Being the parent of a 10 year old son, it was inevitable that Pokemon Snap would be high on the "must have" list of games in our household. We picked the game up on Saturday, and set down to a weekend of searching high and low for the elusive Pokemon.

The general story of the game is that an island is populated by various Pokemon, which must not be harmed in any way. Your task, as a great photographer, is to instead get a photo of each Pokemon to show it's alive and doing well. Sounds pretty non-violent to us!

You move through the island in stages - you begin in the "beach" area, and move on to five other main sections, plus a secret level. In each area, your vehicle is on a track. You cannot change direction, speed, or elevation. Later in the game you win some extras, such as a "go faster" ability, but in general you are stuck on the exact same course every time. The Pokemon, in fact, do the exact same things every time you go through the course! A pikachu sits here on the left, a diglet pops up over in that area.

The graphics are great, but it's really a shame that you don't have freedom to move throughout the world. There are a few neat tidbits they give you - do X combinations of things and a special Y thing occurs - but we were able to solve the game in under 24 hours. It was merely a matter of going through each of the 6 areas over and over again, getting the keystrokes down to cause the appropriate things to happen.

You'd think with the incredible graphics engine that they created, that they'd have more than 63 of the Pokemon in there, or that they'd let you wander whereever you wanted to!

As a final annoyance, you can only have one player on a gamepak. Period. If someone else wants to play from the beginning, they have to completely erase all existing pictures from the gamepak.

A fun game to rent for the weekend, but not quite as much fun to have sitting on your shelves.

Pokemon Snap Walkthrough

Buy Pokemon Snap from Amazon.com