A review’s deepness is directly related to the deepness of the videogame. So I am sorry if this review turns out shallow
"The hell?" you might be thinking. It IS downright weird, when a bad game with absolutely no investigation in it defeats over thirty (on the category our project is) projects that have a lot of statistics and effort on them. Why has it blown the competence? Well, as much as I’d like to say it is my PERFECT presentation, it is the fact the judges are dinosaurs. You show them something that moves when they press something, and they are left with their mouth wide open. If they knew how easy making games is with the Game Maker! RPGmaker seems professional in comparison! The worst thing is that I started making the project with no knowledge of how to use the GameMaker.
But Ignacio did. He’s one of those persons who has a thousand games on emulators, is a TOTALLY retro gamer, and spends a considerable amount on time on making games. And his games are good enough to make half of the class wannabe game creators (with the GM), though only I and him have skills to actually make a game. Some of his games include his Instant Death series (though calling them a series could be too much--there is only instalment one and a mathematical gaiden made for the math class, though number two is in development.)
Unlike the soon-to-be second instalment, which will feature a lot of gameplays (I myself have contributed one), "La muerte instantanea" (The Instant Death), the first instalment is pure and simple, a la Katamari. You are this little dinosaur, and you have to get to the flag avoiding enemies. Granted, in the later stages you can lose 100 lives before you get to the flag (when an enemy touches you, you lose a life and respawn at the beginning of the level--lives are plenty). When you lose, a message says "game over stupid" and the game restarts. When you end the game, a message says "Congratulations! Now the world will be destroyed!" in spanish and an image of the world does explode, to then show THE END. Short levels, Kingdom Hearts musics and madness is all there is to this game (and a game over screen of me saying "pwned u noob", an easter egg saying "u r not supposed to be here ROFLMAO", 2 secret levels and an enemy museum/warp zone in the Final Mix version I made for him).
Why do I tell you this? Because The Instant Death is the game over which I will review individually the games in Wii Play. An "S" indicates the game is as good as The Instant Death (almost good-ish by today’s videogaming standards). Anyway, let us begin this review!
When you boot up Wii Play, you are greeted by a screen with the Wii Play logo and two Wiimotes as a background. You press A and B and BAM! Right off the bat asked how many players will play. 1 or 2. That is right, there is no party in Wii Play, which means the "We" in Wii Play is reduced to one-on-ones. I’ll take this chance to mention all the minigames reviews are based in multiplayer, because, well, otherwise I’d need the H letter. Anyway, once you choose two (never one!) and then the Miis you’ll use, you find the nine games presented oh-so-crudely. Yet the Miis you chose stand in the center of them, as though they were the stars of a play. They sometimes interact with each other, and they might bring a smile to your face. This is by far the best part of Wii Play.
Why don’t we begin with the C game? It is actually called Laser Hockey in an effort to sound cool, but to me it will always be the C game. In this game you control either a red C or a blue C, and try to get a golden glowing C into the goal of the other C, marked by two Cs. C-rappy. Well, since this game is so freakingly obsessed with the C, might as well give it a C.
Then there’s Find Mii, which also tries to sound cool with its Find Me thingy and all. I have, however, come up with a better name: Waldo rip-off. If you have ever had a Waldo book, then you know the drill already. Find X Mii, or two Miis that look alike, or the like. You have to find them before the other player does. While not too much, this game is boring. this game is a B.
Moving on, there’s another me-Mii pun in Pose Mii. I think this game was based around its music, sort of. Which means it has a slighty good song. And a DDR look-alike background. In this game, you have to pose 3 (OMG!) different positions to make them fit in the bubbles to make the bubbles disappear before they fall off the screen. At the bottom of the screen are three lines, which, you guessed it, disappear one by one as the bubbles fall. Pop a bubble and you win points. Let a bubble of your color fall and you lose points. Survive with the lines intact and you get a bonus. Lose all lines and the game ends. Get more points than the other player and you win. AWESOME! Yeah right. B.
And never forget Table Tennis. It is--yes!--virtual Table Tennis. I won’t bother explaining how Table Tennis works, but I will say all you have to do to win is move mindlessly from side to side. It only gets saved from a D because it is kind of cool to have an audience made of your Miis (as in Wii Sports’ Tennis). C.
Wii Play also pretends it is Wario Ware and includes an old videogame brought to life again. Shooting Range has you shooting around in many pseudo-stages in an effort to win more points. It features OVNIs that chase your Miis, ducks, shooting thingies (I don’t know how they are called in english, okay?), and dishes. It doesn’t really matter because all you ever do is shoot them down. Might as well shoot like some crazy bastard. And a bastard is a B, right? Wrong. C.
Now, do you wish to ride a cow? Because Charge! is the next game. CHARGE! In this game you are on top of a cow. If you tilt the control forward, CHARGE! There is a yellow road you better stay at, which is filled with what at first look like cousins of The Prince of all Cosmos, but upon a closer inspection are actually scarecrows. When you see them, CHARGE! If you manage to CHARGE! through all the row, you get a bonus. Then there’s a king scarecrow, which seriously makes you think if they weren’t playing Katamari when making CHARGE! Anyway, if you CHARGE! through ’em, you get more points. There are also blocks through which you can’t CHARGE! So jump them. Try to get more points than your enemy. And since I used a lot of Cs in my CHARGE!s, this game is a C too.
With another use of a !, there is Tanks! TANKS! TANKS! features TANKS! which shoot other TANKS! You control a tank. More like, you try to control a tank until you notice you can use the nunchunk to have better control. This game should have an award because it is actually fun to play alone. And has a fine song. There are many kinds of TANKS! and all, you know. Ah! This is so much better than, say, CHARGE! you know? A.
Fishing... fishing... In fishing, there are 2D fishes in a small pool. It look tight and horrible! Try to get fishes with your net. There are sometimes bonus for some fishes so that the game isn’t always about catching the biggest fish. Too bad it barely works. Seriously, real fishing is much more fun than this. Not to mention it is REWARDING (this will pop up after I’m done with the individual games reviews). This game is a D, at best.
What am I missing? Oh yeah. Billards. Zzz. F.
And that’s not even the worst thing about Wii Play. No, the greatest problem is not that the games just plain suck. The problem is that they never feel rewarding. After I had played all of the games, I didn’t feel like anything had changed, nor that I had achieved something. Quite the contrary, I felt as though I had left something incomplete: a kind of emptiness. There never is any incentive to go back and play anything ever again. The game feels incomplete.
Why did Nintendo release an incomplete game? I don’t know. Maybe they realised it was flawed to begin with, and released it while it still had positive feedback (something Daikatana could have done). Yet you find the game is flawed as soon as you see the 1 or 2 players option. I know Nintendo just ain’t this type. But there’s not even a "Fitness" challenge. It is disappointing.
Do Wii Play? Wii don’t. Wii suffer.