User Reviews (1 - 11 of 30)

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Fun until you hit the bug

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 45 / 49
Date: March 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My daughter went head-over-heels for the "Barbie in the Princess and the Pauper" movie, so naturally, she just had to have the game for her computer. The game's lovely graphics and professional vocals and audio effects do the movie great justice, as the player controls "Erica," completing a variety of missions. The missions are stereotypical kinds of things that little girls go crazy for, such as growing flowers, decorating the castle, baking and decorating cakes, and so forth. There are a few more non-stereotypical missions, too, but they're in the minority (which is fine for my daughter, being the "princess" that she is).

Sadly, as with other players, she cannot actually finish the game and get to the coronation finale at the end. The same bug that has plagued so many others has hit her copy as well: "Erica" can no longer sing, and therefore cannot locate the other singers necessary for the coronation.

Worse, Vivendi Universal's technical support has only "canned" responses that would help if it were related to driver incompatibility. But this is a plain, old fashioned, software bug, and that's something they just can't help with.

Don't risk disappointing your own kids: pass this title by.

Singing level bug on Mac version

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 5
Date: February 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

As happened to Cliff J on a PC, we've experienced the singing bug on the Mac OS9.2 version. After successfully recruiting a singer from the town, the note singing interface stopped working, and no one can be recruited to the choir. Now my daughter is stuck at this level and is very disappointed that she can't see Barbie's coronation!

Another victim of the bug

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: May 02, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My 4 year old girl absolutely loves to play this game, but she is so frustrated, because every time it hits a specific point in the game - she designs a flag, sings to a man, the man sings back, she tries to give him flowers, and poof - it gives this error (LipMgr.play -> EzDlgNone has no loaded lip synch data!) and closes. I tried to uninstall and reinstall. Then I exchanged it for a new disk. Same exact thing is happening with the new one. I am as frustrated as my daughter. What a disappointment. Don't waste your money on this game that doesn't work!

Pretty game but it's got fatal bugs that kill the fun

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: January 03, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My daughters (ages 3 and 5) love this game and can mostly handle the quests/puzzles that the princess has to do however, as a parent I think they are a little mundane and I'm not sure that I would call them educational as there are no academic puzzles at all. However, what really aggravates is that the game has fatal bugs in it that as far as I can tell, cannot be worked around except by starting all over again. This happened once at the beginning where the princess got stuck in a state she couldn't exit but it did not matter too much then but now that my 3 year old is near the end, (according to the cheat-sheet) she has hit another fatal limbo bug - the princess has to go around trying to find some singers; To locate them, the princess has to sing notes to people she meets and if they reply in the correct way then she gives them some flowers so they will sing at the ball. Well, the little princess has decided to stop singing! The interface is there, the buttons are there, the people are there and she keeps on telling us to sing notes but when you click on the note places, although the mouse pointer changes, no notes come out! In addion, we've come across 2 fatal bugs where if you speak to certain people, or ask the scroll to read out a certain item, you get a cryptic error message about missing elements and the whole program vanishes to the desktop!

As far as I can tell there is no "patch" available on the web or even any kind of support site for the game, just fluffy advertising pages for the game itself. In addition, reinstalling the game completely did not help. I have the latest hardware and XP home so no there should be no excuses there.

Unfortunately, as the game only ever saves the last position, there is no way to return back to a last-known-good point. So, although this game gets 4 strs for fun, it gets 1 star overall because it's nothing more than a ticking time bomb of disappointment for your kids. Until Vivendi fix it or issue a patch AVOID!!

Can't finish the game because of bugs

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 2 / 2
Date: December 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

As others have noted, the game is fun but cannot be completed due to bugs. First is the "lipmgr.play... lip synch" error. Also, Erica is unable to sing and therefore can't find the singers. We also called Tech Support and Customer Service numbers provided with the game. They only provide useless prerecorded messages that do not cover the above errors.

Do NOT buy this game. Santa got it for my daughter and she is stuck with a half finished game.

don't buy

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: December 28, 2004
Author: Amazon User

i have been trying to play this game with my four year old, and it is very frustrating. erika moves oh-so-slooooooooooow, it takes forever to get her to walk across a room. then, you must do the activities in order---if my little girl wants to "find the kitten", she has to start the entire game over to do it. same for "baking a cake", and all the other activities. you can't just click on something and do it.
all in all, it's very aggravating.

hard to figure out...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: September 07, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game for my 5 yr old and thought that it was very hard to get to the next level. If you are thinking of buying this for your child, please think twice. The graphics are very nice and the game is in a nice setting. Just to hard to figure out for your typical Barbie lover!

Good game - has glitches

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: May 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My 7 year old daughter played this game for 3 hours straight the day we got it. She loves the game but got VERY frustrated when we ran into a software glitch at th 17 th step -- one step away from making the coronation! My suggestion to avoid this is to make sure you use the log the woodsman gives you to cross the muddy patch to collect the toolbox. My daughter did not and she was unable to give the snacks she collected later to the sheep herder. This prevented her from continuing on in the game. I think the log and the snacks must hold the same spot on the ribbon bar. I played the game with her under a different sign on name and had no problem when we used the log to cross the mud.

Long game, with lots of repeats and can't finish!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 5
Date: November 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I just got this game for my 4.5 year old daughter. I played with her all day yesterday; I was happy to see that it was more challenging than the other Barbie games she has (Rapunzel and Swan Lake - both very good but a bit short and very easy). We hit a few tiny bugs that forced us to exit from a task and re-start it, but nothing too bad... until the BIG ONE. I had read that other peopple had experienced that bug, when Erika has to give flowers to three village singers and the game gives us an error message "Lip mgr.play...no loaded lip synch data" and takes us out of the game. Very frustrating! I went to the support web site indicated in the booklet, and after being re-directed to another support company site, I saw that they have other Barbie games, but don't even list this one! So NO online support whatsoever, and apparently no way to fix that bug...
Apart from the bug, I would say that overall the game is good, with very pretty graphics, good navigation and good character interactions. On the negative side, 18 tasks are too many for a small girl, especially since many involve redoing the same actions (moving and grooming a cat, making banners, etc). Even before we hit the big bug, my daughter was starting to be bored and antsy. Being able to choose 2 levels of lengths/tasks would have been a big plus.

Fun game for older pre-teen girls

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 2 / 3
Date: November 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

My daughter really enjoyed this game, and did not run across the bug others have mentioned below.

However - please note that she is a "highly gifted" 8 year old and a computer game wizard - and even so, she got stuck a couple of times and needed help. So I can see that for younger kids, this game might not be appropriate. But it is great for girls in that "too old for toys, too young for boys" stage, who are still young enough to love Barbie but don't need to add another doll to their collections.

She played it for weeks (maybe a couple months) before she got to the end, but enjoyed it solidly every time she played. Once she got to the end, she went through it a few more times but has now put it aside.

For us it was a nearly-perfect game, as she got a lot of hours of play out of it.

My main problem with it is that the chores Erika has to do are so stereotypically female - sewing stuff, baking lots of cakes, and so forth. She has to be a kind of "Stepford Barbie" in order to be coronated. But whatever - my daughter enjoyed it, and that's what really matters.

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