Strawberry Shortcake Musical Matchups

Right before the video game crash, companies were so high on the notion of video games that they were cranking out games for every possible trend and demographic. A hot property amongst young girls in the early 1980s was the Strawberry Shortcake dolls. So much like the Smurfs and other kid properties that came before her, Strawberry Shortcake made the leap to the video game world as “Strawberry Shortcake Musical Matchups.” This Parker Brothers title was made for young kids and the game fails to transcend that age group, but that does not mean it doesn’t have its charms.

Let’s start off with the good. The graphics and music are really decent and the gameplay while simple is easy enough for a child to understand. It uses the idea of a child’s mix-n-match book, where you have the head of this character and the body of this character all mixed up. In this game, you need to make them match up to move on. In an amazing twist, for an Atari 2600 game, all the characters all look like who they are supposed to be. Now, this is great, but it also contributes to the game’s biggest problem. It is too easy.

Once you have memorized the few character parts available to you in the game, the challenge instantly disappears. Perhaps if they changed colors, or you needed to shuffle vertically as well as horizontally, it would be more of a challenge. Now I know the game was made for younger children and I think this game would be interesting for a kid under the age of 6 for maybe an hour. But anyone over six would get bored once the novelty of seeing their favorite Shortcake characters on screen dancing. I give this game 2 out of 5 stars.