It is rare to find a demo that leaves you satisfied at the end. Many end with cliffhangers, hoping you’ll buy the game. With Viva Piñata: Party Animals, the mini-games created a satisfying experience in just a short demo.

I wasn’t sure whether or not I would like Party Animals. I have never played Viva Piñata, but it was one of my sister’s obsessions. I have been hesitant to start the game because we have similar taste and I don’t want to get distracted from my schoolwork. When I heard that there was a party game using these characters, I thought it would be worth checking out the demo.

In the first few minutes, I was impressed by the amount of character packed into the game. Each piñata animal had its own personality, through exaggerated body language and careful character design. The mini-games were summarized and scored after each round with voice-overs imitating sports commentators. It was cute and clever.

After playing two other party games for quite some time (Rayman’s Raving Rabbids and Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz), I have to admit that this game won me over with its charm. While the games themselves hardly seem innovative (from a Mario Kart race clone to sailboats powered by burps), they are certainly fun covered in the Viva Piñata theme. The humor is not quite as gross as Rabbids, yet it still seems to have a good balance of humor to appeal to younger boys and girls.

However, I would not limit the audience of this game to children. My coworkers were playing through the demo one day and had a blast. While neither grown man would likely admit to enjoying a kids game that much, I saw first-hand how much they became immersed. The game became a way for them to compete and tease each other to a greater degree than they do in real life. Also, the stakes were quite low, keeping the fun level high.

I really enjoyed the limited demo experience I had with Viva Piñata: Party Animals. I plan to rent this game later. I was glad that I was able to gain an understanding of the strengths of the game from the demo. I would recommend this game for children and encourage curious older gamers to consider trying the demo.  

Since I have a Wii, I though it would be a good idea to rent a lot of different games to see what works and what doesn’t. I want to play the new Zelda, but FFXII and now FFVIII are going to fulfill my RPG quota for the next month or two. In the meantime, I decided to check out some more casual games like Rayman Raving Rabbids (discussed earlier) and, more recently, Super Monkey Ball.

I began playing this game with my sister’s boyfriend, who has more of a natural knack for games than I did. For this reason, I didn’t expect to win any of the short mini-games against him, but I really did value his feedback.

The first game we played was a shooter game where the monkeys were in space shuttles and had to shoot aliens. The arena was circular with a bunch of geyser-type structures scattered around that would spit out aliens. The game seemed simple enough, but I had an awful time trying to steer my ship with the Wii motes. Then I had a lot of trouble aiming. I thought maybe it was just me, but my sister’s boyfriend didn’t seem to be doing much better. His score was higher, but he was also complaining about the controls. I wondered if some types of games just don’t translate as well onto the Wii. However, I do not think shooters and the Wii are incompatible – the Raving Rabbids Western-style shooters are very well-designed. I just think this one was put together in a short amount of time and it shows.

One of the advantages to Super Monkey Ball is the fact that there are so many games. So, it was easy to move onto something else after that disappointment. Like Rabbids, each mini-game would provide very limited instructions. This is an effective way to get people into the game quickly, but, if you’ve never even seen the game before, sometimes it can leave players like me a little baffled. One of the games we then played was a game with the goal of collecting as many bugs on a stick as possible without the bugs falling over. The controls were okay, but any temporary lag in the Wii-mote sensor tracking could spell disaster.

We continued playing other mini-games, but were not impressed. There were a few games, such as shooting hoops or catching fruit, that just weren’t that fun. The goals were cute and the ideas all fit well into a theme, but the game felt sloppy. The tuning that comes with repeated playtesting was lacking. I would have appreciated a style more like Rabbids with multiple games of the same type and increasing difficulty to refine the mechanics of the game.

However, Super Monkey Ball is not altogether awful. I think it would be a fun game for a party, as long as no one was playing the game for too long. For casual players, such as my girl friends, I think this game could be fun. It’s very cute and happy. A game like Rabbids would also be fun at a party, but it requires a little more skill. Rabbids is also more crude – some games are based around drilling a rabbid’s teeth when you see a worm and shutting rabbids in outhouses. I would choose this game for a crowd of people who have played games more and come to expect more from them. While I have not personally taken a great interest in Rabbids, I often watched my sister play it with her boyfriend and I thought it was a lot more fun to watch, making it a good choice for parties.  

My sister is not really someone that I’d consider a “gamer.” She likes to play games, but she is very specific on what she plays. She mainly likes fun, short games like Rayman Raving Rabbids, Katamari Damacy, and Guitar Hero. This is why I was surprised to see her come home one day with a big grin on her face.

“I just played the most awesome game!” she exclaimed. “It’s called Loco Roco and there are a bunch of little guys who sing like this…” She then went on to sing in a voice that resembled someone who had just inhaled helium. I just stood there for a minute, in shock. There was actually a game that sang in that ridiculous voice she found so amusing? And people bought it? This was news to me.

It turned out my sister was telling the truth. This game really was about a bunch of happy, signing, rounded creatures. It was a PSP game and her boyfriend had bought it (for himself). They played it together as a bonding activity.

A couple weeks later, I had the opportunity to play this game myself. I was at a dinner party and my sister’s boyfriend pulled it out. The singing started, and it was so happy that I couldn’t help but smile. Everyone else wondered what I was doing, and they liked the music enough to ask me to plug it into speakers so they could listen, too. While the game may seem like it could be a rhythm game, it’s actually more of a normal platformer…except for one thing: the controls.

Loco Roco’s most innovative feature is how you control the characters by moving the environment. Your only controls are the triggers and one button. The triggers tilt the world, much like the knobs on a wooden labyrinth. Pressing both triggers jolts the world so the characters jump. The other button makes the characters either form into one round blob or separate back into the smaller circles. (Of course, they have a lot to say about either of those actions and will shout in response.)

My sister is also in the game story class with me and she presented this game to our class. We were the only two girls in this class, and I was curious to see how our male classmates would receive it. To my surprise, they laughed at the music and were intrigued. After her presentation, I heard at least three boys say how much they wanted to play the game! It is a ridiculous game, but it’s also ridiculously fun. In an age where almost everything is directly controlled, it’s very refreshing to have indirect control. The game feels so original, and, like Katamari Damacy before it, Loco Roco has the power to captivate my sister.  

I finally rented a game for the Wii other than Wii Sports. I got Rayman’s Raving Rabbids. This may seem like an unconventional choice considering the release of the new Zelda game and the popular Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, but I was captivated by the French commercial for Rabbids that I viewed on YouTube. It has a bunch of rabbids playing the game, and there is one particularly memorable scene where there are several rabbids huddled around a couch, all shaking their Wiimotes and nunchucks at the same time. Check it out here:

Rabbids French Trailer

My sister and I finally got around to playing it. The game is set up as levels of four or five mini-games in a gladiator arena base level. There are one or two games from different categories (rhythm, precision, etc.) that all involve different uses of the Wiimote. Many of the games fit into my ideal of mini-games, where you have to play them for two or three times before you can beat them. Some are more successful than others.

By far, I found the rhythm games to be the most fun. They involve shaking the Wiimote and nunchuck in time to the music as raddibs hit a certain spot on the screen. I enjoy music a lot and am a big fan of DDR, so it really appeals me. I also think it is one of the most fun games to watch. My sister and her boyfriend played it in versus mode, and it was hilarious to see two people seated side by side, shaking sticks in time to the ridiculous music and looking completely focused.

Another type of game that seems to translate successfully onto the Wii is the shooter. There are several Western-style shooters in rabbids that are mandatory to complete a level. The Wiimote is used like a computer mouse to aim at the rabbids and shoot them with a plunger gun. There are many friendly features, such as a fairly generous target range (anywhere on the body knocks most rabbids down), short breaks before strings of rabbids, and an endless supply of ammo. The nunchuck is shaken to reload, and the trigger in the right-hand Wiimote is your trigger.

The design is fairly intuitive, and this extends to a great GUI (Graphical User Interface). The ammo and score are displayed along the top. When ammo is depleted (5 plungers at a time), you they turn opaque. The colors and placement of the GUI is very easy to read over a short period of time and never clutters the view.

Some of the other games are severely flawed, however. I grew so frustrated playing one particular game that I quit playing and considered returning the game. It involved pointing the Wiimote at each rabbid’s snorkel mask and then pressing a button to shoot some sort of drink at them. The aiming was absolutely terrible. I couldn’t tell if I was supposed to aim at the eyes of the mask or the snorkel. Also, you have to manage the flow of the drink by constantly shaking the nunchuck, which wasn’t an easy task. I found it very stressful, as the rabbids would creep up to the front, getting bigger and bigger, and then scream in a gremlin-like voice.

This wasn’t the only game with flaws. Many of the games offer only a very brief set of instructions, which is fast and convenient but often fail to tell you important details. For example, on a labyrinth game, you had to figure out that you could slide your ball into a weak wall to break it and take a shortcut necessary to win. Certain secrets are fine with me, but I really prefer to play games where the secrets are not mandatory to win. Games become much more accessible to a wider audience if you save the secrets for those who really want to go through the trouble to find them. Secrets such as those involved to complete puzzles in adventure games turn many players off; veteran players often look up the answers online or use strategy guides. With so many games to play, there is less time to waste on frustrating secrets.

Despite Raving Rabbids’ flaws, I think I will continue playing it for a little while longer. It is nice to be able to pick up a game without worrying about when to find the next save point (each game is about a minute or two long). Even so, I do not find it a stellar use of the Wii technology and hope to find something that better utilizes the Wii’s potential.