Weekend Party Fashion Show Review

You know you’re going to be in for a rough ride when the very first comic book-style story page in a game contains no less than three grammatical gaffes, starting with “Meet Lilly. She is a fashion consultant in young, growing advertising agency.” Although its concept is sound, Weekend Party Fashion Show is unfortunately hampered by some pretty crippling translation issues.

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You know you’re going to be in for a rough ride when the very first comic book-style story page in a game contains no less than three grammatical gaffes, starting with “Meet Lilly. She is a fashion consultant in young, growing advertising agency.” Although its concept is sound, Weekend Party Fashion Show is unfortunately hampered by some pretty crippling translation issues.

As Lilly, your job is to dress a variety of women for parties, concerts, commercials and photo shoots. The game takes place in a mall, where you’ll have to complete hidden object challenges by rummaging through clothing and accessories in the different stores in order to find pieces to put your ensembles together based on a list. Items you might be asked to find include “dark yellow dress,” “gray embroidered blouse” or “green trendy sunglasses.”

You’ll also visit the jeweler, make-up stylist and hair stylist and play a different mini-game at each station. The jeweler is a memory game where you flip over tiles to match accessories; the make-up mini-game is a straightforward jigsaw puzzle of a woman’s face; and the hair salon is a spot the difference puzzle where you choose a hairstyle and have to compare two versions of the model’s head and cut pieces of her hair off until it matches your chosen coiffure.

The mini-games are fine, but it’s the hidden object portion of Weekend Party Fashion Show that suffers. There are simply too many inaccuracies with the way the items are labeled. For example, the “blue blouse with printed design” was actually a tank top. Other descriptions just made no sense, like “purple flexible belt” (don’t all belts have to be flexible?) or “youth gray glasses”; while others (like “big beautiful necklace” or “blue stunning brasier”) were just too vague and could refer to more than one item.

Then there were the typos: “purple & blue stripped blouse,” “dark blue shoe high-heels,” “red coctail shoes,” “women brown cardigan” and “dar lacy sexy top” to name a few.

At least the game isn’t without (unintentional) humor: I had a chuckle at having to find a “large green seductive bra.”

Once you’ve found all of the items on your list and played the mini-games, you enter the dress-up stage where you’re given a style (such as disco, banquet or retro) and must try to dress the model appropriately using the garments you’ve collected. Unlike Jojo’s Fashion Show, though, the game doesn’t give you any in-depth advice or fashion tips, and even the judging afterwards (where you’re awarded a star-rating) seemed arbitrary.

There are little quirks too, like the fact that the level timer ticks down even if you’re not in a scene and just reading characters’ speech bubbles; and you can’t review your level objectives after being given the information for the first time; or there’s no number to keep track of the overall number of items that you still have left to find.

Additional challenges – like a time management-style bartending mini-game – lack clear instructions. (It took me a while to figure out that you needed to click on the glass first or the drink would automatically be ruined.)

The game is short, too, and can be finished in a couple of hours. Afterwards, all the clothing is unlocked and you can play dress-up. There’s also a Freestyle mode where you can just dabble around in the mall, but the time limit still applies. It seems like this mode would have been better realized as an untimed mode to make it more different from the main mode.

If you’re a fashion nut who enjoys playing around with different styles and looks, the dress-up mode at the end might hold some appeal. To sum up the game up, though, Weekend Party Fashion Show is unfortunately yet another example of a title that had potential but was not properly localized for its target audience.

Gamezebo tip: If you like games like this, try Jojo’s Fashion Show, Jojo’s Fashion Show 2: Las Cruces, and Fashion Solitaire.

The good

    The bad

      40 out of 100