Thomas and Friends: A Day at the Races

Eye Toy is dis- dis- disgraceful, disgusting, and despicable!

***Thomas and Friends: A Day at the Races*** is a video game developed by Broadsword Interactive and published by Blast! Entertainment, it was released only in Europe.

## Plot

Join Thomas and his friends in ten all-new, fun, and exciting mini-games. Use the Eyetoy USB camera to put yourself in the game and control the action. Enjoy a brand new story, featuring Thomas, James, the Fat Controller, and all your other favorite *Thomas the Tank Engine* characters.

## Why This Game Causes Confusion and Delay

1. The story is very generic and bland, as it’s just Thomas and his Friends being told to prepare for a race day that is coming to the island.
2. **Misleading Title**: The game has almost nothing to do with racing at all nor is a racing game for that matter, as it's simply just a bunch of badly made minigames bungled into one pack, much like *The Three Stooges* and *Imagine Party Babyz.*
	* A prime example of this is the first level of the game, Match The Face, where the engines' faces all come off and float in the air while you have to place them back on the correct engines. How is that at all relevant or realistic???
3. In one of the cutscenes, the narrator states that Thomas had never won a prize before. This is most considerably incorrect because he earned a reward in the Season 7 finale episode, "Three Cheers for Thomas". In that episode, Thomas picks up the box of medals for the children's egg and spoon race on Sports Day (which is Fields Day in British English) because the Fat Controller told him they were left behind at his office. In the end after picking up the box of medals, Thomas was rewarded with a shiny golden medal that a small boy gave him.
4. Very poor Eye Toy motion controls.
5. A lot of the minigames are really boring to play. Most of them consist on dragging things and putting them where they are.
6. The difficulty is very frustrating due to the motion controls being hard to control.
7. The graphics look pretty lifeless and dull, even for a mid-2000s game made for the UK. It's mainly just 2D sprites in front of 3D backgrounds in the actual gameplay for no apparent reason. The only actual 3D models of the characters are of Thomas and the Troublesome Trucks in the options menu.
8. Many mistakes are made when the game uses the TV series footage for the cutscenes. In one scene, James is mirrored.
9. The game was completely rushed altogether and because of that, **there is a ton of incomplete gaming content in the game!**
10. The game can get extremely glitchy at times too.
11. The box art looks extremely cheap and lazy at best, as it's just a simple snip-it from the Hit Entertainment era just cropped to fit on the PS2 box format and the TV Show logo plastered on along with other logos too such as the Blast! Entertainment logo smacked down on one of the ends of the boxart next to Thomas. Also, a quarter of James' face is missing as a result of cropping the image to fit the PS2 box art format since the console used DVDs as a basis for the games themselves.
	* The cover was taken from the DVD "It's Great to Be an Engine!"
	* Even more lazy is the design of the game disc as it is just a plain valley with hills, mountains, trees, rocks, and bushes. Nothing even remotely related to the trains or the game themselves.

## The Only Redeeming Quality

1. If Broadsword Interactive can be credited for one thing, they made one of the only Blast! Entertainment games that have something to do with the source material.