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My Sims Party Game Review–Like A Freshman Kegger

Now, you may be asking yourself at this very moment why I would compare a purely nonoffensive game like My Sims Party (now available on, not surprisingly, the Wii) to a high school drinking party?  Well, I actually just told you why, but let me elaborate.  See, a freshman kegger, a high school drinking party, has about as much chance of getting actual alcohol as, say, Dick Cheney has of being elected president.  It would require an incredible intersection of events–extremely permissive parents, an understanding elder relative who didn’t fear anything less than extremely permissive parents, outright bribery–to actually happen, so the result you’re left with is a party that promises to be a lot more than it actually is.

This is, of course, exactly the case with My Sims Party, a game that promises to be a whole lot more than it actually is but seems unable to deliver.

The plot is pretty simple, as is generally the case for Sims games of any stripe–you’ve moved to a new town, which you get to name (I called mine Steveland, because it’s so very plausible and sounds almost exactly like Cleveland, only with two letters changed).  The tourism board of this little town is desperate for a way to keep residents in the town, working and contributing to the tax base–and of course is always looking to bring in more people–thus they’ve hit on the idea of the Festival.  The town regularly (at least once a month from the look of it) declares a holiday and puts on a tournament of various minigames, including running luggage from one side of a hotel lobby to another, dancing at a night club, scooping up to-order ice cream cones and making pizzas.   This all will, of course, be accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.

All of this sounds fun enough on the surface–we’ve played a literal slew of games like this already–but the big problem with this one isn’t the cutesy-poo characters or the repetition or the fact that most of the “games” at this Festival look like a way for the townspeople to get free labor out of us, but rather that the controls are seriously malfunctioning.  When I went to rock out at the dance club, they assured me that all I’d have to do is “shake my Wiimote”, which sounds a lot dirtier than it actually is, but when the time came to do the shaking, it refused to accept my commands no matter which direction or how hard i shook the Wiimote.  Worse yet, it wouldn’t even accept simple button press commands.  Scooping the ice cream cones was also not an easy thing as my scoop would frequently overshoot the particular flavor of ice cream I was after.

So that’s why the comparison, and that’s why I can’t recommend this game at all.  Sure, it looks like it’d be a lot of fun.  it even sounds like a party.  But when you get there and discover that the promised keg is nowhere to be had and the game barely recognizes that you even have a Wiimote, there’s just not that much point in sticking around.

Wario Ware: Smooth Moves Game Review–Defies Any Easy Description

Sometimes there’s a real downside to writing about Wii games.  Like I said in the headline, they defy any real or simple description.  It’s hard to tell what exactly is going on sometimes.  They can even be downright confusing.  That’s definitely the case with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves.

Long, long ago, civilization was infested with these things called “form batons”, mystical objects that contained vast power and ostensibly controlled a race of tiny humanoids if the hieroglyphs are to be believed.  Anyway, one day, Nintendo’s biggest anti-hero and treasure hunter extraordinaire Wario was sitting in his chair at home, sucking down cake and donuts and suchlike when one of those tiny humanoids from the hieroglyphs abducts Wario’s snacks.  Naturally, Wario can’t stand for such nonsense, and thus he chases after the tiny humanoid to recover his snacks.  What he finds instead is one of the legendary form batons.  Thus, Wario will join a whole cast of motley characters, including a dog and cat taxi driving team, two inveterate gamers, a cheerleader, an inventor and a witch with her pet demon familiar in a series of slice of life-style vignettes as they go about their lives.

You, meanwhile, will have to accomplish a series of tasks in rapid succession, accomplished by doing various things with your Wiimote.  You’ll hold it like a waiter holding a tray, like a remote control, up in front of your nose like an elephant with its trunk, and on top of your head like a mohawk to do any of a number of things, including driving a car, picking up trash with a remote controlled robot, picking your nose, and scrubbing a cow’s ass.  No, seriously.  You’re going to do all that and even less savory tasks.  Frankly, I was amazed enough to find myself working my Wiimote into a position where I could ram a finger up a polygonal nose on a polygonal face, but when I started running a scrub brush over a cow’s rump roast, well, that just did it for me.  I had nothing to say.

The graphics are, of course, last generation weak, but the biggest problem with Wario Ware: Smooth Moves is also the biggest joy–the controls.  Several times I found myself about to start a game and I was left totally unaware of what to actually DO.  Oh, sure, I knew how to HOLD the Wiimote–they make that perfectly clear from the second you start a game–but I didn’t always know what to do from there.  Did I swing to the left?  The right?  When do I pick up?  And most unaccountably of all, why won’t the Wiimote acknowledge ANYTHING I do, no matter what direction I move?  This didn’t happen often, but when it did, it really spoiled the game.

I have to admit that I enjoyed this game.  I liked the rapid switching of games, and how at higher speeds it could be tough to keep up.  There was some challenge involved here–it was no walkover.  It took me two, even three times to get through some stages.

All things considered, this is definitely a game to get your hands on and wrap some smooth moves around.

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party Game Review–I Stopped Caring About Time

For those of you who enjoyed the first collection of party games known as Rayman: Raving Rabbids released to a whole host of systems, chances are you’ll also be interested in grabbing a copy of the second sequel, Rayman: Raving Rabbids TV Party, which is sadly only available on the Wii.

The plot is about what you’d expect for a game like this, where those brain-damage cases with bunny ears and horrible dental work, the Rabbids, are once again pursuing Rayman for reasons that probably only make sense to them, if they make sense to anyone at all.  From what I can tell, Rabbids were a race of extremely trusting idiots, kind and gentle, but wholly idiotic.  This left them the butt of numerous jokes, and, unable to take the abuse any longer, the Rabbids snapped, resulting in the lunatic wackjobs who beat anything and everything that comes nearby, including each other.  Anyway, due to a freak lightning strike, the Rabbids end up transported to an alternate dimension located inside a television.  Now the Rabbids have seized control of the programming and are recasting it in their own image, forcing you to play along.  The sheer parody value alone is worth the price of admission, as they’ve skewered most every TV show imaginable and several movies to bring you this game.

As is generally the case with games like this, you get a whole slew of things to do—the Rabbids have seized the entirety of cable, apparently—and you’ll get to choose the programming for the Rabbids’ new network by selecting one of several minigame choices for that day.  You might be playing music by shaking your Wiimote, or dancing (or doing aerobics) by holding it in a certain position.  You’ll shoot plungers at targets, you’ll drive a lawn mower, you’ll kill weeds, you’ll decimate towns with radioactive fire.  You’ll do literally hundreds of different things in the course of this game, and that’s what I love about it.

There is an INCREDIBLE variety here.  It is a time sink the likes of which I haven’t played since my last round of Fallout.  Seriously—I started this one last night and figured I’d play a bit this morning just to get reacquainted before I wrote it up.  I wanted a half hour…but by the time I noticed the clock again forty-five minutes had passed.

I didn’t even notice.  I lost almost an hour and I didn’t notice.

To me, that’s the surest sign of a game’s success—when I no longer care about time.  When I’m having so much fun playing a game that the clock no longer has any bearing, that’s a good game.  And that means this is a good game.  Sure, it’s simplistic. There’s no great and epic storyline here.  There’s decent sound and good graphics (for the Wii, anyway, which is always something of a laggard in graphics), and most importantly, a whole lot of fun.

Granted, if you don’t like simple games, and you crave a good story, Rayman: Raving Rabbids TV Party isn’t going to be the game for you.  You can look at the front of the box and tell it’s not going to be the game for you.  But if you want something fast and simple that’ll eat up a whole lot more time than you’ll ever see coming, then this is the game right here.

If you haven’t already had the chance to try this one, go.  Go and grab it.  This thing is downright amazing and I relish every moment.  Chances are, you will too.