Camping Mama: Outdoor Adventures for the Nintendo DS is a where Mama shows off her wilderness skills featuring 100 different stylus mini games set in an outdoor adventure theme. Throughout 38 levels, your character will have to complete different tasks for Camping Mama and Papa while unlocking the different mini games.

Camping Mama is setup similar to a top-down adventure game where you control a boy or girl character through each environment avoiding obstacles along the way such as bushes, trees and furry companions. These lovable creatures, depending on the motif of the level, range from all kinds of creatures like bears and monkeys.

As your adventurer wanders the different environments, he will encounter different touch screen mini games, of which most are classic puzzles games including matching, timing, and normal puzzle games. The majority of the advertised 100 mini games play similarly to one another with only slight environment changes differing between them. With the exception of the environments, each level plays like the last creating a repetitive gaming experience.

The game is easy. Every mini game can easily be completed to a 100% perfect rating with only a few being difficult enough to warrant a 90% completion. You would expect these mini games to be riveting since they are the heart of the franchise.

The health meter contains 8 hearts, but does it rarely ever come into play due to the fact health is given away like candy. Hearts can easily be found throughout the map as well as completing mini games successfully.

Collecting isn't very difficult either because each level is small enough to walk through every inch. There are no hidden passages or treasures to find and if one were to write a walkthrough, it would be a dry piece of literature.

With such a high standard set forth by its predecessor Cooking Mama, Camping Mama falls short of the mark. The mini games aren't unique with the DS Touchscreen only being used in a mundane manner with very little creative utilization. This title may be well suited for the younger gaming audience, but if you're looking for an expansion to the Cooking Mama experience, this isn't the game for you.

Camping Mama falls two graham crackers short of a full S'more.

Score 2/4

I've finally gotten Cathrinein my hands and I hate it. It’s one of the most frustrating games I have ever played. The controls are horrible, the puzzles are trial and error, the time limit is too strict, and the game does horrible job at explaining itself. If I was reviewing the game I would give it this site’s lowest possible score of 1 out of 4; Except I'm not reviewing the game. In fact, I'm glad I'm not working for a website that is forcing me to review the game, because I would not be able to do this game justice. Everything I complained about is my fault.

No doubt my experience with the game was unpleasant. First, I would often die while hanging off the side of a block because I hit the ''’ button expecting Vincent to climb up. When in reality, it made him drop down to his death. Secondly, when I come up to a wall of blocks with a time limit to worry about, all I can fathom to do is randomly push block blocks around hoping to find the right path. To top it all off, the worst experience was when I finally got a game over on the third chapter of the game which took me to the title screen only to find out that the game doesn't auto save. I now would have to start over from the beginning. From that moment on I hated the game. I don't think there's anything it could do to save itself.

These experiences were all negatively affecting my review before realizing it might just be me. Most people that buy a game like Catherine are probably smart enough to learn the different control scheme and to save when it tells you. It’s my fault that I could not. I remember once upon a time being upset at a certain God Hand review for the reviewer being bad at the game.

The role of the game designer is to teach you how to play the game so the designer does have to answer for something. The gaming crowd is large enough that there is bound to be someone else who makes the same mistakes as I do and therefore hate the game for it. All game designers work hard and test hard in order to make these incidents as rare as possible, but it’s impossible to catch everything. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere.

Shawn Elliot, of the Bioshock Infinite team, once told a story about tester who would not even touch the right analog stick. No matter how many times they explained the joystick mechanics to him, he still couldn't get it. As a result, that tester must have had a horrible experience with the game, but it would be silly to expect the game designers to put a one hour tutorial teaching players to put their thumb on the right analog stick.

Video games have that unique characteristic of interactivity which can cause opinions to vary more wildly than any other medium we know. How we interact determines our overall experiences with the game which leads to greatly opinionated viewpoints than we are used to. If it takes me a full frustrating hour to figure out a simple puzzle that would take others just minutes to solve, then as a reviewer I have the obligation to detail my reasons for being upset.

I believe I also have an obligation as a reviewer to pinpoints parts of the game that could very well be a problem only I would have. In the end I would probably give Catherine a lower score than most publications. I just hope readers take this article as a warning that video games, more than any other medium, require an understanding on how reviewer reached their overall opinion. Just take this example as a lesson to not take a simple score at face value without reading the reasons behind it. It’s entirely possible all the problems I had would never affect you.