Nuts to that. You deserve better. You deserve not to be patronized with a list of supposedly putrid games that are merely below average. Because I love you all, I've hunted down and played as many Wii games as I could find over the last year, so that I could definitively report that the game with the gingerbread ninja on the cover is not very good.
What follows are the five worst games to be released for the Nintendo Wii in 2007. For real, this time. Believe nothing else.
5. Haneru no Tobira Wii: Girigirissu
We live in a bountiful time where just about anything can make it over from Japan and be localized for North American audiences. We are past the dark days which saw hundreds of potential classics go untranslated, and we are now assured English versions of enduring classics like Escape from Bug Island mere months after their original Japanese release.
Escape from Bug Island is not anywhere close to being in this list's league. It doesn't live on the same block, continent, or hemisphere as these games. Escape from Bug Island lives somewhere in Kansas. These games live underneath the moon's surface, rotting its core from within. The difference between Bug Island and something like, say, Haneru no Tobira Wii: Girigirissu, is that at least one person in charge of Eidos' money thought that the crappy but not horrible Escape from Bug Island was worthy of localization and marketing dollars.
I know very little about Haneru no Tobira Wii: Girigirissu, other than the fact that it's utterly terrifying. It's also apparently based off of a Japanese TV show. My God, look at those character models. The game is filled with horrible human-faced insects who do all sorts of terrible things to one another, seemingly without rhyme or reason. Just think -- this is shown on Japanese television with real live actors. Try to hold together a mental image, I dare you.
The gameplay itself is the worst part, amazingly enough. It's a minigame compilation that features only three minigames. No, really. Three. Using simple Wii Remote motions, you can pogo onto a platform, blow out birthday cake candles, or hop along a log. That's it. I tried to find more, believe me. I got good enough at the existing minigames to pass them consistently, but no more ever unlocked. You're only offered the choice of making the three games harder and harder until they become impossibly difficult and place you at risk of serious injury from shaking the Wii Remote so violently.
Then, once you lose, this happens.
4. Ninjabread Man
Ninjabread Man deserves special mention for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Being Totally Depressing. Oh, I was excited about this one, believe me. The concept of warm pastry as ninja is the kind of thing that inspires a moment of quiet awe. Later, I was delighted to find out that Ninjabread Man was a Wii port of a budget-priced PS2 game that was so bad, it was only released in Europe. And Europe has extremely high tolerance for crappy games. Look, here's one. See? They play stuff like this all the time. Animal Soccer World actually outsold Gears of War by a margin of three to one over there.
My mind reeled at the possibilities. Would there be obnoxious voice acting? Poorly written dialogue? Lots of food puns about how Ninjabread Man was going to bake everyone's buns? Would his catchphrase be "Oh, gingerSNAP?" The possibilities sent me giggling to sleep every night for weeks in an extended Bad Games Christmas Eve.
Then I played it.
And yeah, it's bad. It's probably worse than you could even imagine. The camera controls are garbage, there's cheap hits everywhere, and gameplay boils down to simple finding and fetching, with cumbersome combat throughout. Worse, there's only three levels, so you can be done with it in about an hour or so if you can make yourself play through it. Oh, and the game expects you to jump by shaking the Nunchuk.
Ninjabread Man isn't just disappointing for its gameplay, though, which I fully expected (and hoped) to be completely horrible. It's horrible all right, and easily fits in among the year's worst Wii games, but it's all a hollow kind of bad. This isn't the kind of bad game that plays like it was programmed by someone who was honestly trying their best and failed miserably. This is a cynical, soulless exercise that distills all of the mechanics of a bad game into one package, but duplicates none of the charm. This is a bad game made by a machine that makes bad games, and is sprayed in bad game pesticide before it's shipped to stores, to ensure that it's as flavorless and as uninteresting as possible so that no one could ever possibly enjoy it.
Ninjabread Man himself might as well not be made of gingerbread. There's barely anything ninja-like about him. He has no dialogue. There's no attempt made to spice up the gameplay or to make it interesting. It should be sold in a plain white plastic bag with big black lettering on it that says "GENERIC VIDEO GAME." Ninjabread Man is bad, but not in any way that might make you want to play it. It's just bad.
3. The Racing Genre: Mini Xtreme Wii Offroad Editio'n
As a Wii owner, you've probably figured out gaming's best-kept secret by now: it's easier to make a racing game than a game of any other genre. Sure, a racer can take a lot of effort to develop if you want to make it worth playing, but you can't crap out 20 games a month if you do that. It's like Nintendo patented the concept of a good Wii racing game after releasing Excite Truck, and banned third parties from making anything even remotely as good.
Otherwise, it's really hard to explain why the racing genre on the Wii is so uniformly terrible. These games have to be bad on purpose. How can you mess up a game where you drive cars? Back when the primitive cave people of the 1970s were playing Pong and eating dirt because they didn't know any better, I bet you anything that their first post-Pong goal was to make a game about driving cars.
So why, after millions of years of progress, do we have to play games like Mini Desktop Racing, Indianapolis 500 Legends, Kawasaki Quad Bikes, Classic British Motor Racing, Cruis'n, Myth Makers: Super Kart GP, Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing, and Offroad Extreme Special Edition?
And how can we ever be expected to choose between Monster Trux: Arenas or its sequel Monster Trux: Offroad, which were released within three months of each other?
And why would anyone want to buy Rig Racer 2 when it's billed as the unofficial sequel to the infamously unfinished PC travesty Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? Who the hell would make a sequel to Big Rigs? Whose state-appointed guardian allowed this to happen?
Cruis'n is at least worth playing because of its unashamed usage of full-motion video and the fact that it helpfully screams "NITROUS!" at you every time you use a speed boost. Otherwise, no. Don't go near any of this stuff. These games are not entertaining in any way, and no man, woman, or child will forgive you if you give them a Wii racing game as a present. Someone's tax dollars will eventually be spent on cleaning up this mess, and it sure as hell better not be mine.
2. Balls of Fury
Balls of Fury is a joy to play. It brings me the kind of happiness that makes me glad that I actively seek out and play bad games. For every 50 Ninjabread Men, there is one Balls of Fury. It makes my search worthwhile, and it gives my life meaning and purpose.
Like the movie of the same name, Balls of Fury is about ping pong. You play as some guy who rises up the ranks in an underground table tennis world tour, and it's all impossibly unfunny. Also, the last boss is Christopher Walken. Seriously!
This game, it's...it's beautiful. Supposedly, you're able to swing the Wii Remote in a number of ways to use a variety of shots against your opponent. If you try this, though, you will lose. Your movements do not sync up with your on-screen player in the least. He'll take a swing a good two seconds after you wave the Wii Remote, and he'll miss the ball every time.
The solution? Swing the Wii Remote around constantly. You'll be unstoppable. You can beat every opponent on your first try like this. Half an hour later, you'll have finished the game. The only other button you need to worry about -- and it's an important one -- is the taunt button, which makes your character say one (and only one) phrase: "Tell your grandma to pull the car around." This is such an awesome non-sequitur that you'll want to use it at least 20 times per match, and it somehow gets funnier every time you do it. By the time you get to the last stage and repeatedly inform Christopher Walken that he should tell his grandmother to pull her car around, you might be convinced that Balls of Fury is the best game you've ever played.
It's not, though. Ohhhh no. Let's not go that far. It's a seagull-swarmed garbage barge, make no mistake. The controls don't work at all, the cutscenes explain away the entire movie through text and still screens (hell of Game Boy Advance styles), and the replays were obviously designed as an afterthought, since the ball hovers an inch away from your player's grip before every shot and behaves with completely different physics than it does during the actual match.
Technically, Balls of Fury is the worst game released for the Wii so far. The only catch is that after my roommate played through it once, his Wii refused to recognize it as a game disc, and never booted it up ever again, even after dozens of tries. Since Balls of Fury was unusually kind enough to kill itself after one play-through, I'm knocking it down to second place. You have to admire the fact that a game can be so bad that it made someone's Wii say, "No. Get that thing away from me. I know what this is, and I'm not playing it."
1. Alvin and the Chipmunks
Alvin and the Chipmunks serves as a touching retrospective of everything that is wrong with the Wii so far. Like Girigirissu, it will scare your face off. Like Balls of Fury, it's licensed and horrible. What could possibly make this marriage made in hell even worse? Why, a selection of popular songs from the '80s and '90s as performed by Alvin and the Chipmunks, of course.
A lot of little things work together in devilish concert to make Alvin and the Chipmunks the worst Wii game of 2007. It's not so much the fact that I want to scream in terror every time Simon does The Robot up on stage. It's not the fact that Jason Lee blatantly rushes through his lines in the cutscenes and actually laughs at the player during the tutorial, either. It's not even so much the gameplay that makes it all so bad. It's a rhythm game that plays like Samba de Amigo, except the notes hardly ever sync up to the music and it's impossible to maintain a combo since every time you shake the Wii Remote or Nunchuk it registers several misses in a row immediately afterward.
No, what makes Alvin and the Chipmunks the worst Wii game of the year is its music. Do you remember that song "Everything You Want", from that one band who never did anything else? Remember how its lyrics are an anthem to the kind of passive-aggressive, intolerably whiny, self-described "nice guy" who thinks that girls don't like him because all women are idiots and that they only like men who are mean to them? You know, "I say all the right things / at exactly the right time / but I mean nothing to you / and you don't know why?" Remember how it's the worst thing that's ever happened to music?
Great! Now imagine that it's sung by chipmunks.
The music may be the worst part, but the game's thorough and consistent badness eventually gels together as a surreal fantasy. One stage is described as a crowded mall full of thousands of people, but thanks to the fact that thousands of people would take time and effort to render, the level is eerily deserted of all non-chipmunk life. Your mind wanders as you shake the Wii Remote along to R.E.M.'s Shiny Happy People, and you mentally begin to fill in the blanks. Why is the mall totally empty? Is Dave the last survivor of the apocalypse? Is he keeping himself sane in this lonely, barren world by imagining a band of chipmunks who sing popular radio hits? What will happen to him when he reaches the end of the tour? Will reality fold in upon itself?
The punchline is that there's no ending. After teasing you with multiple stages and story sequences, you're kicked back to the main menu after you beat the last song. Screw you, Alvin.
