, Ken. You were all ready to go to the gym and then you remembered the prom is in an hour? You are losing points as the Perfect Boyfriend by the minute. Still, Barbie, dateless for the prom, agrees it would be fun, and it's time to get dolled up again.
She returns home, and the doorbell rings. Ken is finally taking her to —
You bastard, Ken.
A jaunty little tune plays, and then we're back at the phone. This time, Ken wants to go on a picnic.
But sure enough, when we return to our home, looking completely adorable by the way, Ken has changed his plans. He wants to go to the pool in an hour.
Barbie will wear the sexiest bathing costume available. That will teach him to change plans at the last minute—
Oh, tennis? Barbie, why are you agreeing to all this? Have you no pride? At this point my son asked if the game ends with a final battle against Ken. But fine. I love 1980s tennis clothes.
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
On the third try, I just let Barbie drive around pretending to be in Paris for hours, and then went home, to teach Ken a lesson.
And so it ends.
All in all, this is pretty terrible shovelware cashing in on the immense popularity of Barbie with little girls.. But I have to give it points for digitised voice in a C64 game, and for the adorable clothes.
On its surface, this looks like the ads for mobile games where you have to dress the girl perfectly for her date or be rejected. (Then you download them and it's just another Match 3 game. But I digress.) And I have to admit, I would have adored that as a little girl.
But Ken seems to not care what you wear or where you are going, which makes the whole experience uniquely pointless. I can't imagine playing this for more than ten minutes as an eight-year-old—
Who am I kidding. I'd play it for hours.
Here I want to say a word for the experience of playing this on an emulator, which consists mostly of staring at blank screens for ages while vague loading noises happen, then a few minutes of gameplay. Flawless recreation of my memories of playing C64 games on tape, 10/10.