MySims

 

    With how prevalent the “cozy game” genre is now, it might surprise you to know that it actually had something of an uphill struggle reaching that level of popularity. Series such as Harvest Moon, Animal Crossing and Boku no Natsuyasumi laid the ground work for what the genre would eventually become, but for a surprising amount of time, no one saw fit to iterate on it or even rip them off. It could be that most companies just didn't see the value in copying something that was mostly seen as an oddity at the time, much like casual games as a whole were. Of course, the Wii very swiftly opened the doors for casual games, and by extension cozy games, to develop, thus the existence of MySims.
    While it is a spin-off of The Sims, it barely has anything to do with the original series except some of the house building and social elements. It's very much meant to be in the style of something like Animal Crossing, and you can immediately tell right from seeing the intro to the game. You're the new face in your town, and you get tasked by the mayor of the town to slowly rebuild it and move as many people in as possible. You do this by collecting essences, floating emoticons of a sort that represent different objects, which are used to eventually build the houses and furniture. Thus the usual routine of a cozy game sets in; you go to Sims and ask them for tasks to complete, which always requires finding essences either by planting trees, catching fish, finding them with a metal detector or obtaining them from other Sims, and completing them lets more Sims with more tasks move in. Nothing you would be unfamiliar with if you've played a cozy game before, but it's the details that make it worth noting.
    When you do move Sims in, you have to build the houses yourself and build furniture for them, each with their own editor. Building the houses is cut down compared to how it is in the usual Sims games; you can make the houses any impractical shape you want and it'll still have the same interior. While that is fun on its own, the furniture building is the surprising highlight. It gives you an outline of the item you need to build with lots of pieces to choose from, but so long as you cover the glowing stars at certain points in the building process, it'll function as intended. This means you don't have to follow the instructions exactly, and letting your imagination run wild is where a lot of the fun comes in. I was able to make non-euclidean chairs, turntables shaped like fish, and a mirror with flowers growing out of it among other silly things, and the building process itself has an almost Lego-like satisfaction to it.
    It helps that the characters you're building this stuff for are genuinely, truly weird. While the voices are still in the trademark Simlish, MySims has actual dialogue boxes for all its characters showing what they're saying, and it manages to be entertaining enough to where I went out of my way to read as much of it as I could. Every character has dialogue unique to them and the things they say range from quirky facts about themselves to genuinely bizarre statements that don't even make sense in context. For some examples, one time I saw the man that runs the museum wandering around town at night, and going up to him led to him murmuring about his secret crush on the goth woman that lives down the street. Another time, I went up to the Sim that spends most of his time reading, and he suddenly goes completely off on one about how delicious meerkats are. It's moments like that that caught me so off-guard to the point it kept me playing for a while.
    However, getting to those moments can prove to be a bit of a chore. Granted, with this kind of game, you need that downtime doing bits of busywork while you're working towards the bigger goals, but the game can lay it on a bit thick. For example, to move other Sims in, you need to go to the hotel, talk to the Sim you're going to move in, walk all the way to the plot of land where they'll live, build the house, and then walk all the way back. You can't get multiple Sims to move in at once, so it makes the process that much longer. The sheer amount of essences you need for tasks later on also gets to be tiresome, and more often than not require waiting around the same area for minutes at a time to get them to respawn. Not helping things are that the game clearly isn't the most optimized; I noticed some stuttering during certain moments like when it switched from day to night, and the amount of loading screens is ridiculous. They aren't that long on their own, but the sheer frequency of them adds up over time.
    While that isn't great, I still had a fair bit of fun with MySims. It's fairly unpolished and doesn't quite have the same power to hook you in for weeks on end like Animal Crossing does, but it's got its own offbeat sense of humor and the level of player creativity on offer makes it stand out. I'd say if you wanna play it now, get it as part of MySims: Cozy Bundle, which reduces the load times significantly and comes packaged alongside the game's direct sequel, MySims Kingdom. If nothing else, it manages to reflect a unique moment in time where this type of game wasn't as well established, before you were able to say “I want my cozy game to have Sanrio characters in it” and have a game fit that oddly specific criteria.

Boogie

 

    So fun fact: this is the first game for this blog I've had to emulate in order to play. I did try to play this game on my actual Wii, and in that regard, things started okay at first. It got through the opening cutscene just fine, and the title screen had no issues either. The moment it asked me to select a character, however, said character turned into a veritable vertex explosion, and my Wii Remote started to make a noise akin to a Gatling gun. My copy is probably just scratched or something, but either way, I didn't wanna risk breaking my actual console playing it further. In emulation, it ended up working fine, but it turns out, I really wasn't missing much.
    My best summation of Boogie is if you took something like Space Channel 5 and blasted away all of its personality and challenge with a pressurized hose. It's a dancing game where you have to shake the Wii Remote to the beat to earn points, and occasionally shake the Wii Remote in specific directions to do dance moves that earn you more points. There's an attempt at a combo system where you can't do the same move over and over or else your points will decrease, but all you have to do is change the direction of your Wii Remote swaying every other beat or so and it'll say that you're doing great. There's also sections where you sing a part of the song, but I've never, ever seen this game bundled with the microphone it supposedly included, so the game just has you tap a button to make your character sing.
    As you could probably guess, the game is extremely easy. I mostly played the story mode, which has you playing as characters that include a stereotype, a generic woman, another stereotype, a generic man, and bootleg Patrick Star on their uninteresting adventures. It's in this mode where I breezed through every single song in no time flat, as the point requirements for playing a stage are far lower than what I ended up getting. On some songs, I had point counts that crossed one million when the game's requirement was only around a hundred thousand. I understand that developers for the Wii wanted to ease off on difficulty for the sake of casual appeal, but this rewards you for doing almost nothing, and it's downright silly.
    There are a bit over thirty songs to dance to in this game, and fair's fair, they are all licensed songs people would probably know. They are all covers, which isn't immediately bad in and of itself; it was pretty common practice for rhythm games of this time to use cover versions, like with Elite Beat Agents or the early Guitar Hero entries. The problem is, the covers made for this game are incredibly weak in quality, often nowhere close to the original song in terms of instrumental palette. There's even a couple songs in here, notably the cover of Daft Punk's “One More Time”, that have notably off-key singing, which is doubly confusing considering it uses autotune.
    If it sounds like I'm having trouble writing about this game, it's because Boogie is one of the most nothing games I've ever played. Barring that mishap playing it on an actual console, which I doubt is the game itself's fault, it is at least more competently put together than the average shovelware title, but it can't really save a dull experience. It doesn't really work as a dancing game since there's no moves to dance along to, and it doesn't work as a traditional rhythm game either due to the utter lack of challenge. After I post this, I'll go back to my life of mostly forgetting this game's existence, and if we're being honest, you will forget this game as well.

Carnival Games

 

    Chances are, you've heard the term “shovelware” before. It's a catch-all term to describe low-budget games that are quickly made and, for lack of a better word, shoveled out to store shelves just as fast to make a quick buck. They're usually released at a budget price and made to appeal to people that aren't particularly into gaming, taking the form of licensed games, mini-game collections, cash-ins on trends, and so on. Understandably, with the Wii's guaranteed audience being those outside the normal gaming crowd, it got hit with a flood of these types of games, and a lot of people wrote off the console entirely because of it. However, while a fair few of these games were pretty worthless, some were pretty unfairly written off even though they were by no means all that good, like Carnival Games.
    The game is exactly what it says it is, a collection of a bit over twenty games that are based on the kind of thing you'd see at a sketchy traveling carnival. It's split up into five zones, each with their own selection of mini-games to play, and they're about what you'd expect based on the premise. Everything from skee-ball, a dunk tank, strength testing, throwing darts at balloons, knocking down milk bottles; a lot of the most popular types of games make an appearance. The majority of them can be played in either single player or multiplayer, with the single player mode awarding you tickets and prizes for completing each game, which can be used to eventually unlock special variants of games and clothing pieces for your avatar.
    The thing with all these games is that, for at lot of them, the controls can kinda suck. They're responsive enough, but each game has its own bizarre quirk with how exactly it controls. Some of the throwing mini-games are timing-based, but whether or not the aiming reticle will move in a simple motion or swing around randomly is completely up in the air with each game. Sometimes you're able to lock onto a target, but sometimes you're not, turning the balloon popping and football passing games into a lot of hand flailing. Also, physics are not always as they seem, as tossing a coin or a ring can turn into one big guessing game on where they'll slide or bounce to. Most of these result in the process of winning a game coming down to sheer luck, hoping that the planets suddenly align and everything works out in your favor.
    However, I think to some extent, that's kind of the point? If you have ever been to a carnival before, you'd know many of those games are rigged so they're almost never in your favor, leading you to get into that “just one more try” mentality, hoping luck is on your side. In that sense, Carnival Games emulates that pretty much perfectly. A lot of the games, simplistic and unfair as they are, are addicting to replay because you wanna beat the odds. There's no doubt at least some of it is intentional, as for example, the game where you shoot out a paper star with a BB gun has simulated recoil on it to make it way harder. It doesn't excuse every control decision, strength testing requiring swirling your wrist around before swinging the hammer might be a guaranteed way to get carpal tunnel syndrome, but it puts a lot of the game into context.
    Helping the game is that, even though it's a low-budget title, it's got a strange bespoke charm to it that really helps sell the traveling carnival feel. The characters all have this somewhat uncanny quality, looking as though they were pulled right from a vintage circus poster, and the games themselves are made to look as though they've become quite run-down and worn. The announcer has an appropriately old-timey flair to the way he introduces the games, and while you're playing the games, other carnies will heckle you and egg you on to try and do better. It's not amazing by any means, as the music is pretty generic and some sound effects feel like they're missing, but again, it works for what the game sets out to do.
    Carnival Games isn't that great, most wouldn't even dare call it good, but I find its ingenuity with its presentation and the way it works with its limitations to be at least a bit admirable. It managed to invoke a lot of nostalgia in me, both for my own visits to actual carnivals, and for these kinds of fun if mediocre games in general. This is the kind of game that thrived on rentals, bringing it home for the weekend and having a decent time before returning it and not giving it much thought afterwards. In that sense, it truly mimics a day trip to a carnival, and I can't fault it for that. Now as for how it sold over a million copies, I don't think even a rigorous scientific study would explain how that happened.

Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree

 

    The Brain Age games were some of the most important titles on the DS during its heyday. Based on the research of Dr. Ryuta Kawashima, who appears in the game as a polygonal floating head (truly the form we all aspire to be), it sounds pretty boring in concept, just a collection of minigames focused on math problems, brainteasers, the sort of thing most people would associate with homework. However, something about the way it gamifies those aspects – the pacing of it all, being able to write out answers with the stylus, the fantastic sound design – it somehow coalesces into something both fun and helpful. It won't make you smarter, as some were misled to believe, but it can help keep your brain more active in general. On that note, Big Brain Academy is also a series that exists.
    The whole concept of Big Brain Academy is somewhat perplexing, especially considering the original DS entry came out within months of Brain Age's release. It's based around pretty much the same concept, playing some minigames each day to help train your brain to be sharper, and doesn't seem to do a whole lot different on the surface. It is more colorful and cartoony than Brain Age, granted, and perhaps the intent as some point was to make it more game-like than Brain Age ever was. The thing is, I think doing that without adding much to the idea to make it more different highlights how wafer-thin the entire experience is. The one I played, Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree, ends up feeling like something of an unhappy middle ground between Brain Age and WarioWare.
    Doing one of the tests, you'll find five categories: Analyze, Compute, Identify, Memorize and Visualize. They're all roughly self-explanatory, Memorize has you remembering patterns and faces and such, Visualize has you do some forward-thinking, and so on and so forth. Once you complete all five categories, it gives you a “brain mass” based on how many you completed correctly and the speed at which you completed them. Here's where the crux of the issue comes in: each of these categories has only three minigames each (four in one of the multiplayer modes), all of which can be completed in mere seconds. They all charitably require slightly more thought than your average WarioWare microgame, but they still aren't that much more substantial. It makes it so the amount of stuff to do runs dry very quickly, and the game knows it, since it expects you to practice and play the same minigames over and over again.
    This even extends over to the multiplayer mode, which has three different modes in Mind Sprint, Mental Marathon, and Brain Quiz. Mind Sprint has two players completing a set amount of minigames the quickest, and Mental Marathon requires players complete as many of the minigames as possible without messing up. The one unique mode is Brain Quiz, which presents the minigames in a game show format. Each player take turns flipping over a tile with a minigame category on it, getting assigned a difficulty level when they flip it over and the amount of minigames they complete awarding them points. I guess Brain Quiz could prove to be fun for a bit, if only because it frames the minigames a bit differently, but you'll still end up wondering why you aren't playing other party games with more to offer.
    That's my main issue that I hope I've managed to get across, is that Big Brain Academy: Wii Degree suffers from a lack of content. It doesn't really work as an alternative to Brain Age, because while that game is light on stuff to do also, the puzzles it presents are longer and more involved, it has basis in actual scientific research, and it has a sudoku mode if you're one of those freaks that likes sudoku. In comparison to WarioWare, the comparison is unfavorable as well, as even with Brain Quiz adding one more game to each category, the total number of minigames only comes up to twenty, which puts it about one-tenth of a typical WarioWare game, not counting any of the unlockables. Even considering other Wii games with a small amount of content, like Wii Sports or Wii Play, there's still a fair amount of depth you can find with what's included. While all of it functions as intended, it's just incredibly insubstantial, and you can find more fulfilling options than Wii Degree elsewhere.

Wii Play

 

    Wii Sports pretty much cemented its legacy from the moment it came out, being the pack-in for the console and being instantly understandable to everyone that played it. Naturally, people wanted more of it, and Nintendo immediately followed up on it, kind of. Another launch title for the Wii in everywhere but the US, Wii Play was another simple minigame collection, albeit with a different focus. While Wii Sports obviously focused on sports, something that people that didn't play video games would more or less know how to jump into, Wii Play feels like it was a way to ease that same audience into more typical video game design language, with slightly more abstract games that mostly focused on the Wii Remote's pointing functionality. To sweeten the deal, it came bundled with a Wii Remote, which was normally forty dollars by itself, leaving the de facto price of Wii Play to be ten bucks. The difference is, I think most of Wii Play isn't anywhere near as substantial as Wii Sports.
    Keyword being most of, and I'll describe the exceptions in deal when I get to them, but I'll quickly summarize the games I don't have much to say about. Shooting Range is a short throwback to NES Zapper games like Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley, containing five short waves where you shoot down balloons, targets, clay pigeons, cans and UFOs, with some ducks in there as an optional target. It's fine enough, but it's over very quickly and doesn't have any sort of variance with repeated visits. Find Mii simply tasks you with finding certain Miis amidst a crowd, using the Miis you created to populate every level; it's longer and more varied than Shooting Range, but it's also nothing special in the slightest. Table Tennis is a simple rally back and forth across a ping-pong table, and it makes me wonder how many people swung the Wii Remote at this point, confused that it didn't work like Tennis in Wii Sports.
    Pose Mii is the first game to shake things up in any significant way, being that on top of using the A and B buttons to switch between poses, you also have to twist the Wii Remote to fit your Mii into the right angle of the bubbles falling. It can get pretty hectic as it goes on, but is overall just okay. Laser Hockey is the point where a lot of people reviewing this game would say it's just Pong, but that's where they're wrong, because I'm enough of a game history nut to know it's actually just Hockey for the Fairchild Channel F. Unlike Pong, you can rotate the paddle and move it in all four directions, but it doesn't change the fact that I've had to talk about two different games in here that are some variant of tennis. Billiards is the first sort of in-depth game in the collection, being that it's a straightforward game of pool, and works about as well as you'd expect it to. You angle the shot, line up the cue stick, pull back and watch it go; it controls really well, especially considering a lot of Wii games surprisingly had trouble with any forward and back motion.
    Fishing isn't gonna win any prizes among the storied history of fishing minigames, but it's executed decently enough. You sit by a lake and catch paper fish within a time limit, each type of fish being worth a different point value, with bonus points awarded for catching specific fish the game tells you to. It's alright, but it's worth noting that the small fry fish are the most entitled jerks in the history of gaming, constantly gravitating to your hook even though catching one makes you lose fifty points. Charge is the most out of place game in the entire collection, being that it doesn't use the pointing functionality at all, but rather you have to tilt the Wii Remote forward, left and right to steer a knitted cow headlong into scarecrows. It's the most throwaway game out of the bunch, being that there's only one stage, and the only replay value comes from trying to get a better time.
    So far, while most of these games play alright, most of them wouldn't warrant spending more than a few minutes on them. Then all of the sudden, Tanks appears, far and away the most in-depth and challenging game of the bunch. It's the only game to use the Nunchuk, and it's a methodical top-down shooter that takes inspiration from Combat on the Atari 2600, having you control a toy tank shooting at other toy tanks. Considering Wii Play's casual focus, Tanks is surprisingly pretty murderously difficult, with one hundred stages to complete and it only giving you so many lives, and if you lose all of them, you get sent back to the beginning. It makes for a pretty awesome challenge, especially with how the tanks you face off against all having unique properties, and the movement of the tanks being slow and methodical. It's easy to understand why this is the most beloved game of the bunch, even getting an indie spiritual successor in the form of Wee Tanks (ha), and I agree wholeheartedly that this is the game with the most value.
    That, however, is about it for Wii Play. There's not really much else to it aside from the multiplayer, where you compete against a friend to get a higher score with some changes to the game rules to accommodate, but it's a bit perplexing that it only allows for two players. It was never intended to be more than a simple demonstration of the Wii Remote, much like Wii Sports, but I think the fact that it wasn't bundled in with the console resulted in it being held to far more scrutiny back in the day. Personally, all of it functions as intended and has that Nintendo level of polish you'd expect, but the simplicity is a bit of a detriment, with a lot of the games not having much going on. That being said, Tanks alone makes it worth trying out if you somehow haven't already, and you can find the game for dirt cheap most places, so there's no harm in trying it if you want.

Wii Sports

 

 

 

    Who do you suppose was the first person to accidentally throw their Wii Remote into the TV? Tell me you couldn't picture it; someone there at the very launch of the system, spending the whole day setting it up, creating their Miis, getting right into a tennis match until wham! The very first instance someone forgot to put on their wrist strap, sending a cascading ripple effect for similar events across the world until it becomes the most iconic joke made about the Wii. Putting it that way gives it an oddly poignant perspective, a collective breaking of every gaming tradition and barrier up to that point. Perhaps it makes the hassle of buying a new TV sting a bit less, knowing you were right at the precipice of a revolution.
    Anyway, do I even need to waste your time talking about why Wii Sports was good? I feel like if you're reading the first post of a brand new blog specifically themed around the Wii, chances are,you've already played it at some point. It's one of the best selling video games of all time and brought in a massive new audience of people that, up to that point, probably didn't even play video games beforehand, all thanks to both the game's simplicity and the motion controls of the Wii Remote itself. Whether or not that popularity was a blessing or a detriment is debatable, you'll find a large number of older people that think the Wii was just this game and nothing else, but there's no denying it still had a pretty significant impact at the time. That does raise the question on whether or not the game still holds up nearly twenty years later, and as such, I went back to give it a try.
    Wii Sports is a very basic collection of five mini-games in total, those being tennis, baseball, bowling, golf and boxing. Most of them can be played with just the Wii Remote, save for boxing, which requires the Nunchuk.  It also comes with three training mini-games for each of the five games, along with a “Wii Fitness” mode, which just puts a random selection of training mini-games together and grades you at the end. As the games are so simple, I can quickly go through each of them in order.
    Tennis is exactly how you would expect, and is far and away the most simple out of all the already simple games. Swinging the Wii Remote swings the tennis racket, and that's all you need to do; you don't even have to move your Mii around, as they'll get into position to hit the ball back automatically. It actually tracks the angle at which you hit the ball surprisingly precisely, allowing for some trick shots and close saves, with instances of it detecting the wrong angle or missing its cue entirely being quite rare. It is somewhat bizarre that you can only do doubles matches, especially in single-player, where you have to go up against two computer players with two copies of yourself, but it's not something I particularly mind. Overall, it works about as well as it needs to, and is pretty fun.
    Baseball is condensed from its real-life counterpart, with the inning count being reduced from nine to three, and other simplifications like the number of plates you can run to being determined by how long the automated catchers take to reach the ball. The controls for batting are about as simple as tennis, but I find them to be a lot more unreliable here. I'll do my best to swing the bat in the exact same way, and it seems even odds whether the baseball will go sailing out of the park, or pitifully sent backwards into the foul ball zone. Pitching is easier to get a hold of, with it picking up the speed at which you throw the ball, and also allowing for things like curveballs, screwballs and splitters by holding down the A and/or B buttons. While the simplifications are welcome, baseball is simply okay here.
    Bowling is far and away the best mini-game of the entire collection, and a pretty good contender for the best bowling game ever made. You set up the position and angle of your shot, hold down B and start swinging, and then release B at the end of your swing to send the ball rolling. The controls feel absolutely perfect, and the speed at which you can blast through all ten frames makes it easy to pick up at any time. I also love all the smaller touches that simply add to the experience, like how if you throw the ball backwards, all the Miis will jump and yell in surprise. If there's any game that will keep you coming back to revisit Wii Sports, it's this one.
    Golf is one mini-game I'm pretty bad at, so in that sense, it's accurate to how bad I am at golf in real life. You select which club to use, line up your shot with the D-pad, approach the ball with the A button, and then swing away. The courses are remasters on the ones from Golf on the NES, which is a neat detail along with the variable wind speed of each course, making it so you can't predict exactly where your ball will land no matter how good you get at the game. Much like tennis, it works as well as it needs to, although the somewhat limited number of courses does hinder its replayability a bit.
    Boxing is the odd one out between all the mini-games, as not only does it require the Nunchuk, but it's also the most “game-ified” of all the sports. You have to balance dodging the other opponent's attacks and finding the correct moment to throw your own punches, trying to get their health bar to zero. Whether or not they're knocked out or will get back up is dependent on how quickly their health dropped to zero, and how many times they've gotten back up already. It was definitely designed with the intent to show the Nunchuk's motion control capabilities, but it ended up faltering a fair bit. The Nunchuk isn't nearly as accurate as the Wii Remote with detecting motion, and even with that, it expects you to do incredibly specific motions that are finicky to pull off. It's simply mediocre, especially in comparison to the other games.
    Speaking of having to do specific motions that the controls aren't accurate enough to handle, the training games, which is where the experience starts to crack a bit for me. A lot of the training mini-games expect way more from the motion controls than can reasonably be expected, such as trying to hit targets or angles with narrow room for error, and thus a lot of them are over very quickly. That's not to say they're all bad, as a couple of them can prove to be a good time; the Power Throws training game for bowling, where you have to knock down an increasingly large number of pins, is far and away the best of the bunch. For the most part, though, it proves to be a relatively throwaway part of the package, in a game that's already pretty light on content.
    Although, does the lack of content really matter? It was bundled in with the console, after all, and for a console pack-in, it does exactly what it needs to do. It showcases the motion controls of the Wii Remote in an incredibly easy to understand and concise way, all while having the kind of distinct charm that only Nintendo could pull off. A couple of the mini-games are a smidge clunky in hindsight, but for how effortlessly the rest of it plays, it's really not something that detrimental. It says a lot that out of all the launch window Wii games that I have, Wii Sports is the one I keep wanting to go back to play, because even though it doesn't have much to do, what is there has remained pretty timeless.