Reviewed: September 8, 2007
Reviewed by: Mark Smith
Publisher
Global Star
Developer
Cat Daddy Games
Released: August 27, 2007
Genre: Action
Players: 1-4
8
8
8
8
8.3
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Whether you are six or sixty there is no denying the nostalgic charm of a good old fashion circus or carnival. And long before you had all of these thrill rides at the amusement parks the only real attractions were those games of skills and chance up and down the boardwalk. Most of these games required keen hand-eye coordination and plenty of luck, and a whole lot of cash and generally rewarded your efforts with prizes worth only a fraction of what you spent to earn them in the first place.
Well Cat Daddy Games is bringing all the charm and excitement of the boardwalk into your living room with Carnival Games for the Nintendo Wii, and it is a match made in carney heaven. Simply put, this game wouldn’t even be possible without the unique motion-control scheme of the Wii, so step right up and take your chances. You might just win a prize.
Carnival Games is a collection of 25+ games, some of which date back to the origins of traveling circuses and carnivals. Each of these games requires various skills at holding and moving the Wii-mote in very specific ways to replicate anything from throwing a softball or a dart, to flinging a coin onto a plate or swinging a hammer.
There are several ways to play Carnival Games. You can play by yourself in Prize Mode and go for high scores to earn tickets and prizes. Much like a real carnival, you can redeem those tickets to unlock special prizes in the store. Depending on your performance in these games you will win small, medium or large prizes. And just like a real carnival you can trade in multiple smaller prizes for prizes in the next upper category, all the way until you unlock the grand prize, which usually unlocks a super version of the game you have just mastered.
But the real fun is when you share the experience with friends and family in Competition and Head to Head modes. In Head to Head you get to choose the games, but in Competition the game will randomly select 5 games and you’ll be scored by which place you finish in each game with the results tallied on a leaderboard. One particularly nice feature is that Carnival Games allows up to four players, even if you only have one controller.
Before you play any of these games you’ll first need to create and name your character. You can choose a girl or a boy and customize hair, faces, and clothing. Later on, you’ll be able to unlock all sorts of cool clothing and accessories by spending your hard-earned tickets in the store.
After you have created your character(s) it’s off to the main entrance where you pick solo or multiplayer then you arrive at the crossroads where six signs serve as your menu to six different alleys. Five lead to menus with more games while Prize Boulevard leads to the ticket store.
I won’t go into too much detail on all 25+ games, but I will cover a few of my favorites and the ones I thought used the controller in interesting ways. Alley Ball (or what most of us know as Skeeball) is much like the bowling game that came with Wii Sports. You line up your character with the D-pad then gently swing your arm in an underhand motion to roll the ball up the ramp and try to get it in a high-scoring hole. Easy enough.
Test Your Strength will really get your arm hurting in a hurry. You have to rapidly shake the remote to build up the power meter, all the while watching the rings on the launch pad. Your goal is to fill the meter as high as you can and make an over handed swinging motion (like you are swinging a sledgehammer) and hit the pad when the green circle is lit. Good luck ringing the bell.
Hoops is probably one of my favorite games on Fortune Way since it lets all players shoot at once rather than take turns. The game does a remarkable job of simulating the act of throwing a free throw, even to the point where I found myself arching up onto tiptoes while shooting and flopping my wrist over to spin the ball into the hoop. The Collection Plate is just as hard in Carnival Games as it is in real life, but the Wii allows you to put a spin on the coin making it slightly easier to stick a coin on a plate.
Heading on over to Love Lane you can throw darts at balloons while making realistic dart throwing motions. Make sure to have the wrist strap secured, as you will instinctively want to release the remote while throwing the darts. This game really makes me want to see a standalone dart game for the Wii. Spilled Milk is basically you throwing softballs at old-fashioned milk bottles. A targeting cursor will spiral around the pyramid and you must throw at just the right time. The cursor gets faster which each new set of bottles.
Over on Rodent Row you can test your sharp shooting skills in the shooting gallery where you have 25 bullets and lots of moving ducks. Another shooting game is Shoot for the Stars where you have a machine gun with 300 bullets and you must try to shoot out as much of the red star on the paper target as possible.
Aspiring quarterbacks can try to pass a football through a swinging or rotating tire and into the target circle behind it within the time limit. This game plays much like the dart throwing game only much harder. Another skill game is Buckets of Fun where you need to carefully lob a softball into a flared basket without it bouncing or rolling back out. This is hard enough to begin with but with each successful landing the basket gets smaller.
Over on Claw Alley you can try to pop balloons with the Clown Splash game, another event that will have your arm hurting in no time. You must rapidly shake the remote to pump up the water pressure then aim and shoot the stream of water into the clown’s mouth to inflate the balloon. This is really fun and competitive in simultaneous multiplayer.
Ring Toss is one of the more classic games where you must fling a ring onto and over a bottle using a motion not unlike throwing a Frisbee. Ka-Pow is another target game where you must throw a softball using the overhand motion at any of several clown heads. The trick here is that most of the clown is fuzzy hair so you have to actually hit the solid part of the head to knock it over. If you are lucky you might get two or more with one ball since ricochets off the back wall count.
Over on Lucky Pass you can try Nerves of Steel, one of the best uses of the Wii-mote yet. Here, you must cautiously move a metal ring over an electrically charged, curving wire without touching the ring to the wire. If the ring touches the controller makes a noise and rumbles (quite startling the first time) and the timer counts down more quickly. This game require a very steady hand.
Lucky Cups is just that, a whole lot of luck. You’ll toss a ball onto a playing field of mostly blue cups and hope that it lands in one of the few red or green cups. There is also a single gold cup that is as tempting as it is impossible to hit. Another great game for simultaneous multiplayer is Day at the Races where everyone is rolling balls (two at a time) down a small alley and trying to land them in various colored holes. Depending on the color of the hole your horse will move along the racetrack so many spaces. The first person to finish the race wins while all the other players continue to play until everyone crosses the finish line.
There are also special Alley Arcade games in each section of the carnival. These require tickets to play and are usually just ways to waste time and tickets. The Great Swami is nothing more than a Magic Eight Ball, Meter-O-Love is just like those love testers in the pubs, and Prize Claw is just like those crane games you can play just about anywhere these days. I have to confess I did get addicted to the Push-a-Prize only because there was a bit of skill involved in dropping the coins into the playing area in such a way that it created chain reactions to earn me more coins.
In each alley there are two Super Games that you can unlock by trading up your prizes until you get the Grand Prize. These Super Games are just bigger and harder versions of the games they are named after. Once unlocked you can play these Super Games in multiplayer sessions.
Going between Carnival Games and the new Metroid Prime really shows the immense graphical range the Wii is capable of, but nobody is expecting Metroid caliber graphics in a budget collection of mini-games. Even so, Carnival Games looks fantastic with crisp clear graphics, charming character designs, and animated (and skippable) instructions for how to hold and move the remote to play each of the games.
The entire presentation does a great job of recreating the festive carnival atmosphere, complete with colorful carneys that taunt and sometimes praise your performance. The assortment of prizes is fun and varied and kids will probably love them more than older gamers. You can rotate them in a 3D view and they make fun noises.
Carnival Games really brings the sounds of the boardwalk to life, first and foremost with a clever soundtrack that exists on multiple levels. Throughout the game you’ll hear that traditional organ music you associate with a circus or carnival but as the stages of the various games go deeper and get harder that music intensifies. You don’t really notice it at first, but pretty soon you’ll realize the music is creating more stress than the actual game difficulty.
There are all sorts of fun and clever sound effects that match the various mini games and the overall atmosphere of the carnival. Expect a lot of humorous speech from the various game attendants and especially from the guy in the dunk tank.
Most solo gamers can probably earn all the grand prizes and unlock the super games in a couple days of casual play. It goes quicker if you are good at the games, but even if you aren’t you can still work your way to the top through the prize-exchange feature.
I really can’t see myself ever not playing Carnival Games, at least when friends come around. This could just be the best party game around. For me, it ranks right up there with Mario Party and Rayman Ravin’ Rabbids.
There is a whole level of nostalgia at work here for anyone who has ever been to a carnival, and Carnival Games really ties into that whole theme and the various skill sets required to play these games. I’ve thrown darts at balloon in real life and doing it on the Wii is virtually no different. The same goes for knocking over milk bottles or tossing rings over bottles or landing a coin on a plate.
One thing is for certain, you won’t go broke trying to earn that big stuffed animal for your girlfriend, and you won’t have to deal with rigged games or creepy carneys. But you also won’t have immediate access to cotton candy or elephant ears either. Still, Carnival Games is some of the best fun you can have on your Wii alone or with friends, and I’m sure it was games like this that Nintendo had in mind when they created their new gaming system.