Well, here we are, then. Journey's end. How many years was it, five? Six? God, it makes me feel old when I can't remember a time before you were in my life.
You didn't have an easy time of it, that's for sure. Even beyond me being a fool and holding off on buying you for three months - totally mum's fault - you always had that stigma to rise above. The 'Casual Console', they called you. As if that ever meant anything. But they kept repeating it like a mantra, trying to spurn you for daring to be different; a spark of ingenuity amid a thick, noxious cloud of stagnation. They tried to drown you, but I like to think I did my bit to keep your flame alive for as long as it was.
Even so, times change. People grow old. And lo, as you replaced your father, so now your son has come to replace you. I've already started courting him, I'm not ashamed to say - he's got a little bit of growing up to do, a little more expansion of his repertoire, but I've got a good feeling. You raised a smart kid. Let that thought give you comfort as the final sleep takes you, my darling Wii.
...not that you're actually going anywhere, of course, I still need you for the occasional Eternal Darkness or Rogue Leader run-through. *cough* Uhm...yeah, so here's my picks for the best Wii games ever, I guess.
Boom Blox: Bash Party
Boom Blox was something of an oddity on its first release; the result of a high-profile partnership between EA and Steven Spielberg, and it was...a block-toppling puzzle game, kinda like an electronic, destructive version of Jenga? It seemed deflating to many, that a master of cinematic storytelling would lower himself to a project so singularly lacking in narrative. A few words from Spielberg on the subject made things a little clearer; he wanted to make a game he could play with his own children, and saw the Wii and its simple motion controls as the best way to do that.
I can't say for sure how much direct involvement Spielberg had in the game beyond its core play mechanic - swing remote like you're throwing a ball to throw a virtual ball at towers of virtual blocks - but someone (possibly several someones) was struck by inspirational lightning during development, as the sheer volume of different ways that single mechanic could be stretched out was mind-boggling, with levels going from wanton destruction to careful planning to time-trials and back again. All of this was supported by bright, colourful graphics and buckets of charm to rival Nintendo's own flagship characters. Bash Party was actually the sequel; it didn't do much to change the mechanics, but the amount of extra content compared to the original tips it over the edge.
De Blob
Funny story - the developers originally responsible for this one, a bunch of students, first demo'd the concept as a simulation of how their home city could be decorated. I can't imagine this going down well with a council planning board, so it's probably just as well someone at the recently-departed THQ took notice of the guys and girls who would become Blue Tongue and flung some money their way in exchange for turning their concept into something more game-y. Thus was born de Blob, a colour-absorbing amorphous vigilante type thing, champion of the resistance movement of Raydia, striking back against the evil monochrome INKT corporation by rolling in paint and throwing yourself against walls to restore colour to city streets and buildings. Yes.
The simple controls, wide open environments and funky music make the simple process of traversing the levels a joy, but what I'll remember most of the game is its comedic charm; the various characters, functionally mute, emote with the kind of arm-flailing silliness that honestly rivals Pixar, and you'll always want to press on with the game even through the tricky parts just to see what misfortune will befall Comrade Black and his legions next. There was a sequel too, but for whatever reason it didn't grab me quite as immediately as the first.
Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep
The first Endless Ocean was an oddity; a game with characters but a throwaway story, with unlockable achievements but no real goal, it simply put you as a diver on a boat in a wide-open sea and let you swim around to your heart's content, admiring the underwater life and maybe learning something. Edutainment? Kind of - it's as much an interactive oceanic encyclopedia as it is a true videogame. It was, however, incredibly gorgeous, with the animation and underwater lighting effects especially drool-worthy, and the calm pace of gameplay coupled with the haunting choir soundtrack and super-simple controls made for the perfect palate-cleanser after a hard session of Tekken or Resi or something else stressful.
Endless Ocean 2 had much the same strengths, but built itself into something more game-y, giving you more optional quests to perform - photography, touring, treasure hunting, running an aquarium - and even introduces the occasional health hazard, be they sharks, crocodiles, piranhas or whatever else. The danger is never such that progress becomes impossible, though, so the game feels as easy-going as before, it just happens to encourage more activity. There was also a stronger 2-player mode, minor character customisation, and a wider variety of environments, with the first game's single big map replaced by multiple smaller maps split across the world, including both north and south poles and an Amazon river amongst other things. You can also find a dinosaur if you try really hard.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
Pretty sure I've mentioned this one on the blog before, and I won't stop mentioning it until it gets the props it deserves. Crystal Bearers takes the skin of Final Fantasy and pulls out the spoiled guts that are its melodramatic, repetitive plotlines, continually bungles combat systems and reliance on tiresome EXP-grinding, before draping what's left over the body of a really fun third-person action adventure. Out go the usual arsenal of silly-looking sword variations and in comes telekinetic grabbing and throwing, a fun power even at the worst of times, and something the devs put a lot of thought into how it can affect the elements of the world around you.
Crystal Bearers is very nearly a sandbox game, such is the freedom it gives you. There's enough sidequests, mini-bosses and distractions to last you over 40 hours if you want, but you're under no obligation to do anything but the core story missions. It also has the same sort of OTT action beats normally found in Final Fantasy cutscenes, except here you actually play them and good gravy is that fun. Even the characters aren't annoying for a change, despite some of them looking like peeled onions with legs.
Ghost Squad
It's a lightgun game. What else can I say? I guess it's more like Virtua Cop than House of the Dead, at least insofar as you fight criminals and terrorists rather than monsters. The story - such as it is - reads like a Tom Clancy yarn written by an 8-year-old and involves a man named Alex Havoc, which I'd really like to get my name legally changed to. Oh, and to beat the boss in mission 2 requires a single shot to the head from 15 metres aboard a plummeting aeroplane, and if you miss your one chance he goes "Ha! Don't you know how to AIM???" in the most annoying voice you've ever heard.
What makes this one head of the Wii's pretty extensive rail-shooter class is its levelling-up system. There are only 3 missions in the game, but each of them has 16 increasingly-difficult 'levels'; clear a mission on your first run-through to open its level 2 setting, where new split paths will be opened, enemy numbers and positions will be different, and both the challenge and your rewards for completion will be that much higher. At the same time, successful run-throughs grant you EXP that steadily unlocks a long list of different weapons (which can radically change your approach to each mission) and novelty costumes, including a YMCA cop and a panda suit. The amount of added value this mechanic gives to a very short game is incredible; even today I haven't yet got the gold costume. There's also a bonus mode where everyone - goodies and baddies alike - wears swimsuits and attack with water pistols, so, y'know. It's got that going for it.
Kirby's Epic Yarn
I do not have a great fondness for Kirby. Granted, the first Kirby's Dream Land for the Game Boy does hold special significance to me, after I bought it in an airport duty free before a trip to the Maldives and, uh, completed it on the flight over. But I've never really seen the magic of the later games, most of which rely on the same enemy-inhaling tricks they've had for about 20 years, and give Kirby the ability to fly and literally complete entire levels by drifting up to the top of the screen and just floating past everything dangerous. No joke. Epic Yarn at least had an interesting visual quirk going for it, crafting the entire world out of knitted wool, something which looked vibrant and gorgeous without taxing the Wii's internal engines. Smart art design > processor output, always.
But it wasn't just style for style's sake. The yarn concept fuelled the mechanics of the game too, with Kirby pulling on loose strands to strip down bosses one layer of knitting at a time, pulling up the background and crawling under it like a mouse beneath a rug, and twisting his simple hollow body into crazy shapes for quick, fun set-pieces. A tank! A fire engine! A UFO! Of course, this apparently alienated the 'core audience' of Kirby die-hards, but luckily the concept is due for a Yoshi's Island themed revival on Wii U.
Little King's Story
Probably my least-played game on this list, Little King's Story is a real-time strategy town-management game...so of course I'm utterly hopeless at it and never got even close to the end. That said, I could never bring myself to trade it in, because really, it's not doing anything wrong. You play as the titular little king, a kid who happens upon a magic crown that shrinks him and transports him to a miniature world, slap-bang in the middle of a town whose people worship him as their king because I guess the crown is magical? You're not supposed to think about that part. What you need to do is expand and improve the town, attract more residents, build better facilities, and eventually fashion a makeshift army strong enough to take on the other established kingdoms across the world.
The game's controls are simple, with you controlling the king directly as he scampers around his domain, calling nearby townsfolk to his side and essentially pointing them in the direction they need to go. Townsfolk can be equipped with specific tools from special shops - shovels for digging, pickaxes for rock-breaking, bows for long-distance attack etc. - and they're smart enough to do that specific job on command. It's a lot like Nintendo's own Pikmin titles, albeit with a touch more micro-management and its own very skewed brand of humour. Great graphics too, and the selection of classic orchestral melodies repurposed for the soundtrack are all very fitting in a weird way.
Metroid Prime Trilogy
Now, I don't reflexively hate Metroid Other M the way around 80% of the internet is prone to - yes, it had its faults, but they were mostly in the narrative, while the actual game mechanics were great and a smart evolution of old-school 2D Metroids. Even so, the Prime games are still my preference where the First Lady of Space is concerned, and this one Wii disc puts all 3 of them in one place. If this was the only game I owned, I'd still play every single damn day and never grow tired.
I suppose it's kind of a cheat to count 3 games as one...but for the record, Prime 3: Corruption - the actually-made-for-Wii entry - is probably my favourite of them on balance. It's not quite as challenging as the others - the later bosses in particular roll over and die far too quickly - but it feels a lot better paced, and progress isn't as dependent on backtracking as it is in the other two. Plus, I like the approach of flying between multiple planets rather than just hanging around on one, even if the sum total playable area isn't really bigger. Prime 2: Echoes is my least favourite, although that's really just down to it being the hardest and having some moments *coughSpiderBallGuardiancough* that make me want to punch things in frustration. But, y'know, any one of these games is an intoxicatingly atmospheric adventure to be savoured like fine wine. Having all 3 almost feels like decadence, and I love it.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade
A 2D RPG with a somewhat Metroid-like feel to its progression, but with a battle system that's like the best bits of Devil May Cry, wrapped up in some of the most gorgeous animation and scenery you'll ever lay eyes on. That about sums up Muramasa. The stories (for there are 2, one for each protagonist) are dense and a bit too layered for their own good, boiling down to a pair of good people bound to cursed swords trying to find a way to save their souls, mostly by stabbing things. 'Things' being an endlessly inventive run of enemies drawn from old Japanese folklore; ninjas and skeleton samurai and flying big-nosed tengu birdmen and other things I don't have names for.
I can't really begin to stress enough just how pretty looking the game is in motion. 2D graphics, for a while there, seemed to be making a comeback before reverting to being the domain of arty, pretentious indie fare on XBLA because lol retro; Muramasa came around at the same sort of time as Wario Land: The Shake Dimension and basically trumped it, crafting a hauntingly beautiful world of watercolour shades and subtle animation flourishes, looking for all intents and purposes like the devs drew everything on scrolls of parchment. That the gameplay itself was one of the best hack-and-slashers I've ever tried was almost just an added bonus.
MySims Agents
Actually, I could probably just call this entry 'the entire MySims series before it went multi-format', although I guess I'd have to put an asterisk note to omit MySims Party, which was just a rubbish Mario Party clone. Anyway, the first MySims was ostensibly a Sims spin-off featuring simplified block people living in a cartoon world, and cast you as chief town planner/architect, tasked with building all the homes and facilities the people demanded using a very amusing free-form construction set. This was followed by MySims Kingdom, which used a similar construction mechanic as a tool for puzzle solving as you went on a grand quest across a nation of several islands, and MySims Agents, which trimmed down the construction stuff and turned things into almost a point-and-click adventure game. And also a platformer, because why not.
All of that might seem schizophrenic, but the devs clearly knew what they were doing because Agents was a metric ton of fun. Your ace detective had a variety of crazy mysteries to solve in Sherlock Holmes fashion, accompanied by the eternally bumbling Buddy the Bellhop and any other kooky weirdoes you'd been able to round up for help, and used a variety of gadgets coupled with platform-leaping skills and your own intellect to track down culprits and grill them with questions. As always for MySims, the writing was comedy gold, helped by every single character in the game being a deranged stereotype of some kind or another (Elf rock star! Mad scientist! Grouchy librarian! GOTH BOY!) and a wide selection of genre parodies to rival anything dreamt up by Travellers Tales' Lego games. Plus you could deck out your fancy HQ to improve the effectiveness of your operatives, e.g. pairing a tasteful coffee table with a 30-foot aquarium and a tesla coil. And then EA decided it wasn't making enough money and took the series elsewhere with the tiresome MySims Sky Heroes and killed it. Bah.
No More Heroes 1 & 2
For a while I was going to just pick one of these two, but frankly, I love them both too much to choose. You are (in vague control of) Travis Touchdown, pointy-haired horny otaku and sometime assassin, determined to be the best in that particular field by killing every other hitman/woman that's ranked above him in the league table of the United Assassins' Association. Because of course they have league tables for that. As he burns a path through the seedy side of Santa Destroy, Travis will have to kill magicians, superheroes, an old lady and distant family members to get the coveted no.1 rank and the attentions of the ludicrously fit Sylvia Christel...only to screw it all up and have to start over in the second game, this time taking on giant cheerleader robots, an earthquake machine and a dude with a boombox that shoots missiles.
I have a major soft spot for anything cooked up by Suda51 and his Grasshopper Manufacture minions, but even amongst their consistently insane output, the NMH games still stand as the absolute epitome of everything that makes a Suda game what it is. The bleached cel-shaded visuals. The over-dramatic sweary dialogue punctuated by fratboy toilet humour. The joint fixations on anime and lucha-libre. Lots of people dying gruesomely. Tributes to the 8 and 16-bit eras done as actual gameplay mechanics rather than throwaway sight gags. Worlds that hold together by virtue of nothing making any kind of sense. NMH1 definitely does a better job of building up to the confrontations with its smaller selection of bosses, making each battle more memorable as a result, and I do like the option to drive freely through town even with Travis' bike handling like a pig crossed with a Tron lightcycle...but NMH2 has the superior part-time job missions, shakes things up slightly with diversions starring different playable characters, and I'd say the tweaks to the basic fighting engine make battles more fun. Also: Takashi Miike cameo.
Rabbids Go Home
Ugh...Rabbids. Ubisoft really went all-out on pushing those ping-pong-ball-eyed freaks down our throats, didn't they? I didn't mind their wacky slapstick humour or BWWWAAAAAA voices, but it bothered me that A) their games were tiresome minigame compilations with little single-player value and painful controls, and B) their games also had Rayman in them, and screw that limbless freak. Rabbids Go Home fixed both these problems, ejecting Rayman from a series he no longer had a reason to be in and turning itself into a 3D platformer, albeit one which almost controls like a racing game. Confused? Well, rather than just controlling one Rabbid, you've got two, with one pushing a shopping trolley around and the other sat inside it, scooping up nearby junk and piling it in the basket. What's the junk for? Oh, the Rabbids are going to make a huge pile of the stuff, then run up to the top and reach the moon. Yes.
Rabbids Go Home is hardly the best platformer I've played; the levels get a touch repetitive towards the end, some of the environments are hard to navigate, and even the best stages lack the magic of a Super Mario title or whatever. But it's unique - there's never been another platformer that felt quite like this. The trolley handles kind-of like an actual trolley, so you have to factor in how it swings around, accelerates and powerslides as you go, and figure out how to keep speed up (most levels are timed) without crashing into pointy things. The game also sports the same lunatic sense of humour as the earlier Rabbids ventures; barging into people swipes their clothes and leaves them running around Benny Hill-style in their pants, the enemy pest-control men wear inflatable haz-mat suits that pop and deflate like balloons, and you exit most levels by jumping down a huge toilet. It grates sometimes, but altogether it's a superior comedy adventure and a genuine joy to play.
Red Steel 2
Red Steel was Ubisoft's big new IP hope for the Wii; an FPS released at launch date, with graphics that seemed to push the system to its capacity and a reliance on motion control that went beyond any other game at the time. It...didn't really work out for them. Personally, I quite liked the game, but there were definite issues with its handling; the controls were very twitchy, the framerate tended to chug at busy moments, and the much-hyped swordfighting was extremely simplified and boiled down to you using the same parry-and-thrust strategy on every opponent. It took a good long while for Red Steel 2 to arrive, and it wound up almost unrecognisable; trading in hyper-real graphics for cel-shading and Japanese gang culture for a steampunk Wild West, about the only thing it had in common with the first was the combination of gunplay and swordfighting, and even that was altered to weigh more heavily towards the blade.
These changes, however, were for the better. Despite the 'cartoon' visuals, the dusty frontier towns of the game's world were far more atmospheric than the neon alleyways of the first game, and the redesigned sword-first combat was an utter joy - and for a little while, made MotionPlus feel like the future and not an unnecessary complication. Whilst the basic arts of parrying and movement were the same as they had been previously, you now could fight multiple opponents with the blade at once, a smart lock-on system keeping one centred in your vision at all times, and your offensive options were beefed up with a variety of easy-to-do special tricks in addition to standard slashes and stabs, opening up your attacks to include finishing a downed opponent or launching a man into the air and following him up for some Devil May Cry sky-fu. And while the guns may have been minimised, they handled far better than before, and the option to instantly switch to a sawn-off shotgun mid-duel to surprise the enemy gave you such a badass feeling...
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Let me be clear up-front: I am not a Silent Hill fan. I missed the series' formative years thanks to my Nintendo fanboyism, and by the time I became aware of it I was basically 'Resi or die' regarding survival horror. It took Dead Space being awesome to broaden my horizons, and by then the SH series was kinda going through the motions with dreck like Origins and Homecoming. Shattered Memories, by comparison, felt like something new, if only by throwing out the series' tired otherworld of rust and smoke and dirt in favour of everything freezing. Sometimes it's the simple things that make a difference. That plus the devs' decision to fix the old, terrible combat systems by simply removing combat altogether, forcing you to simply run away from bad things.
Shattered Memories wasn't quite an unqualified success; the chase sections weren't quite as terrifying as they could've been, largely since they could only occur in the otherworld so you always knew they were coming, and the game's much-vaunted 'psychological analysis' didn't change very much, limited to reskinning certain elements and changing the odd conversation. That said, I still love it for what it is - a slow-burning trek through an abandoned, gloomy town, with a distraught father searching for his daughter, following a trail of facts that don't seem to add up until the conclusion draws near and...well, I don't wanna spoil. Suffice to say that it's a major gut-punch, and if anyone tells you this is a remake of the first Silent Hill...well, no, it's not. Not really. It's very much its own beast, and I still go back to give it a whirl every few months. Sometimes it's good to be sad, y'know?
Super Mario Galaxy
Perfection is a hard thing to nail down, and sometimes you can only really tell when you've found it by looking at everything around it. Like, it's only really clear just how brilliant Super Mario Galaxy is when you look at every other platformer out there and realise just how far behind the curve they are by comparison.
And make no mistake, Mario Galaxy is perfect. Every level is an absolute joy to behold and plays even better, the central character's handling has never been smoother, it challenges the player seriously without ever becoming cheap or unfair, its music is sublime, and every new mechanic established is stretched in a dozen different ways, all of which work like a dream. It kicks ass with every step and never puts a foot wrong. And if anyone out there is going to turn on it because "lol its got a stupid story" or whatever, let me just say that while I respect differing opinions, there's a point where some opinions become errors, and putting any kind of negative thought to Mario Galaxy is so far beyond that point it's a miracle you don't explode from the sheer wrongness.
The Best Game Ever.
Thrillville: Off the Rails
Y'know, I don't even remember what made me pick up Thrillville. Residual goodwill from enjoying Rollercoaster Tycoon when I was younger, I guess. Anyway, Thrillville is not like that. Oh, sure, you're managing a theme park, but you're doing it from the ground, mingling with the crowds and seeing the fruits of your labours up close and personal. Each new attraction you place opens up a new activity in return; rollercoasters can be rode normally or as a crazy VR target challenge, mini-golf courses can be played, arcade cabinets hold fully kitted-out homages to coin-ops of old, cheerleaders can be joined for a quick rhythm-action dance, etc.
In a lot of ways, Thrillville feels like my least favourite type of Wii title - the minigame compilation, where itty-bitty nuggets of gameplay are split haphazardly between a hundred activities, diluting the appeal. Where Thrillville succeeds is both in making each activity meaty enough to be a worthwhile distraction, and in letting the player define the content of their own playground freely. Don't wanna do the R-Type-esque side-scrolling shooter? Don't build it, just put something else down instead. Feel like a quick kart race? Build a track for it. All of these options are simple to access, and given how quickly money flows into the park at even the worst time, you'll rarely run into any obstructions. The sheer volume and scale of things happening at once is deeply impressive, especially since this wasn't a Wii-exclusive; the devs deserved some sort of trophy for retaining all the game's content when they ported it and getting it to run relatively slowdown-free. Not to mention the intuitive Wiimote-based method of 'coaster construction is a major improvement over the other versions.
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
The first Trauma Center was part of an early wave of DS games Nintendo really went all-out on hyping, largely due to their smart use of the stylus and touch-screen; in this case, it was a surgical simulator, where your stylus prods and swipes stood in for suturing, scalpel cuts and fluid draining. And also a laser, because it's a game after all, so of course half the patients had stomachs full of tiny dragons. Eventually, Atlus decided to keep the series alive by upscaling the visuals a touch and porting it to the then-new Wii, with the Wiimote assuming the stylus' duties.
While I kinda liked Trauma Center on DS, it was on Wii that I fell in love with the idea. Having the full freedom of a TV screen to present the patient made accuracy much easier to judge (and resulted in less time spent panning your view around to different body parts), using the nunchuk's control stick for tool selection meant less HUD space being swallowed up by junk, and the Wiimote better replicated the heft and 'feel' of most of the implements needed. There were also a large selection of bonus missions involving a parallel plotline to the main game, which took the game in new, fun directions, like having to reset a broken leg in pitch-black darkness, with the only light source being a camera's flash. There have been other Trauma Centers for the Wii since, but New Blood crossed that boundary from being challenging to nightmarishly difficult and put me off, and unfortunately the more ambitious Trauma Team was never released in the UK.
~+~
18 genuinely great games, most of them exclusives, many of them never given the props they deserved. Whatever others might say, know that in my heart the Wii was, is, and always will be a wonder.
Rest in peace.
Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep
Endless Ocean 2 had much the same strengths, but built itself into something more game-y, giving you more optional quests to perform - photography, touring, treasure hunting, running an aquarium - and even introduces the occasional health hazard, be they sharks, crocodiles, piranhas or whatever else. The danger is never such that progress becomes impossible, though, so the game feels as easy-going as before, it just happens to encourage more activity. There was also a stronger 2-player mode, minor character customisation, and a wider variety of environments, with the first game's single big map replaced by multiple smaller maps split across the world, including both north and south poles and an Amazon river amongst other things. You can also find a dinosaur if you try really hard.
Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: The Crystal Bearers
Crystal Bearers is very nearly a sandbox game, such is the freedom it gives you. There's enough sidequests, mini-bosses and distractions to last you over 40 hours if you want, but you're under no obligation to do anything but the core story missions. It also has the same sort of OTT action beats normally found in Final Fantasy cutscenes, except here you actually play them and good gravy is that fun. Even the characters aren't annoying for a change, despite some of them looking like peeled onions with legs.
Ghost Squad
What makes this one head of the Wii's pretty extensive rail-shooter class is its levelling-up system. There are only 3 missions in the game, but each of them has 16 increasingly-difficult 'levels'; clear a mission on your first run-through to open its level 2 setting, where new split paths will be opened, enemy numbers and positions will be different, and both the challenge and your rewards for completion will be that much higher. At the same time, successful run-throughs grant you EXP that steadily unlocks a long list of different weapons (which can radically change your approach to each mission) and novelty costumes, including a YMCA cop and a panda suit. The amount of added value this mechanic gives to a very short game is incredible; even today I haven't yet got the gold costume. There's also a bonus mode where everyone - goodies and baddies alike - wears swimsuits and attack with water pistols, so, y'know. It's got that going for it.
Kirby's Epic Yarn
But it wasn't just style for style's sake. The yarn concept fuelled the mechanics of the game too, with Kirby pulling on loose strands to strip down bosses one layer of knitting at a time, pulling up the background and crawling under it like a mouse beneath a rug, and twisting his simple hollow body into crazy shapes for quick, fun set-pieces. A tank! A fire engine! A UFO! Of course, this apparently alienated the 'core audience' of Kirby die-hards, but luckily the concept is due for a Yoshi's Island themed revival on Wii U.
Little King's Story
The game's controls are simple, with you controlling the king directly as he scampers around his domain, calling nearby townsfolk to his side and essentially pointing them in the direction they need to go. Townsfolk can be equipped with specific tools from special shops - shovels for digging, pickaxes for rock-breaking, bows for long-distance attack etc. - and they're smart enough to do that specific job on command. It's a lot like Nintendo's own Pikmin titles, albeit with a touch more micro-management and its own very skewed brand of humour. Great graphics too, and the selection of classic orchestral melodies repurposed for the soundtrack are all very fitting in a weird way.
Metroid Prime Trilogy
I suppose it's kind of a cheat to count 3 games as one...but for the record, Prime 3: Corruption - the actually-made-for-Wii entry - is probably my favourite of them on balance. It's not quite as challenging as the others - the later bosses in particular roll over and die far too quickly - but it feels a lot better paced, and progress isn't as dependent on backtracking as it is in the other two. Plus, I like the approach of flying between multiple planets rather than just hanging around on one, even if the sum total playable area isn't really bigger. Prime 2: Echoes is my least favourite, although that's really just down to it being the hardest and having some moments *coughSpiderBallGuardiancough* that make me want to punch things in frustration. But, y'know, any one of these games is an intoxicatingly atmospheric adventure to be savoured like fine wine. Having all 3 almost feels like decadence, and I love it.
Muramasa: The Demon Blade
I can't really begin to stress enough just how pretty looking the game is in motion. 2D graphics, for a while there, seemed to be making a comeback before reverting to being the domain of arty, pretentious indie fare on XBLA because lol retro; Muramasa came around at the same sort of time as Wario Land: The Shake Dimension and basically trumped it, crafting a hauntingly beautiful world of watercolour shades and subtle animation flourishes, looking for all intents and purposes like the devs drew everything on scrolls of parchment. That the gameplay itself was one of the best hack-and-slashers I've ever tried was almost just an added bonus.
MySims Agents
All of that might seem schizophrenic, but the devs clearly knew what they were doing because Agents was a metric ton of fun. Your ace detective had a variety of crazy mysteries to solve in Sherlock Holmes fashion, accompanied by the eternally bumbling Buddy the Bellhop and any other kooky weirdoes you'd been able to round up for help, and used a variety of gadgets coupled with platform-leaping skills and your own intellect to track down culprits and grill them with questions. As always for MySims, the writing was comedy gold, helped by every single character in the game being a deranged stereotype of some kind or another (Elf rock star! Mad scientist! Grouchy librarian! GOTH BOY!) and a wide selection of genre parodies to rival anything dreamt up by Travellers Tales' Lego games. Plus you could deck out your fancy HQ to improve the effectiveness of your operatives, e.g. pairing a tasteful coffee table with a 30-foot aquarium and a tesla coil. And then EA decided it wasn't making enough money and took the series elsewhere with the tiresome MySims Sky Heroes and killed it. Bah.
No More Heroes 1 & 2
I have a major soft spot for anything cooked up by Suda51 and his Grasshopper Manufacture minions, but even amongst their consistently insane output, the NMH games still stand as the absolute epitome of everything that makes a Suda game what it is. The bleached cel-shaded visuals. The over-dramatic sweary dialogue punctuated by fratboy toilet humour. The joint fixations on anime and lucha-libre. Lots of people dying gruesomely. Tributes to the 8 and 16-bit eras done as actual gameplay mechanics rather than throwaway sight gags. Worlds that hold together by virtue of nothing making any kind of sense. NMH1 definitely does a better job of building up to the confrontations with its smaller selection of bosses, making each battle more memorable as a result, and I do like the option to drive freely through town even with Travis' bike handling like a pig crossed with a Tron lightcycle...but NMH2 has the superior part-time job missions, shakes things up slightly with diversions starring different playable characters, and I'd say the tweaks to the basic fighting engine make battles more fun. Also: Takashi Miike cameo.
Rabbids Go Home
Rabbids Go Home is hardly the best platformer I've played; the levels get a touch repetitive towards the end, some of the environments are hard to navigate, and even the best stages lack the magic of a Super Mario title or whatever. But it's unique - there's never been another platformer that felt quite like this. The trolley handles kind-of like an actual trolley, so you have to factor in how it swings around, accelerates and powerslides as you go, and figure out how to keep speed up (most levels are timed) without crashing into pointy things. The game also sports the same lunatic sense of humour as the earlier Rabbids ventures; barging into people swipes their clothes and leaves them running around Benny Hill-style in their pants, the enemy pest-control men wear inflatable haz-mat suits that pop and deflate like balloons, and you exit most levels by jumping down a huge toilet. It grates sometimes, but altogether it's a superior comedy adventure and a genuine joy to play.
Red Steel 2
These changes, however, were for the better. Despite the 'cartoon' visuals, the dusty frontier towns of the game's world were far more atmospheric than the neon alleyways of the first game, and the redesigned sword-first combat was an utter joy - and for a little while, made MotionPlus feel like the future and not an unnecessary complication. Whilst the basic arts of parrying and movement were the same as they had been previously, you now could fight multiple opponents with the blade at once, a smart lock-on system keeping one centred in your vision at all times, and your offensive options were beefed up with a variety of easy-to-do special tricks in addition to standard slashes and stabs, opening up your attacks to include finishing a downed opponent or launching a man into the air and following him up for some Devil May Cry sky-fu. And while the guns may have been minimised, they handled far better than before, and the option to instantly switch to a sawn-off shotgun mid-duel to surprise the enemy gave you such a badass feeling...
Silent Hill: Shattered Memories
Shattered Memories wasn't quite an unqualified success; the chase sections weren't quite as terrifying as they could've been, largely since they could only occur in the otherworld so you always knew they were coming, and the game's much-vaunted 'psychological analysis' didn't change very much, limited to reskinning certain elements and changing the odd conversation. That said, I still love it for what it is - a slow-burning trek through an abandoned, gloomy town, with a distraught father searching for his daughter, following a trail of facts that don't seem to add up until the conclusion draws near and...well, I don't wanna spoil. Suffice to say that it's a major gut-punch, and if anyone tells you this is a remake of the first Silent Hill...well, no, it's not. Not really. It's very much its own beast, and I still go back to give it a whirl every few months. Sometimes it's good to be sad, y'know?
Super Mario Galaxy
And make no mistake, Mario Galaxy is perfect. Every level is an absolute joy to behold and plays even better, the central character's handling has never been smoother, it challenges the player seriously without ever becoming cheap or unfair, its music is sublime, and every new mechanic established is stretched in a dozen different ways, all of which work like a dream. It kicks ass with every step and never puts a foot wrong. And if anyone out there is going to turn on it because "lol its got a stupid story" or whatever, let me just say that while I respect differing opinions, there's a point where some opinions become errors, and putting any kind of negative thought to Mario Galaxy is so far beyond that point it's a miracle you don't explode from the sheer wrongness.
The Best Game Ever.
Thrillville: Off the Rails
In a lot of ways, Thrillville feels like my least favourite type of Wii title - the minigame compilation, where itty-bitty nuggets of gameplay are split haphazardly between a hundred activities, diluting the appeal. Where Thrillville succeeds is both in making each activity meaty enough to be a worthwhile distraction, and in letting the player define the content of their own playground freely. Don't wanna do the R-Type-esque side-scrolling shooter? Don't build it, just put something else down instead. Feel like a quick kart race? Build a track for it. All of these options are simple to access, and given how quickly money flows into the park at even the worst time, you'll rarely run into any obstructions. The sheer volume and scale of things happening at once is deeply impressive, especially since this wasn't a Wii-exclusive; the devs deserved some sort of trophy for retaining all the game's content when they ported it and getting it to run relatively slowdown-free. Not to mention the intuitive Wiimote-based method of 'coaster construction is a major improvement over the other versions.
Trauma Center: Second Opinion
While I kinda liked Trauma Center on DS, it was on Wii that I fell in love with the idea. Having the full freedom of a TV screen to present the patient made accuracy much easier to judge (and resulted in less time spent panning your view around to different body parts), using the nunchuk's control stick for tool selection meant less HUD space being swallowed up by junk, and the Wiimote better replicated the heft and 'feel' of most of the implements needed. There were also a large selection of bonus missions involving a parallel plotline to the main game, which took the game in new, fun directions, like having to reset a broken leg in pitch-black darkness, with the only light source being a camera's flash. There have been other Trauma Centers for the Wii since, but New Blood crossed that boundary from being challenging to nightmarishly difficult and put me off, and unfortunately the more ambitious Trauma Team was never released in the UK.
~+~
18 genuinely great games, most of them exclusives, many of them never given the props they deserved. Whatever others might say, know that in my heart the Wii was, is, and always will be a wonder.
Rest in peace.
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