The Collection Chamber: ALL DOGS GO TO HEAVEN 2: ANIMATED MOVIEBOOK

Charlie Barkin is back... back on Earth, that is, running the "mean streets" of San Francisco in hot pursuit of Gabriel's missing magic horn.

Join Charlie, his best buddy Itchy, and some new friends in an exciting storybook and activity adventure as they confront the Devil Cat, Red, and his villainous sidekick, Carface.
Charlie and friends search for Gabriel's magic horn and outwit the bad guys in eight animated scenes!
25 pages of narrated text, full-motion video clips, and character animations bring the engaging story to life.
Four delightful activities challenge and reward young children, aged Preschool to First Grade.
Bursting with creative fun designed to entertain and educate young minds for hours on end!

Turn any story screen into a challenging jigsaw puzzle in Charlie's Puzzling Picture Gallery. Get hints and help, too!
Have fun digging in Sasha's Secret Spelling Garden while learning to spell simple words. It's Concentration with a new twist!

~ from the back of the box

By the time Don Bluth's All Dogs Go to Heaven animated sequel hit theatres, Disney were once again wearing the cartoon crown. I was getting too old for either back in 1996, but for those who weren't, they were spoiled for choice with age-appropriate slightly educational tie-ins. Sound Source Interactive's All Dogs Go to Heaven 2: Animated MovieBook was one of them.

If you've read my previous two reviews of games from this series, you'll know I've gone backwards in release order. This was entirely unintentional and down to the fact that there is remarkably little info out there on them. This game came out the same year as the movie - 1996 - while An American Tail and The Land Before Time arrived each subsequent year. This means that my speculation over WayForward's involvement in the entire series was unfounded (though I never claimed it to be anything other than a guess). And I'm gonna do it again now, though with a smidge more confidence - All Dogs Go to Heaven 2 was the first Animated MovieBook, and a little development team called Rhode Island Soft Systems were behind it. They were one of those multimedia companies that made a bunch of licensed screensavers and digital jigsaws under the Jixxa banner. This makes sense when you realise how heavily jigsaw puzzles feature in this series. Like before, each page of the MovieBook can be turned into one.

Like the others in the series, you have to find items to unlock the mini-games (left).
If you've played The Land Before Time entry, Itchy's Fantastic Food Court will look familiar (right).

But it's not the jigsaws that will make or break any entry in the series. It'll be everything else. My lack of knowledge over the movie made the story scenes seem more interesting to me, with some better scene layouts than anything else in the series. The three mini-games - unlocked by finding a given item among the pages - are perhaps the weakest of the three. Top of the meagre pile is Itchy's Fantastic Food Court that sees you navigate the flea-ridden mutt to his fast food house of choice by following a line of similarly shaped or coloured garbage. The Land Before Time had the exact same game, but even there it wasn't ever more than two-minutes of fun.

The remaining two fare much worse. Sasha's Secret Spelling Garden is the same spelling game found in each entry, except this one gains kudos for being the first (unless I later find out otherwise :/). This one is a little better than those reskinned variants as you have to manually dig up each letter instead of waiting for them to bubble up or reveal themselves.

Unearthing letters in Sasha's Secret Spelling Garden (left).
A fully populated day at David's Cannery Square Street Fair (right).

Our last activity isn't actually a game, but a sticker album and a bare-bones one at that. It's a single page with 20 random circus characters that can be plopped onto it. When you do, an accompanying jingle or sound effect will play but in a lack of effort found in Disney's offerings, there are no animations. You can print off a page, though I don't know why anyone - even kids - would want to as it offers very little room for self expression. Configuring DOSBox to recognise your over-priced ink-guzzler is simply not worth the time or effort.

While some sprogs may get some giggles out of the storybook side of things, there's not much else here to occupy their hyper-active minds. In each subsequent entry, the mini-games and activities will get more meat on it bones but the quality of the story sections will dwindle. Regardless of what you or your pup are looking for, All Dogs Go to Heaven 2: Animated MovieBook will be the worst of the series so far.

To download the game, follow the link below. This custom installer exclusive to The Collection Chamber uses the DOSBox-X build of DOSBox running Microsoft Windows 3.1 to get the game working on modern systems. Read the ChamberNotes.txt for more detailed information. Tested on Windows 10.

File Size: 176 Mb. Install Size: 286 Mb. Need help? Consult the Collection Chamber FAQ

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