I played the latest installment of the Carnival Games series today. It’s a sound game for what it is, which is a very casual, fun experience.

I only had time to get started with it. I played the first 5 of 20 games. My favorite was the batting cage one. I can’t remember its name but there’s a picture above. The other four consisted of a basketball shooting game, one where you jump around in a room collecting bananas, one where you shoot paint balls into cups to try and create clusters of your color, and a target shooting game.

Four players can play. I used all three A.I. but I think you can play it solo if you want or in teams of two. It’s same screen only. There doesn’t seem to be an online component, but maybe there’s a leaderboard (I think I saw that). I played against three AI opponents every time, first easy A.I. and then medium when I started to beat them consistently.

There’s a Tournament mode where you play either 10 games or all the games you’ve unlocked. You win tickets in each game which you can spend to unlock new games and buy items to customize your character. After playing a 10-game tournament, I unlocked all the rest of the games. I did that in about an hour.

From playing the DS game New Carnival Games, I was hoping there would be a park to explore but there isn’t. There are just the games. I was also hoping for online play so Mark and I could compete but no luck there. It’ll be fun for a few days. I’ve would’ve rather bought it on the cheap after it had been out a while, but I really wanted to check it out this month when I was doing a carnival theme. It came out back in November, so it was still $40. I think $20 would’ve been more appropriate.