Rayman Raving Rabbids (Wii) (gamespy)

- gamespy -

Confession time. Prior to seeing Rayman Raving Rabbids in Germany during the Games Convention in August, my personal buzz for the game was pretty low. That was until Ubisoft Montpellier unveiled that instead of creating another generic platformer that involved jumping around with a Wii remote, they'd conjured up a compilation of mini-games and party games. Reviews, writing, and work aside, as a gamer, I love party games as much as I dislike most cartoony 3D platformers. Super Monkey Ball rarely left my GameCube during the period between graduation and career path. Mario Party was a big, redundant hit in my neck of the woods. With that in mind, it's safe to say that while Rayman Raving Rabbids doesn't quite reach the "instant party-game classic" potential that it seemed to have during preview time, it's still a good collection of fun games.

The plot of the game's story mode is quite simple. Our hero's off at a picnic, when suddenly, a group of giant rabbits replace his friends and abduct him. He's thrown into a prison, where he becomes a gladiator of sorts. However, instead of feeding other characters to large cats, he participates in a battery of challenges over fifteen days. At the end of each day, he is rewarded with a toilet plunger. Much to the ignorance of his captors, it takes some fifteen toilet plungers on a wall to pull an Andy Dufresne and get out of Shawshank. The plot is really never too serious, but thankfully, never gets as bad as this.

If they get this close to your carrot juice, it's already too late.

Each mini-game is rooted in some scientific fact about his captors. For example, Bunnies Are Addicted to Carrot Juice is the notorious "pump and dispenser" mini-game, in which players use the Nunchuk to pump carrot juice out of a dispenser while aiming the remote as though it were the nozzle. Players won't have to do it for long, but it's virtually guaranteed that they'll go above and beyond the call of duty to take down as many snorkeling bunnies as possible before they all raid the carrot cabana like so many zombies attacking an abandoned house. In fact, one of the nicest things about the majority of RRR's games is that Ubi Montpellier's programmers have designed games with the idea that there is no "victory." Every player will eventually fall to the bunnies, but it's scored and based on how long they can withstand the onslaught. It's like a sick game show, but not.

Others involve even more cartoonish mayhem inflicted upon rabbits, warthogs, and bovines. The cow-tossing mini-game will incite either laughter or uneasy squirms, depending on your feelings about cartoon-animated animal cruelty. Another game, in which players must hammer the Nunchuk against a dim-witted bunny's bandaged skull to get the tallest lump, is flat-out hilarious. The warthog racing is a bit hit and miss, with the steering not quite feeling right, but fortunately, the games are less about finishing first and more about finishing within a time limit. Most of the games are just plain fun and definitely have the twisted edge that most gamers saw while growing up with Looney Tunes.

That not-quite-hitting-greatness part? It's because we played some, but not all of the mini-games during preview time. Some just plain don't work, and it kind of feels like we couldn't play them in part maybe because they had flaws that didn't quite get worked out before ship date. At some points, the game veers, in a near manic-depressive fashion, from extreme moments of joy and whimsy, to thoughts of spiking the Wii Remote. That's supposed to be reserved for Trauma Center: Second Opinion. Although the cover of Jingle Bells during play is oddly hilarious, games like Bunnies Can't Slide, in which players on an icy surface must slide as close to a centered target as possible for points, will drive anyone hair-torn-out bald who's not playing with three other poor bastards.

Bunnies Can't Jump, in which players must jump rope with the Nunchuk by moving vertically, is exceptionally frustrating to control. The tougher version forces players to also control the rope with the remote. It's the opposite of fun. Bunnies Don't Know How to Close Doors feels like an exercise in imprecise Nunchuk detection. Strangely, it felt easier to control during preview demos than on the final version of the game. It's not like a few rotten apples spoil the proverbial barrel, but it seems as though the team has recycled a lot of the same gestures for different games, so when something doesn't work, it really stands out among the other fun but similar games.

The multiplayer portions of RRR, found in Score Mode, are quite good, although with the shortage of remotes floating around, we really haven't had a chance to explore any four-player insanity. Still, it gives the game a second wind, as most players will breeze through the single-player game in a few hours in order to unlock more games for Score Mode. The games are reconfigured into four sections: Bunny Hunt, Sports, Shake Your Booty, and Challenges. Bunny Hunt allows players to experience the Area 51-style shooter on rails, usually to rather hilarious results. Sports are subdivided into even more categories, including Workout (which includes more physical games), Precision (featuring mazes and memory-based games), Skill (involving cow tossing, skydiving, and jump rope), and Get Going (a series of warthog races). Shake Your Booty contains the rhythm games, which vary from fun to, well, quit-worthy. Ultimately, in Challenges, players will get compilations of mini-games from the other assortments.

Tracing a slice of pizza isn't as easy as it looks.

It's all in the name of earning points to unlock more bonus materials. In another cool move, Ubisoft has implemented a system in which players receive a code, which they type in on the game's website, and see how they rank against other players, both in their country, worldwide, and according to their platform. As of the time of writing, I'm ranked #38 on the site, although I haven't registered codes for some of my better feats, regrettably. Still, it's a cool feature that makes up for the fact that there really aren't any online leaderboards implemented at this point on the Wii.

The fun factor is quite high on a majority of the games, although again, games like Bunnies Can't Slide aren't really fun unless there's no CPU around to bump off players. Some are turn-based, such as Bunnies Like to Stuff Themselves, in which each person traces a design that pops up onscreen so that it becomes a food item. Others, such as Bunnies Can't Shear Sheep, will find players competing to trim as much wool off of a cluster of lambs as possible. While people will get a kick out of the single-player game, it's in the multiplayer that this title shines the most.

The million-dollar question for party gamers seems to regard whether or not Rayman Raving Rabbids is a better purchase than Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz. From the time spent playing both, there are pros and cons to each. While SMB has a more diverse range of mini-games that utilize the Wii Remote in what feels like more ways than Rayman, Raving Rabbids has more mini-games that work well. Sure, there might be three games that all use the same control function, but they're fun. Ultimately, one can only hope that a sequel will improve on certain issues, such as a few clunky mini-games that eat away at the fun factor, but overall, for the sense of humor, entertaining presentation, and the online scoreboards, Rayman is the winner in this launch battle. Who would've thought that the armless platform character from France would keep those jonesin' for party games going until (the likely inevitable) Mario Party for Wii drops?