Who would have thunk it? Rayman, that funny French videogame character with floating limbs and floppy ears, turns up on the Wii in launch title
Rayman Raving Rabbids, developed by the team behind the classic
Beyond Good & Evil. Not only that, the game surprisingly only goes and turns out to be one of the better titles available for Wii at launch on Wii-E day this coming Friday (8th December). Unlike past games in the
Rayman series, which have been 3D platformers, this one is made-up of 70 barking mad mini-games – and this turns out to be a very pleasant surprise indeed. Particularly as Wii gamers in Europe are going to have to wait a good few months after launch to get their mitts on Nintendo’s unparalleled
king of zany mini-games
WarioWare: Smooth Moves.
Alongside
Zelda and (the now slipped)
Trauma Center: Second Opinion it is one of the few Wii titles that this reviewer is happy to recommend anybody to buy in order to realise the full potential of the wonderful Wii Remote and Nunchuck control system. Read on to find out why I fell for this bizarre and charming little game.
The story goes like this: Rayman is enjoying a perfectly pleasant picnic when, quick as a flash, he’s captured by the evil ‘rabbids’ who are, as you might have guessed, also
raving. This is ‘raving’ in the olde-worlde sense of the word, you understand, not in the sense of necking some pills and dancing in some farmer’s field till dawn. You, however, may well experience some of the same sense of sensory hallucination, euphoria and temporary bliss once you’ve spent a whole night lost in this game.
We would never for one moment suggest that
Rayman designer Michel Ancel is a fan of strong hallucinogens himself – he must just be possessed of one of the weirdest topsy-turvy upside down brains in the games industry, nay – the world! After all, it’s not every day you get kidnapped by massive rabbits.
Those bastard bunnies have only gone and dumped our limbless, gladiating (yes, I can verb nouns!) hero in a crumbling coliseum. To find your way out of your prison you simply select one of four gateways, behind each is a challenge in the form of a kerr-azy mini-game for you to complete. Complete all four in one game-day and you are rewarded with a massive plunger… which is nice. It’s also useful, if you successfully complete the full 15 levels then you will earn enough plungers to make a ladder so you can make it all the way up the wall and out of the window as you escape to victory!
The game is, however, a mini-game fest rather than a linear progression. It’s also got to be pointed out that, although the phrase ‘party game’ has been flung in its direction, this is a slight misnomer if you’re assuming that a party requires, well, more than one person. The fact is that not all of the mini-games can be played using in multi-layer mode. There are times when your
Raving Rabbids themed hootenanny will feature your pals watching as, singly, you complete a task. Although this is far from optimal – in the shindig sense – it would be entirely churlish to knock the game too harshly for this.
So what of these mini-games/trials that Rayman must endure then? These are not
Wario-style mini-games which, very much like a sexual disappointment, are over in a matter of seconds, they are similar to a classic party game collection in two important ways:
Firstly, they are very easy for even the most inexperienced gamer to pick up and play. This is helped massively by Ubisoft’s innovative use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuck controllers.
Secondly, they are genuinely very funny. SPOnG cannot imagine anybody picking up and playing this game and not smiling. Go on, try it. I challenge you to keep a straight face while lobbing cows about. Or a mini-game during which you use the pointer to lock in on a rabbid as it sticks its stupid head out of a hole. Then you follow up with a swift bonk using the Nunchuck in classic whack-a-mole style.
See? Funny. It’s classic Tom and Jerry humour based on cartoon violence hilariously enacted against cartoon villains. If anybody has a pop at this game for encouraging violence among children then I would urge you to punch them squarely in the face… with a large foam fist.
The mini-games are all about completing basic objectives within a set time limit. There are 70 in total but I’ll just tell you about a few of my particular favourites to whet your appetite. I’m sure that I have dreamed a number of these games in the past because they have that sense of being both hilariously strange and yet somehow making total sense.
To give you an idea of the titles of the games are fairly literal descriptions of the games themselves:
In “Bunnies Are Addicted to Carrot Juice”, you use the Nunchuk to pump carrot juice out of a hose that you aim at the approaching snorkel-clad rabbids.
In “Bunnies Can't Slide”, you slide as close as possible to a centered target.
In “Bunnies Can't Jump”, you skip a rope (or an evil-looking chain) by flicking the Nunchuck.
As you progress through the game the difficulty levels on each task increases accordingly, with the developers really managing to nail that essential ‘just-one-more-go, nearly there’ factor.
