A compilation of seven mini-games, with a poor dress-up theme as coating.
Barbie Fashion Pack is, put simply, a compilation of seven mini-games, each of them associated to a clothing item or accessory. Beating one of these mini-games will give you, as prize, a version of said item or accessory that you can then put on your selected character (there are four characters to choose from: Barbie, Kira, Christie or Teresa, but there's no difference in what mini-games you can play, this is just a cosmetic choice).
As an example of what you can expect, when you beat the mini-game associated with shoes, you get that pair of shoes, which you can put on your character. Play the game again, and you'll get a different color or style of shoe, so you can collect and swap around.
There are two fundamental flaws with this idea.
First of all, there's a reason why young girls like to play dress-up, either on themselves, or on dolls: touch. Girls like to own things, touch them, feel them. Bringing that to a computer or console game means the main appeal is gone, and just shows that some videogame designers don't know their target audience that well. While a seven-year old, or younger, might feel mildly entertained with this format for some time, sooner or later, she will prefer to go back to the real dolls and real clothing.
Second, this is portable game. The screen is too small to really appreciate the "art" of dressing up a pixelated doll, and there's not even an option to print, or in some way "export", your designs. Adding insult to injury, the graphics on Barbie Fashion Pack are pretty sub-standard.
While the menus and character models that you dress up aren't too bad, the mini-games themselves look very dull, to say the least, which is disappointing since that's the meat of the game.
Here's a rundown of each mini-game.
1 - Lipstick: you control a lipstick at the bottom of the screen, while three rows of hearts, with different colors and patterns cross the screen from right to left. Below the lipstick, a fixed heart shows which one you should hit. Fire a shot from the lipstick to hit a matching heart. You need to get 6 correct hits to win, but hitting an incorrect heart will make you lose one of your earlier hits (if any).
2 - Purse: you control a purse at the bottom of the screen, while several items, from rings to cell phones, drop from nowhere. You're supposed to press the A button to open the purse to catch the items of the same color as your purse and let go of the button to avoid unwanted items, however, you can just leave it open all the time because the wrong items don't go in or hurt you in any way. Use the B button to change the color of your purse and wait until you have 6 different items.
3 - Shoes: you control a bag at the center of the screen, and you are shown a piece of footwear. Once the game starts, different shoes will pop on screen and you're supposed to catch two (a pair) of the same shoe you were shown at the beginning. Trying to catch a wrong shoe just rings a buzzer, with no penalty.
4 - Necklace: similar to the Purse game, but actually more challenging. Here you are shown a necklace with five beads, at the start. Then beads of different colors and shapes start to fall, and you need to use two blow dryers, fixed at the sides of the screen, to push the beads you want towards the necklace entry point, and push the ones you don't want away. If an unwanted bead gets in the necklace, you lose one of the correct beads you got in previously (if any).
5 - Perfume: drops of perfume flow through a pipe into a maze. At the exit of said maze, there's a bottle of perfume. Use different shape tubes to create a path from the pipe to the bottle. If you take too long, the perfume will spill. For every drop, one of the tube pieces you placed disappears and needs to be put back before others collapse.
6 - Shirt: a simple Space Invaders clone. You control a brush at the bottom of the screen, where you also see a shirt pattern. Shirts then start floating on screen and you have to hit five correctly to win.
7 - Skirt: a picture of a skirt is scrambled in a 4x4 grid. Move the pieces around until the picture matches.
As far as I can tell, each game has around a dozen variations of each item (if you count the starting clothes as one). At least, in the Skirt mini-puzzle, after the eleventh prize, it started to repeat patterns I already had. While not terrible, there's definitely not much to do in Barbie Fashion Pack.
Regarding sound, there's a different theme song for each of the mini-games, and one extra for the menu and dressing up sections, but all of them are but a short combination of notes that become incredibly repetitive and are likely to make you turn the sound off completely after a while. Sound effects are as basic and generic as possible, with little variety and excessively muddy (even by Game Boy Color standards).
By comparison, Barbie Magic Genie Adventure is also just a compilation of mini-games, with an optional exploration mode around them, but at least it offered something that actually made sense in a videogame, like flying around in a magical carpet, talking to people and fetching items. Here, however, I see little reason why any child would want to play this in the long run.
On a positive note, here too, you have a password system that keeps track of what items you collected, so a child can play this in small doses at a time.
While not a terrible offering, Barbie Fashion Pack looks, sounds and feels like a poor effort. The mini-games range from ok, at best, to borderline broken, as is the case with the Purse game. With a simplistic dress-up theme that's more suitable outside of a videogame console, and with little reward for your time, there's no doubt in my mind that you're better off picking something else for your child. Even if she's a fan of Barbie, I'd suggest you give this one a pass.