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.
Tintin is a Belgian boy who somehow manages to be a journalist without ever writing a word, who knocks out grown men twice his size with a single fling of his fist, and who lives in a world where the only woman is a jolly opera singer who exists only to make us laugh. In short, his life plays out like a little boy's dream – or at least the type of boy who juggles ambitions of winning the science fair with fantasies of clobbering the local bully. The good news is that it's not a disagreeable dream, and while it suffers from excessively easy gameplay and forced variety, The Adventures of Tintin is a bit more rewarding than its movie franchise origins might suggest...
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.
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.
We just had the most terrible nightmare. We were in debt to this horrid raccoon called Tom, and all our neighbors had animal heads and they kept spouting the same nonsense over and over, day after day, for years. The worst part is we could swear we’d done it all before, like some kind of hallucinatory déjà vu. Aaargh!
Newsflash, people: a game can have more words than bullets. Another Code R has more words than anything – a surprise after the more controlled ratio of chat to puzzle in the DS original. In actuality it feels like the first game filtered through Hotel Dusk, adopting the extensive nattering but keeping Code’s more innovative puzzle design.
Disappointingly, R drops Dusk’s adult vocabulary and attitude.
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