Review: Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party (Wii)

Mon, Nov 24, 2008

Ubisoft told us, when they announced Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party -- and when we got to try it out, back at E3 -- that it would be the first game you could play with your butt. They did not tell us, however, that the Wii Balance Board integration might include playing it with other parts, too. You see, there's one mini-game in TV Party where the interface involves the player guiding a stream of brightly colored liquid, from a point somewhere below the screen, onto various items on the playing field -- and the stream is guided by standing on the balance board, shifting your weight and swiveling your hips to and fro. What the hell, Ubisoft.

Motion-controlled, mini-game-driven party titles for the Wii are certainly nothing new, but the Raving Rabbids series carries a special place in many gamers' hearts, due in large part to its outstanding art design and oddball humor. Three games into the series, gamers can rest assured that TV Party keeps the aesthetic intact, with plenty of laugh-inducing cutscenes and interstitial animations, including all of the slapstick comedy and bizarre behavior of the titular bunnies, and plenty of their trademark screaming.

If anything, the animation and art quality have greatly improved in TV Party. In addition to the in-game movements of the bunnies, sprinkled liberally throughout the game are 2D animations featuring the bunnies in a handful of television-themed lead-ins and commercials. These 2D inclusions are extremely colorful and fluid, making fantastic use of the kind of concepts that won the Rabbids team a spot in the Into the Pixel collection.

The humor, too, is still fresh and hysterical: The Rabbids spend all of TV Party poking fun at pop culture and committing random acts of extreme violence, and each moment is excellently realized. Since their debut two years ago, the Rabbids have not grown stale to me as characters; I could keep on watching their short cartoons and enjoying their antics indefinitely.

Of course, as improved as the visual design may be in TV Party, when the humor has passed, a "party" mini-game collection will live or die based on the quality of its gameplay and social accessibility. On this front, TV Party brings a number of new features to the table, adding several innovations that the series has not seen before, including the aforementioned Wii Balance Board integration, and the ability to play with 8 players. Sadly, though the game may be praised for the new ideas it has tried, the new features flop about as often as they shine, making TV Party merely comparable to its predecessors -- no worse, certainly, but no better, either.

Topping the list of TV Party's new features in the game's hype has been the Wii Balance Board integration -- that is to say, the much-touted ability to play the game with your butt -- and TV Party delivers on this promise in a big way. A handful of mini-games can be played with the Balance Board, using it as a surrogate surfboard, aerobics pad, gas pedal, or rump-friendly sled. The board-based mini-games, like all Raving Rabbids entries, are quite amusing, and the variety certainly makes the board a novel feature. Unfortunately, however, after a few playthroughs, one comes to realize that's all the feature really is: a novelty. Under most circumstances, in fact, it will detract from your game experience.

It's unfortunate, but the prediction I made back at E3 was exactly right: "I think the Balance Board games are neat, but if I’m playing a party game, I want to get some other folks involved." The balance board games are fun, in fact -- Ubisoft's creative uses for the human body as a gaming peripheral are executed quite well. Unfortunately, the balance board is very much a one-player-only accessory, and as such, if you're using the balance board, only one person gets to play, which does not lend itself well to the multiplayer mayhem that a party game is meant to involve. Sure, the other players get the opportunity to interact slightly from the sidelines, occasionally pelting the screen with visual blockers, or the like, but the action is focused on just one player at a time. What's more, since these games can only accomodate one player, that means you're going to have to repeat the game for every player in your group -- and with some of the games lasting upwards of 3 minutes per player, this will quickly grind the short-attention-span-fueled hilarity to a halt.

Every game can be played in single-player mode, of course, but while this solves the balance board slowdown problem experienced in group play, TV Party replaces it with a new problem. Playing through the single-player mode allows one to enjoy the bunnies' lunacy without needing friends, but since you no longer have the competition of your fellow players, the game is re-oriented to be a score-based affair. Not only can players submit their top performances to an online leaderboard, but in order to advance through the single-player game at all, a minimum score needs to be achieved in any given game. Needless to say, once you've had your fun flailing about on the balance board, you're going to want to use the Wiimote for better, tighter control, if you're going to be chasing those high scores. Too slow for party play and too big a handicap for competitive play -- the balance board is fun to try once or twice, but cannot sustain itself as a gameplay mechanic.

Speaking of things that are too slow for party play, TV Party presents the option to include up to 8 players in a party game, using controller-swapping and randomly-assigned opponents to keep everyone involved. In theory, it's great; a laughter-intensive evening of Rabbids-brand insanity sounds like a great fun when you drop 7 friends into the mix. In practice, however, this feature quickly degenerates into a repetitive, aggravating, patience-testing mess, quickly draining the enthusiasm from every player in the room. Just as it's a bad idea to ask four players to spend their party game patiently taking turns on a single balance board, it's a bad idea to try and manage the same task with eight people and four Wiimotes.

We sampled this feature under what ought to have been ideal circumstances: Eight players, four Wiimotes and Nunchuks, plenty of playing space, and lots of drinks. Everything started out great -- the entire group was laughing and enjoying themselves, calling "dibs" on their favorite player color, and sharing a good laugh over the bunnies' on-screen silliness as we picked our first game: Dancing in time with Kool & the Gang's "Jungle Boogie."

It must be said that the dancing game, a long-time staple of the Raving Rabbids series, has been vastly improved for TV Party. Rather than just snapping the Wiimote and Nunchuk up and down to the beat, TV Party prompts you to do full dance moves, tracking as you wave your hands in the air, twirl your arms, and strike poses from Saturday Night Fever. Over the course of the full three-minute song, the room was filled with awkward dancing and laughter from the gallery, and when it was all over, everybody was enjoying themselves. "That was great!" "Did you see, he was really getting into it over there!" "Well, that's why his score is the highest." "I thought you were about to punch me in the head with that arm point!" Then, the game prompted us to swap the controllers over to the four players who hadn't been dancing -- and prepared to start the song over again.

In a single instant, the mood in the room turned ugly, and laughter turned to jeers and grumbling. "What?! We have to sit through that whole song again?" "Are you kidding me? Find a way to skip it." "They're not going to give us a different song? I don't want to do that again." "From now on, nobody pick the dancing game! Nobody pick it!" Party games are amusing because they continually change up the flow of what is happening, and asking a group of impulsive, impatient gamers to repeat five minutes of gameplay is not a good way to keep them amused. TV Party deserves credit for trying to get more players involved in the game, but the ideal number is four: Nobody wants to repeat every game twice, especially when the games can last upwards of 5 minutes each -- and if you so much as think of trying to pick a balance board game, forcing your group to repeat it eight times in a row, you're asking to be smacked.

Ultimately, that same flaw -- "I'm having fun but this is getting old" -- seems to be TV Party's greatest failing. It's as if Ubisoft felt the need to show that Raving Rabbids was growing as a series, so they dropped in many more features, and deeper, more involving games. Somewhere along the lines, though, somebody seems to have misplaced the "mini" portion of mini-games. What had previously been 1-2 minute affairs in the series' prior entries is now stretching into 4-5 minute experiences, keeping players in the games longer than they care to wait around. Not all of the mini-games are guilty of this; TV Party contains a few gems, such as the runway photo game, the lawnmower-helicopter game, and the deodorant/ear-cleaning game (trust me), which are ideal in length and hilarious in execution. However, a great deal of the offerings in TV Party could be greatly improved by being shortened, in particular, the "shooting gallery" games, the "lotto jackpot" platformers, and nearly everything music-based. All of these were games where our enthusiasm started high, and ended low. "Ha, that was great -- wait, it's still going?"

Still, this is not a problem unique to TV Party; many such party games have the ability to overstay their welcome once the initial novelty has worn off. I can recall many occasions playing Mario Party or Scene It, in which my group's high spirits were dashed by the game announcing that we had merely reached the halfway point. On this point, however, we must give credit to TV Party for including an absolute lifesaver of a feature: the game timer. Most party games conduct their game as a function of how many rounds you've played, running things in a perfectly static "15 mini-games and you're done" way. TV Party, on the other hand, allows you to select a game length before you begin, timing a game in 20-minute increments. If you've set a game for 40 minutes, and a mini-game happens to carry you past that limit, it doesn't matter if that's only the fourth game you've played -- it'll be your last. For crowds who like party games but often worry that they'll wind up stuck playing all night to see the game to its conclusion, this function is absolutely perfect, and Ubisoft deserves high praise for including it.

In the end, TV Party's hits and misses do a pretty good job of canceling each other out. The Rabbids are still riding high in terms of their humor and character, and the game stands strong as a decent collection of mini-games, right on par with the last couple of games. Still, sometimes "par" is still fun. The game is fun, definitely, and if you don't smile at least once while playing it, you may not actually have a soul. But at the end of the game, playing with your butt isn't going to revolutionize party gaming as we know it, and if you're waiting for a great 8-player game, your wait isn't quite over yet.

Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party is available now on the Nintendo Wii and Nintendo DS.