Wii Reviews

Bango! A 50-yard belter from Stevie G. Blam! A 30-yarder fizzed in from Rooney. Thwack! A stunning bicycle kick from the goal machine that is Emile Heskey. We’re only 12 minutes into our opening World Cup match and already we’ve netted three of the finalists for the Goal of the Tournament competition. And there we were worrying that our love affair with FIFA might be stretched thin by this mid-year release…

Feeding colorful jellybeans to an amorphous alien pet to make it transform into a multitude of cool items was loads of fun way back in 1989, and WayForward’s resurrection and re-imagination of the NES sleeper hit A Boy and His Blob perfectly captures the clever gameplay that made the original so absorbing. 20 years later, the remake is one of the most endearing games you’ll find on the Wii.

Perhaps hoping to capitalise on shops selling out of Wii Sports Resort and Wii Fit, Active Life: Extreme Challenge (Family Trainer: Extreme Challenge in the UK) is a collection of ‘radical’ activities (kite surfing, skateboarding and so on) controlled by a dance mat thingy.

There’s about a million adventure games that would be brilliant on the Wii. Imagine a LucasArts compilation – we’d happily pay near full price for that. What we wouldn’t happily do is pay the same amount to direct a waddling Belgian around a static seaside resort.

In Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, the heroine eats a cake to grow larger, drinks a potion to grow smaller and meets all manner of extraordinary characters. It’s an interesting starting point for a videogame and when focused through the prism of Tim Burton’s imagination, even more so.

Alone in the Dark loves a good cliff-hanger – quite literally in the case of one helicopter crash sequence – but there’s no scenario more hair-raising than that of publishers Atari themselves. Teetering on the brink of financial disaster, they’ve put all their eggs in this gothic basket, expecting a company-rejuvenating three million sales across multiple platforms. Here’s hoping the next-gen version shifts a

The success of Wii Sports was always likely to spawn imitators but after numerous frames and tournaments with AMF Bowling: Pinbusters! we’re still left scratching our heads as to why this exists. It is, as a whole, considerably worse than what is one fifth of Wii Sports - in look, execution and enjoyment.