Reviewed: August 14, 2008
Reviewed by: Jason Porter
Publisher
Majesco
Developer
Coyote
Released: July 8, 2008
Genre: Simulation
Players: 1-4
2
3
3
2
2.5
Supported Features:
Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)
Wonder World Amusement Park, one of the slew of recent junk titles for Nintendo's hyper-popular Wii console, combines a few dozen carnival-style games into one unified package, making it essentially a game full of mini-games. Lest your thoughts stray to titles like the WarioWare or Mario Party series, though, rest assured that Wonder World Amusement Park is about as far from fun and exciting as you could hope to get on the Wii.
In fact, despite the traumatic clown/carnival worker/gruesome roller-coaster accident memories that many of us carry from our youth, even an afternoon at the dumpiest old carnival in the state is guaranteed to be loads more enjoyable than playing this game for the same amount of time. At least real carnies don't follow you all over the park calling you "pardner." (And no, I do NOT want to read your e-mails to the contrary. Ugh.)
At the outset, players choose a character and customize his or her appearance. While extremely basic, the character editor is reasonably enjoyable to use; however, after this screen, it is extremely rare to ever get a good look at your character again, because all the carnival games are played in a first-person perspective. In light of this fact the character editor might seem extraneous and pointless, if it were not arguably the most enjoyable part of the game. After character editing, the gameplay experience of Wonder World Amusement Park begins to slide downhill fast.
Each game is contained within one of five uniquely themed areas of the "amusement park," and only one of those areas is available to players at the outset of Story mode. Starting with 100 tickets, players must earn more prize tickets from the various games, most of which cost a set amount of tickets to play as well. Earning enough tickets in one zone will enable players to purchase a pass to an adjacent area from the prize booth, thereby unlocking more games. Annoyingly, though, tickets are zone-specific, which means that earning 10,000 tickets in the initial zone will not help anything in the zone after it.
To allow players to build up from nothing, each zone has a single game that can be played without paying any tickets. Therefore, if a player happens to not like the one free game in each zone, the chances that that player will get to play all of the other games in the zone are very slim, especially since the free games generally only award 10 or 15 tickets per play, and all other games cost at least that much, if not more. The only exception, as noted above, is the starting zone, which gives out 100 tickets for free.
The generally annoying virtual carnies that follow players around the various zones introducing each game don't help matters, especially the twang-drawlin' Carrot Top wannabe in the first zone. Additionally, it's worth noting that in Wonder World Amusement Park's free play mode, games do not become available until unlocked in Story mode, so there's no way to just jump in and play 80% of the content without toiling away to unlock it first. This could have been a bigger problem if the games themselves were more fun, because almost every game has a multiplayer option. Despite allowing up to four players at once on many of the mini-games, though, it is hard to imagine anyone liking this game well enough to want to recommend it to their friends.
While specific control schemes vary from minigame to minigame, the brunt of Wonder World's action is controlled via hand motions with the Wii Remote and Nunchuk attachment. Button pressing is minimal except where it makes sense (as in the shooting gallery games). Games range from the merely uninspired (shooting) to the dull (magnetic fishing), annoying (various whack-a-mole clones) and downright irritating (a timed sliding-puzzle game).
The controls are intuitive about three-fourths of the time, but occasionally they defy all logic (move a cursor with the Nunchuk's D-stick and then make a swinging motion with the Wii Remote?). The problem is compounded by the fact that during free play, it is impossible to access a guide on how to play the game--that option is only available in story mode, for some reason. It seems that Majesco and Coyote Console (the developers) somehow assumed players would be so hooked on Wonder World Amusement Park that they'd learn all the games from Story mode as soon as the games were unlocked, and fall so much in love that they'd never forget.
The last feature of Wonder World Amusement Park to note is the ability to unlock amusement park rides for each of the five themed areas. Predictably, this is done by racking up tickets. The rides are a yawn. They're only barely interactive, so riding one is essentially like watching a poorly rendered CG movie of a ride--not exactly a rich gameplay experience. When the loftiest goal a video game has to offer is a chance to not have to actually play that game for a couple of minutes, it's a good sign that the title is probably not very good... and Wonder World Amusement Park, sure enough, is not very good.
The visual presentation of Wonder World Amusement Park smacks of a four-year-old budget PC title for children, which is probably where this game began its conceptual life. The graphics are smooth and 3D, but they have a sort of rounded, generic quality to them that makes them uninspiring and uninteresting in all instances. A lot of graphical corners were cut to get this game to production, most notably the fact that neither the player's character nor her requisite creepy carnie sidekick are ever actually seen walking around, despite other patrons of the park milling about nearby.
As previously noted, this raises a question about the custom character-editing tool, namely: why bother? The main characters (such as they are) of this game might be animated in 3D, but they're functionally no different than still shots of characters. When they appear, they're just standing still, the carnie with his or her arms waving, and the player's character doing absolutely nothing. Navigation around the amusement park is done by swiveling a high camera around to look at the games, while the player's character stands like a statue in the very center of the park grounds, her back to the player. In fact, players will see more of the carnies, and the creepy clown at one of the ticket exchange booths, than their own character. The few anemic special effects are not enough to save Wonder World Amusement Park's mini-games from being nearly indistinguishable from the sort of drivel seen on those touch-screen mini-arcade consoles in truck stops and dive bars across America.
In my rough estimation, Wonder World Amusement Park has less than 20 songs in its soundtrack, so players who don't like a particular tune are out of luck. Each of the five zones has a map theme and a game theme. In addition there is the main menu screen music, and a tune that plays upon completion of a minigame. There may be a couple more songs as well, but in general, players will be hearing the same two songs over and over again in each zone they choose to engage.
The most annoying aspect of the music is the game completion song, which is exactly the same whether a player beats the high score for that game, just does well enough to win tickets, or fails utterly (this last option is the best fit for the minor tone of the music).
There is no voice acting. Sound effects are few and far between, well below even the lax standards of most budget titles: most games have only two or three stock effects. Again, the shoddiness with which Wonder World Amusement Park was cobbled together is evident in every aspect of its production.
At first glance, even with nothing to recommend it otherwise, the sheer variety of mini-games seems like it might make for a decent budget deal. However, the truth is that most of Wonder World Amusement Park's games are not available to play without jumping through the game's hoops. Furthermore, many of the games are almost identical, having only the tiniest variation from one another. In one area, for example, playing whack-a-mole requires players to swing the Wii Remote down, while another area has the exact same game with different graphics and a different hand motion (jabbing towards the screen) masquerading as a separate game.
Last but not least, the thirty or so games Wonder World Amusement Park offers really don't stack up to the amount of different things to do in such micro-game titles as WarioWare, and are really not nearly as varied (and certainly not as enjoyable) as those found in better party games like Mario Party 5. A years-old game for Nintendo's now-defunct GameCube console has more to recommend it, even in direct modern-day comparison, than this awful, no-fun excuse for a party game. And did I mention the creepy clowns? At $29.99 to $39.99 for a new copy as of this writing, the game isn't even close to being a worthwhile purchase.
As happens with any popular console, the number of really mediocre titles being released for the Wii only continues to grow. Since the Wii is expanding into non-traditional markets, a lot of developers seem interested in jumping on the gravy train and getting a slice of the profits in return. Sometimes, as with games like Zack and Wiki, or the stellar WiiWare title LostWinds, good things come of this convergence of interests.
Most of the time, however, the cluttered Wii games market looks a lot like the PC section of a big game store: a handful of prominently displayed AAA titles, a smattering of decent games below that, and a bunch of overflowing bargain bins. The main difference thus far is that bargain-bin PC games generally run between $5.00 and $15.00, while lumbering Wii failures like Wonder World Amusement Park continue to sell for more than twice what they probably should.
As the glut of new consumers begins to wise up to the ways of the gaming world and the profit potential for a critically panned game starts dropping, such games will likely fade out a little bit. For now, keep checking reviews and making informed decisions about the games you purchase--or you may well end up throwing away $30.00 of hard-earned money on a game like Wonder World Amusement Park, and that would be a shame.