The Great Waldo Search (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
203A playthrough of THQ's 1992 puzzle game for the SNES, The Great Waldo Search.
Played through on the expert mode.
The Great Waldo Search is based on the Martin Hanford book of the same name. Do any of the rest of you guys remember it from those Scholastic book fairs in elementary school? I dread to think of how much money I managed to beg off of my parents each year to buy Goosebumps, Garfield, and Where's Waldo books.
If you don't know what Where's Waldo (or Where's Wally, depending on where you are) is, the books are "hidden object" games, sans the iPad. Each "puzzle" is a themed two-page spread filled to the brim with people doing all sorts of comical things, and Waldo is hidden somewhere among the chaos waiting to be found. As anyone that read the books can attest to, it's not that easy. You'd think that that signature red-and-white knit cap and jumper would stand out a bit better than it does!
Anyways, it's an extremely simple concept, and it works incredibly well in a book that sold for $10-15. But as an SNES cartridge that cost several times the amount that the books did? Not so much.
The game follows the same idea as the book, and the graphics are *much* better than they were in the original Where's Waldo? NES game, but there are only five stages (whereas the book had twelve full scenes), and in order to retain any level of detail at the SNES's resolution, the images are all super magnified on the screen. As you might imagine, that makes the game incredibly easy. The placement of Waldo, his dog, and the items you need to collect change with each game, but as you can tell by the run time of the video, there isn't much content or challenge here.
There is a minigame where you can collect bones as Woof flying on a magic carpet, which is neat, I guess? And the "Where's Waldo?" voice sample is amusing the first 700 times you hear it, but you hear it every time you push a button in the menus, so the novelty wears off pretty quickly.
I suppose The Great Waldo Search fulfills its intended purpose, but I'm not really sure why it's a thing. I have to admit I do have an inexplicable soft spot for the NES Where's Waldo? game, but still... why not just grab the book instead? The print version looks better, it doesn't require a television and a Super Nintendo, and you can say "Where's Waldo?" to yourself as many times as you like as you search.
You can find my video of the original Where's Waldo game here: https://youtu.be/w9C_MrU7y4E
And the NES version of The Great Waldo Search is here, if you're interested: https://youtu.be/yx_6afwZ0Ow
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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