'Toy Test 2005' Rates Best Holiday Season Kids' Games

U.S morning TV show 'The Today Show' has announced the results of its video game portion of its Toy Test, in which it set up 63 game titles due to launch this holiday season at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, and collected nearly 11,000 ratings from children over two weeks. Since the games rated were meant to be child-oriented in some way, Today's test set the somewhat arbitrary rule of "no shooting and no stabbing of human characters on-screen", adding that nothing in the Toy Test arcade could be rated higher than teen. Players got to test drive a title for up to 20 minutes, then they rated the game "from terrible to most excellent." The top-rated title in this year's test by far was Criterion/EA's Burnout Revenge for multiple consoles, of which the Toy Test results article commented: "Because there are no drivers in any of the vehicles, there’s no blood and there are no bodies, just awesome crashes." Next up was Nintendo's Super Mario Strikers for GameCube, which was praised for being fun for players of all ages, with GameCube titles Mario Superstar Baseball and Dance Dance Revolution Mario Mix the next most popular games, both praised for their kid-friendly nature. Rounding out the Top 5 was Sony's USB camera-using EyeToy Play 2 for PlayStation 2, and VU Games' The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction and THQ's The Incredibles: Rise of the Underminer for multiple consoles finished out the top-rated titles over all age groups, showing an intriguing blending of genres, age-range suitability, and hardware formats.