Features

Tween (pre-teen) girls should love Belle’s Beauty Boutique. I bet my nine-year-old niece would get into it if it’s not too fast-paced for kids her age, but alas, she hasn’t stopped by since I started playing the game. Continuing the popular tradition of running a business game where you serve customers and keep them happy, Belle’s is all about the hair (how appropriate considering I’m in Plano near Dallas known for big hair and plastic, but I don’t have big hair!) and the typical stuff you find in a spa.

Shampoo, color, cut and dry are all included along with polishing nails. The ones that make a player go nuts are the hair coloring and nail polishing because you have to select the color the customers want. It’s tough with the color selector moving at different speeds and in different directions. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve given blue hair to someone who wanted blonde. As soon as this happens, I immediately give the person a treat, usually magazine, tea or a spa treatment depending on what you have.

The game comes with two modes: Story and Endless Beauty. In story, like other similar games, you shoot for a goal and the game gets harder as you advance. Continuous mode is non-stop except to upgrade the beauty shop. I couldn’t get very far in Endless mode.

Story mode works better as I advanced most of the time. As it should be, I didn’t easily reach the goal on every level, and sometimes it took a few tries to get through it. Some games made it impossible for me to work my way past a level. I like a game that challenges without being impossible and Belle succeeds. In the later levels, you gain helpers — a good and bad thing. Your helper could beat you to a customer and you have to redirect yourself elsewhere. Madness, but fun madness.

The only thing I became exasperated with was moving the customers around. Well, that and losing my game due to a bug in the software and having to reinstall it after receiving a fix. Sometimes, the mouse pointer didn’t pick up a person or sometimes the person slipped in the wrong chair. You have to work fast and in these cases, I had my mouse pointer and clicked where I needed.

One improvement I’d like to see is an indicator of whether I selected the right nail polish color. Figuring out the color of polish on one-pixel sized fingernails is difficult even with perfect vision.

According to the information about the game, it has bonus levels. I’ve yet to see one at this point. In Belle, you don’t have to collect cash. Just move customers from chair to chair, clean chairs and put customers close together to get bonus points when they flirt or gossip. The game has a nice variety of customer types from kids getting ready for prom and brides to the gossip and guys.

Belle’s Beauty Boutique isn’t only a tongue twister, but also it’s another enjoyable run your own business game. It’s just a matter of what you like as many of these games exist and one or two are bound to catch your interest.

Wow… we’ve come along way from the days of fixing up our dolls’ hair and makeup.

System Requirements

• Windows 98/ME/2000/XP
• 800MHz or faster Processor
• 128MB RAM