GamesRadar - Wii Previews

E3 07: EA Playground - hands-on (EA Playground)

Jul 11, 2007

Electronic Arts is promising to bring the pleasures of the playground to our screens. Not the playground we went to, thankfully, which means we can avoid the casual spitting, hair-pulling, and broken glass. Its all Wii Remote-controlled and in single-player it involves you wandering around at playtime, getting yourself into competitions to rise to the position of King of the Playground. The real heart is the multiplayer, though. Some games are real, such as ...

EA Playground (EA Playground)

Jun 20, 2007

The actual concept of an EA playground is one of the most wonderfully absurd things weve heard of in a while: a kind of compendium of EA games collected together in the style of a theme park. How excited you get by this prospect depends entirely on your age, because this one is aimed squarely at sticky-fingered youths. But theres no doubting it has a certain pizzazz. The minigame that were most looking forward to is Tetherball - the game that everyone loves until the ball swings right into ...

Elebits (Elebits)

Dec 20, 2006

Wednesday 20 December 2006 We all know how annoying it is to lose something in your own home. During the ensuing room-to-room search, sofas are shuffled, TV stands tipped over and don't even get us started on old jeans pockets. Can you imagine what it would be like if, instead of car keys, you lost a million cuddly personifications of electricity and all the appliances in your house went down? That's super bogus. Luckily, the Wii remote in Elebits functions as a beam-shooting capture gun, ...

Elebits - hands-on (Elebits)

Dec 4, 2006

We all know how annoying it is to lose something in your own home. During the ensuing room-to-room search, sofas are shuffled, television stands tipped over and don't even get us started on old jeans pockets. Can you imagine what it would be like if instead of car keys you lost a million cuddly personifications of electricity and all the appliances in your house went down? That's super bogus. Luckily, the Wii remote in Elebits functions as a beam-shooting capture gun, capable of lifting even ...

Elebits - first impressions (Elebits)

Aug 16, 2006

Hidden creatures crying out for the catching: that pitch initially sounded so cynical. It would be easy to write Elebits off as a lazy recharging of Pokemania against a domestic backdrop that calls to mind Chibi-Robo or even Toy Story. The result, however, seems likely to be far more surprising. And the biggest surprise of them all is the slow-dawning realization that Elebits is, in essence, a first-person shooter - albeit an FPS reduced to first principles and then rebuilt with an entirely ...

E3 06: Elebits (Elebits)

May 11, 2006

Today, Konami's first Wii game was unveiled in... minor detail. The quirky game, called Elebits, stars a race of tiny magical creatures of the same name. They just happen to look a lot like overweight Pikmin... which might be a coincidence. These strange little creatures provide all of the power in the game's world - no gasoline price hikes, no power plants. ...

Emergency Heroes (Emergency Heroes)

May 15, 2008

This is one positive game. There’s no murder, robbing or disrespecting other people; there’s some reckless driving but that’s absolutely fine as speed is of the essence when you’re the driver of an emergency service vehicle, as you are in Emergency Heroes. Set in the near future city of San-Alto you assume the role of Zach Harper, a cadet with a flair for driving who must speed around the streets to various man-made ...

Emergency Mayhem (Emergency Mayhem)

Feb 22, 2008

Many years ago we saw a TV show that included a piece about someone who had tried to jump over a fence, but had slipped and got a spike impaled through the bottom of their mouth. It’s haunted our dreams ever since, so we’re inclined to run a mile from any game that features the emergency services (while taking great care not to trip over anything, of course).Fortunately, the incidents you’ll be called to in Emergency Mayhem ...

Emergency Mayhem (Emergency Mayhem)

Mar 6, 2007

Heres an interesting prospect - Crazy Taxi meets Monkey Balls minigames. Or, as someone from the development team described it to us, Grand Theft Auto for kids. Emergency Mayhem was first spotted in early 2004 but, following the demise of original publisher Acclaim, its taken until now for a completely reworked version, running on a new engine and published by Codemasters, to appear. The most significant benefit of the long delay is that well now be able to play it on Wii, with a control ...

Escape from Bug Island - hands-on (Escape from Bug Island)

Apr 25, 2007

You've used your Wii remote as a gun. You've used it as a sword. You've even used it as a bow and arrow. But have you ever used it as a giant bug-thwapping stick? Escape from Bug Island will give you that chance. You'll use the motion-sensing controller to swing sticks and throw rocks at all sorts of foul insects, from mutated millipedes to ginormous praying mantises. Later in the game, your enemies will evolve to include demonic fish and zombie gorillas. If you're not in the right mindset to ...

Excite Truck (Excite Truck)

Sep 27, 2006

Wednesday 27 September 2006 Nintendo's spiritual successor to side-scrolling scrambler Excitebike (released for NES in 1986) might be generations ahead of the 2D pixelated racer in terms of graphical oomph, but Wii's Excite Truck still packs many of the original's gameplay mechanics under its mud-spattered bonnet. Indeed, the tracks we sampled during our recent hands-on - a sun-soaked and beach flavoured Fiji circuit, along with a more traditional off-road inspired Mexican course - may have ...

Excite Truck (Excite Truck)

May 23, 2006

Tuesday 23 May 2006 If there's one type of gaming that truly benefits from Wii's sensory-overload controller, it's the racing genre. Instead of holding the wand like a pointer, you use both hands to position it horizontally - and turn it like a steering wheel. This makes Excite Truck all the easier to play and its accessibility is only enhanced by its amazing simplicity. The early version we played featured two courses - one tropical and another an arid desert. Regardless of which track we ...

E3 06: Excite Truck - hands on (Excite Truck)

May 11, 2006

If there's one type of gaming that truly benefits from Wii's sensory-overload controller, it's the racing genre. Instead of holding the wand like a pointer, you use both hands to position it horizontally - like a steering wheel. Everyone, in theory, knows how to drive using a wheel. This makes Excite Truck all the easier to play, and its accessibility is only enhanced by its amazing simplicity. For E3, Nintendo had two levels to try out, one tropical and another an arid desert. Regardless of ...