*New Games* Fun Park

Fun Park is one of the rare games to actually be social, practically demanding that you play it with, ideally, at least six friends. The game is so reliant on having friends that it provides you with three CPU “default” friends, because without any friends it is literally impossible to make any progress in the game. Fun Park gives you chat and in-game mail systems so you can make the experience even more social.

When you start up in Fun Park, you’ll go through a bunch of tutorial quests that explain the interface and basic game concepts to you. Essentially, you want to use your money to build up a “theme park” that is really a bit more of a fairground or arcade, full of games to play rather than rides. You build your park up by buying new games, attractions, and decorations. You earn money by inviting guests into your park, letting them stay awhile, and sending them home. You can give guests drinks or do other little things to earn more money from them. While guests mill around your park, you get to see them chatter to each other (and most of what they say is quite funny).
This is great fun when you have friends in the game, because you can see how they’ve decked out their avatars. All of Fun Park’s avatars are bizarrely cute anime-like persons wearing enormous hats or cakes animal heads that have a lot of charm.

  












A problem quickly rears its head as you play the game: there’s just little incentive to play it very long. The stuff you buy at higher levels doesn’t feel very different from what you buy at lower levels, since you mainly interact with guests rather than the attractions. It’s a pity, because otherwise the game does some things to make even browsing the menus fun. Instead of a little drop-down menu of items you have, you can go to a customizable virtual space that lets you interact with your collections by clicking on furniture. The game’s cash item shop is set up the same way, as is the shop full of stuff for customizing your avatar. The shop where you buy new attractions is just a simple menu, though.