Get Ready for the Sweetest Birthday Bash Ever!
- NA release: 14th February 2003
- EU release: 1st June 2003
- JP release: N/A
- Developer: n-Space
- Publisher: Club Acclaim
- NGC Magazine: N/A
- Mods Used: Widescreen Hack
Mary-Kate and Ashley, sometimes referred to as the Olsen Twins, were global megastars in the late 90s and early 2000s. Since then, they’ve managed to retire from the spotlight and live a more private life running fashion businesses, which is nice as they were often treated horribly by the media. They didn’t really have a great deal of involvement in their video games, letting Acclaim take charge. Shortly before Acclaim filed for bankruptcy, the twins sued for not paying them the agreed royalties, with their lawyer also adding that the quality of the games was a tarnish to the brand.
Sweet 16: Licensed to Drive is based on the twins passing their driving test on their 16th birthday and planning a party. This takes the form of a Mario Party clone, where you roll a dice and have to watch your chosen character (Mary, Kate, Ashley or a fourth girl) very, very slowly make their way to the selected spot. You can’t speed things up or skip things – even on CPU’s turn. The spots are the kind of thing you see in really bad roll and move games, including going back spaces and missing turns. This means there’s a lot of just waiting around and doing nothing.
After each round, you’ll play a minigame, which is either all-for-one or 2v2. These mostly function fine and aren’t atrocious, but they also aren’t exciting either and often feel like they drag on for far too long. Quite a few just involve moving left and right to make it through posts or to avoid obstacles, and a few others are single-screen racing minigames.
So, the game is pretty much a case of pressing A, waiting far too long for a minigame to start, getting a small amount of enjoyment initially from the minigame before thinking “ok, it’s time to move on” not even half way into it. It’s just not very exciting and it makes the absurd “Real Games for Real Girls” branding more of a laughing stock.
Poor
This quote from an IGN review is a prime example of how horribly these kids were treated by the media.
We’ve watched over the years as Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have grown from the cute twins on the horrible, life-sucking television disaster Full House into sexy — err, well, pretty, anyway, young women. Okay, we admit it, we can’t wait until they turn 18 so that we won’t feel so guilty about our sickening, borderline sadistic thoughts and extended day dreams about them.
Unknown IGN Editor
This is a strange instance where this part was added when they copy and pasted the PS2 review as a GameCube review, with the original PS2 reviewer filing a complaint with IGN in 2021. That said, the original review still features gross stuff, and an earlier preview from the original author is even worse, featuring lines such as “The game where you run around and try to touch the other teenaged girls, sometimes called Tag, is one example of the single-handed control games. Convenient, we say.”. He’s now an executive at Sony.
Remake or remaster?
These are best left in the past. The twins have suffered enough.
Official Ways to get the game
There is no official way to get Mary-Kate and Ashley Sweet 16: Licensed to Drive.
Europe
Japan
North America
GameCube Games by Date
2002: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2003: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2004: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2005: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
2006: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
Yeah, I’ve heard of this game. The Game Grumps played a round.
I also knew it precisely because of that IGN review. It’s pretty infamous. Teenage me was far too busy playing Pokémon to care about the Olsen Twins, so that whole grossness completely passed me by at the time. It was a ResetEra thread from a few years ago, looking into the treatment they got where I finally learned about that whole thing.
It’s mad that fame could make that kind of behaviour more acceptable to some people.
The late 90s/early 00s were a particularly gross time for stuff like this. Many famous women under the age of 18 were subjected to the “countdown to legality” awfulness.
That’s rough when your own celebrity endorser denounces your own product.
BTW, this was the final licenced game developed by n-space (except for Hannah Montana: The Movie in 2008, but we don’t count that one)… yes, the very same n-space that would go on to develop Geist for Nintendo. We won’t be seeing that one until 2005 though, as it went through a very protracted development cycle following on from this little Olsen Twins disasterpiece.
Just goes to show how desperate Nintendo were to find a good western development partner around this time that they decided to shack up with these bozos. But Geist was, and still is, a thrilling concept for a game; it’s not hard to see the potential that Nintendo saw in it. But n-space weren’t the ones to make it, and this is a story for later on whenever @Cube gets round to that game.