NintendoLand is Nintendo’s flagship tech demo for its new WiiU console. Built around twelve mini-games set inside a theme park, it is a wide-reaching and fun collection of mini games, but don’t let that phrase put you off. These are well rounded games with lots of variety and challenge and much fun to play and here I’ll try and sum them up.
The game can be controlled in one of two ways: from a straight up menu where you select the games on the GamePad and go or by running around the theme park, bumping into other players populated from the MiiVerse and interact with small gizmos you get from collecting coins, gathered in mini games, spent in an old fashioned dot-matrix coin-drop machine like you get at the seaside which rewards you with a new gizmo for every screen you hit all the targets. Here you can run through gates to play the games or jump on the train to play the attraction tour, a mix of all the games for 2-5 players.
The game is MCed by an annoying floating television screen called Monita (geddit?) who gives you instructions but is mostly silent once you’ve found your footing, thankfully. The main screen also details how many coins you have, how many times you’ve played each game and which attraction will score you double coins.
Graphically the main area is cartoony but well rendered and feels like a theme park come to life. The music is an incredibly irritating tune not wholly dissimilar to ‘I’m Going To Wash That Man Right Out Of My Hair’ but the ability to change tunes on the jukebox to unlocked game themes is a godsend. The music within the games themselves is great, and the variety of game-specific tunes most welcome!
The twelve mini-games are split into three sections: team attractions for 1-5 players, competitive attractions for 2-5 players and solo attractions.
Team Attractions
The Legend of Zelda Battle Quest: Play as Link fighting monsters, using the analogue sticks as your view and firing a bow and arrow if you’re a GamePad player or the Wiimote as a sword otherwise. Challenging for single players, easier with friends, the knitted style looks great and the levels throw something different at you each time leading you up to a boss battle. Tricky to play and fun when you get into it. (8/10)
Pikmin Adventure: A riff on the original game where you use the touch screen to attack blocks and baddies with your Pikmin, moving from the starting point to the rescue rocket, level-ing up as you go and collecting pick-ups to aid your progress. Fun to play but very easy but, again, throws in some differing goals as you progress through the levels. (7/10)
Metroid Blast: My least favourite of all the games as you control either a Samus-like space agent or a rocket ship to destroy your opponent. The controls take a lot of getting used to and it’s not that fun. (4/10)
Competitive Attractions
Mario Chase
Set over several maps, one player has to escape whilst the others have to chase after them and capture them within the time limit. With some great variety in the maps and a good difficulty change depending on how many people are playing, this is truly a fun multiplayer game where only the GamePad player can see everyone and everyone else has to work out where they are by teamwork and a distance calculator. (9/10)
Luigi’s Ghost Mansion: The best of the games, this sees the four other players having to track down and destroy the ghost player using their torches. Only the ghost player can see everyone’s locations on the GamePad whilst the rumble of the WIimotes gives away the approaching ghost to the other players. A sometimes-scary, always-fun game, this is the best of the bunch if you and your friends come round. (10/10)
Animal Crossing Sweet Days: Another fun multiplayer game with the GamePad player chasing after the others with a knife and fork to capture them as they capture sweets. The more sweets they have, the slower they move, adding to some strategy in this fun multiplayer game. (6/10)
Solo Attractions
Yoshi’s Fruit Cart: Use the touch-screen to draw a path from the door to the exit, collecting fruit on the way whilst avoiding baddies, taking note of special orders and looking for presents and secret-exits, in this challenging but rewarding one-player game that requires a lot of thought. (7/10)
Octopus Dance: One of my favourites as you control your Mii with the GamePad to mimic the dance moves of the host with the moves becoming more varied and complex as the game progresses, as well as many distractions in your way. (7/10)
Donkey Kong’s Crash Course: A seemingly easy one-player game that is anything but. Make your way down a maze using the tilt, microphone and buttons of the GamePad to rescue the princess. Difficult, infuriating but addictive, this is a very hard but very fun game. Just don’t mention area nine. (9/10)
Takamaru’s Ninja Castle: Holding the GamePad the other way round, fire throwing stars at enemies whilst avoiding what they throw back. It’s at times uncomfortable to hold the controller but it’s a good game to spend ten minutes in. (6/10)
Captain Falcon’s Twister Race: An unforgiving racer with the controller held upright, pilot your ship over speed blocks and avoid obstacles and mines to cross the finish line, whilst also battling against a relentless clock. Tricky but enjoyable, it does struggle at times with the controls and requiring the GamePad to be recalibrated which takes the shine off an otherwise great mini-game. (8/10)
Balloon Trip Breeze: Use the touch screen to blow your Mii across a landscape to collect items and avoid baddies. Trickier than it sounds, it’s got that one-more-time quality that a lot of these games have. (7/10)
With most of the games above, there might seem to be a smaller amount of content but completing them often unlocks more, harder levels that really challenge you. Each mini-game is themed around a different game and the art styles – whether the knitted Zelda, chalked-Donkey Kong or fabric Balloon Trip – really shine on this game. It’s a package that actually becomes much more than a tech demo with twelve genuinely enjoyable mini-games without only really one duff one in Metroid Blast, that manages to shine both as a multi-player and single player collection.
There’s plenty of playability here from beating friends scores on the score boards (there’s a slight bug here, daily-records appear to be this session-records) plus the integration with Miiverse, and the coin-unlockable gizmos even if most of them are pointless. Balance between games is tweaks depending on how many players so it never seems unfair whether there’s two of you or all five.
A very enjoyable collection with a surprising amount of depth and perfect for a party or a sole excursion, and demonstrates the abilities of the WiiU’s asymmetric gameplay, just as Wii Sports showed off the power of the Wiimote.
8/10
0 comments:
Post a Comment