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Or maybe just has a cookie, not like it matters either way.

Licensed games are the bane of the gaming world. Once a television series or movie bares any marketability as a game, it's off to development. Unfortunately for the gaming world, these licensed games go on to the mainstream market and become the poster child for what many assume to be the mediocre and contrived world of gaming. If only the opposite were true. What's worse is that sometimes these games make it into the hands of actual people who grow up thinking they're truly experiencing a bang-up game while they're actually being trained to expect less from their hobby, quit it altogether, or never learn and keep feeding the machine. It all starts here, folks, with games for kids like Dora The Explorer: Dora Saves The Mermaids. Does the DS generation give licensed titles a new name or will kids be dancing to the same old songs?

Unfortunately for Dora's world, there's some jerk octopus dumping his trash all over the ocean, messing things up for the wildlife and supernatural race of mermaids who also inhabit the ocean. Obviously, we're going to have to put a stop to this, right? I'm not going to begin questioning the storyline behind a game featuring an icon reading "kid-tested" on the front, but this is really the beginning of the end for Dora's career on the DS. The story takes place between handfuls of playable sequences in a slideshow format with no dialogue or anything. I'm also not going to complain about the semantics of this game not having made a clear decision on whether or not they want to educate children on ecological friendliness or that if you steal a mermaid princess's crown you'll turn into one when you wear it. The issue that's actually going to bother a lot of parents is that the game somehow doesn't even last longer than an actual episode of the show.

In fact, it's not even the fact that I blew through the game in under 20 minutes, but that my friend's four-year old daughter finished it in just a little longer than I did. She didn't mind jumping back into it, but the price of this game can also buy you a month's worth of cable which usually includes Nickelodeon and at least 20 episodes of the actual Dora show. In other words, there are better ways to spend your money. Heck, it's possible to buy the DVD with the real episode of Dora The Explorer: Dora Saves The Mermaids for half the price on most online vendors.

The gameplay is extremely simple, consisting of only 24 activities in which you'll dodge trash, play music, and yell into the microphone to stop that crazy fox, Swiper. As it's probably easy to imagine from the playthroughs mentioned a paragraph up, none of this is challenging. None of the levels can be lost, and there's no score to keep, and everything in the game is actually accessible from the second you see the title screen-just find your way to the "play any game" option. In fact there's one interesting game where a drum must be beaten by tapping the screen, gradually filling up a meter on the side. However, the screen needs only one tap to start it off and will actually play itself to completion. The exact same thing also happens in the boy's version of this game, Go Diego Go: Safari Rescue, drawing no less attention to this pink elephant.

Parents who buy their kids everything will have had no problem picking up Dora the Explorer Saves the Mermaids, and probably the Go Diego title as well. Parents who care enough to hunt down a review of this game may want a bit of guidance in their purchase, though. To those people, I would say to skip Dora Saves the Mermaids as a shoddy game, but the fact that it's awfully short in length and on content. There's nothing to this little DS cart that the show can't give, and although the games are certainly very friendly to its target audience, there's a lot more that you can do for your children in the world of video games if you want them to grow up treating the industry right. I'm sure adults with kids in Dora's age group grew up playing Mario, not Barney; let's continue that favor. If that's just not an option then at least buy the Go Diego version of this game; it has a positive message towards wildlife and double the length and levels of Dora the Explorer.