Tuesday 28 Jul 2009

The Wii has entirely new genres of games. For example, there’s the mini-game collection that involves swinging the Wii Remote like a bat genre. There’s also the mini-game collection that involves swinging the Wii Remote like you’re throwing a ball genre. Big Family Games falls in the latter genre.

There are 24 games in Big Family Games, but just about all of them are variants of “throw something at something using an underarm throw.” None of them are remotely as entertaining as Wii Sports Bowling. There’s lawn darts, where you throw a dart at a big target; horseshoes, where you throw a horseshoe at a stick; bocce, where you throw a ball at another ball like in bowls; basketball, where you throw a ball at a hoop, and shuffleboard, where you push a puck to get it to land in a certain spot to score points. Each of these five games has variants which are counted as different games. Lawn darts, for example, has Dartball where you throw darts at a swinging target, and Waterdarts where you throw the dart at a target in a pool instead of on the lawn. These 15 games are the only ones available in single player, while the other 9 only show in multiplayer – I guess because the AI was harder to make for them.

Cool characters, ok locations, repetitive gameplay

Each game takes place in a reasonably detailed and colourful location (albeit with very basic graphics) that looks like a place where kids would play these sorts of games in real life. The characters you play with are also decent – you can customize your character’s clothes, hair, sunglasses and the like, and as you play you unlock different shoes or pants. For each single player game there is a different opponent and they have varying personalities – some are ultra-competitive and cough to put you off, while others clap when you do well. These are nice touches.

The problem with the single player games is that they feel like 15 variations of throwing. The motion you make is the same for every game – hold B down, make an under-arm throwing motion and let go of B to throw. The strength of your throw, the angle you let go at and the rotation of the Wii Remote all factor in to the arc of your throw and affect the results. It doesn’t feel as polished or accurate as Wii Bowling, but it isn’t bad in that it sort of does what I expect some of the time. In games that require supreme accuracy, such as Horseshoes, I quickly became frustrated because I couldn’t get the horseshoe to hit the stick, while in others like Dartball, which only needs rough accuracy and reasonable timing, I cruised to maximum points. The other problem is that the games are just not interesting enough – 15 variations of throwing something at something becomes a tad boring after game 5. Some are better than others, and I would prefer that the better ones were developed into a fuller game (like Wii Sports Bowling) rather than having a breadth of simple games.

The less said about the music the better. But in the interests of informing the prospective buyer – the music is incredibly repetitive: infinite repeat is quite accurate, and the length of music repeated is only a few bars. I would recommend turning the music off, which fortunately you can do.

Multiplayer games are a little more fun

The multiplayer games fare very slightly better than the single player in fun levels, and only because of the interaction factor when four players are playing at once. None are going to last much longer than 10 minutes each in one stint – there’s not enough depth to any for that. RC Planes and Water Wars are the two that provided the most interest. In RC Planes you fly a small plane over a pool and drop firecrackers on the ships scattered around the pool. The controls for it don’t make use of the remote – you use your nunchuk thumbstick to control the plane – but they work quite well. In Water Wars you run around with a water gun and try to soak your opponents. This is probably the most full-featured game in the set – you can duck to avoid shots, you have to refill your water at the troughs, you can throw water balloons and you have to shake your Wii Remote to charge up the power of the water gun. As a four player game this is not bad, although it still pales in comparison to any of the games in Nintendo’s Wii Play, a game often accused of being light on content.

Big Family Games is not a game that will keep a single player entertained for more than an hour or two, and at that you won’t be particularly entertained. If there are three or four willing players you might enjoy passing some time with it – the games are very easy to get into. The game is clearly aimed at children, with the in-game characters being children and the scenarios being just those that children play in (hitting a tennis ball against the garage wall, playing lawn darts in the back garden.) This is not a bad thing, but I’m sure most kids would enjoy something like Mario Party or even Wii Sports or Wii Play more. Of course if you’re tired of those and still want to play mini-games with a few friends then you could do worse than Big Family Games. You could also do a lot better I’m sure – or should I say THQ could do a lot better.

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Contributor:	Peter

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