The dawn of a promising new WiiWare franchise
Pearl Harbor Trilogy - 1941: Red Sun Rising, one of the most anticipated WiiWare games of the year, wowed observers with screenshots that seemed far too impressive to be possible in a downloadable Wii title. In a field mostly populated by mini-game collections with simplistic graphics, Pearl Harbor...
Party pooper
Enjoy Gaming’s Cruise Party is a collection of four gambling games: video poker, blackjack, roulette and slots. In Video Poker, each player’s five-card hand is visible to all, with the exception of the Bank’s hand, of which you are only privy to one card. Your one and only goal is to wager whether your hand will be better than the Bank’s. The game is nice enough to tell you..
WiiWare gets pushed to the limit in this fun 3D platformer
It’s clear that Shin’en Multimedia knows their way around WiiWare. After delivering the lovely Art of Balance, the German studio’s follow-up is a platformer with unparallelled looks on the service. Jett Rocket looks excellent, yes, and we’re happy to say that it plays well too and...
The drunker you are, the better.
Nothing compliments a good buzz like tossing tiny ping pong balls into a group of plastic cups. In fact, Beer Pong has become quite the popular party game over the years, so much so that JV Games released their own version of the game for the WiiWare service back in 2008. Despite receiving extremely low review scores...
A beary good game
We've already seen the first Tales of Bearsworth Mansion release make use of a tower defence-style gameplay mechanic, but now Square-Enix is mixing things up a bit with Tales of Bearsworth Manor: Puzzling Pages, the second game in the series and a game that uses the same bear-tossing element of the first release but takes things into a more puzzle-oriented direction. The main goal..
A bear-knuckle ball
For anyone that's played video games for an extended span of time, the name Square-Enix has long been synonymous with epic role-playing adventures and in-depth strategy battles. So when you see the company release a rather offbeat spooky-themed storybook adventure on WiiWare, your first reaction is likely one of bewilderment. But with the release of Tales of Bearsworth Mansion:..
Swap 'til you drop
If you've gone anywhere near an electronic device capable of playing games in the past decade, odds are you've heard of PopCap's addictive puzzle series Bejeweled. This WiiWare release of the sequel marks the developer's first foray onto a Nintendo home console and is a worthy version, but it doesn't bring a lot new to the table...
A good find
Hidden object puzzles are big money these days, drawing in unsuspecting players with tales of relaxing but addictive gameplay. WiiWare has already seen the disappointing "Aha! I Found It!" Hidden Object Game but now Konami is here with a new challenger, Yard Sale Hidden Treasures: Sunnyville, and it's got a few tricks up its sleeve. Set in a fictional US town populated by..
Jack-of-all-trades, master of none
Perhaps better named, “Bowling Alley Sports”, Arcade Sports is a collection featuring pool, air hockey, and of course bowling. All of these games are available elsewhere on your Wii, but here you can get all three for one download. We’ve seen plenty of minigame collections on the Wii before, but is this latest bargain-buy just too good to be true? The game..
Buzz kill
With a few exceptions – Excitebike: World Rally and Heracles: Chariot Racing chief among them – WiiWare is pretty thin on family-friendly, well-received racing titles, so the thinking behind Mister Bumblebee Racing Champion is clear. Sadly, the best thing about this game is likely to be its title. The key twist here is that all the characters fly rather than stick to a track. Your..
Hook, line and stinker
Reel Fishing Challenge II is, by definition, the follow-up to Reel Fishing Challenge that hit WiiWare last year and as such is basically just more of the same. Fans of staring at full-motion video backgrounds and boring, lame fishing mechanics, rejoice! Everything about it just feels lazy, and the fact that it's essentially a rehash of a PlayStation One game doesn't help..
A discgrace
Let's get this out of the way immediately: Zoo Disc Golf is a game that should not be played by anyone under any circumstances. Zoo animals playing disc golf may sound like a pretty awesome idea, but Zoo Disc Golf is a mess from top to bottom. It takes your ten dollars, chews it up, regurgitates it and spits back at you one of the worst WiiWare games to date. Disc golf is essentially..
Even Steven
The idea of a boy capable of transforming into wildly different forms, each with special abilities, is ideal fodder for game design: Kid Chameleon did it nearly twenty years ago, but Ben 10 Alien Force: Rise of Hex revives the template with a few welcome tweaks. In case you’re unfamiliar with the titular hero, Ben Tennyson possesses a magical device known as the Omnitrix that allows..
Dam good
Robocalypse: Beaver Defense has all the red flags of a stinker: a "crude humour" warning right when you boot up, a cartoony theme possibly chosen to draw in unsuspecting youths and a genre in which it's easy to cut corners. You might want to think twice before passing this one up, however, as this dam's actually quite sturdy. The genre is tower defence – in other words, you..
Tentacular spectacular
The Art Style series certainly stands out as one of the safer bets in Nintendo's stable of downloadable software. These are puzzle games with a minimalist aesthetic and focus on simple gameplay; it's like the Tate Modern of gaming only with content and a price point that's accessible by everyone. Though given an unfortunate...
Bad mojo
Developed by Exkee, the guys behind the rather average ColorZ, Voodoo Dice is a puzzle game in which you control a large yellow die, attempting to reach the end of every stage in order to earn gemstones used to proceed further into the game. Of course, it's not a matter of simply rolling over to the exit: each level has various dice-related puzzles to solve before a way out is opened. Each..
Fun with viruses that doesn't involve Mario or vomiting
Viral Survival is a compilation of five single-player arcade games with a loose petri dish theme tying them together. In each game you control a little chunk of DNA (that looks an awful lot like a magnifying glass) as you zip, wind, shoot and jump your way to a top score, which is then automatically uploaded to online leaderboards. Movement is..
The meerkat sim you've been waiting for?
Meerkats have long suffered the reputation of being lazy sods who just lay around in the jungles of Africa eating bugs all day thanks to a certain film from a certain company with a certain round-eared mascot. Of course people who actually have an interest in wildlife (and form their impressions of the world from something other than dubious animated..
Another porting disaster
WiiWare has already seen a few ports of iPhone games, but this one in particular has to take the cake as the laziest of all. A shooting gallery game based around the legend of Robin Hood, you must protect the people of Nottingham from the seemingly endless hordes of knights running around. As this is a Wii game we're talking about, this is obviously done by aiming using the..
Racing takes a puzzling turn
After a year-long DSiWare detour, the Art Style series has returned to WiiWare with one of the series' most action-oriented entries so far. It may look like a simple racer, but as the Art Style series has proven time and time again that looks can be deceiving. light trax is an updated version of the Japan-only bit Generations game dotstream. On the surface it seems like..
