The Ubidays 2008 live webcast happened mere hours ago, bringing with it tidbits, trailers, and a few live demonstrations of Ubisoft’s upcoming line. Among the more unique presentations was a live demo of Raving Rabbids TV Party, the recently-announced next installment of Ubisoft’s humor-driven mini-game series. Ubisoft’s Adrian Lacey took the stage and enthusiastically narrated a hands-on (and other-parts-on) demo of the new “game you can play with your ass.”
As promised by earlier revelations, Raving Rabbids TV Party will make liberal use of the Wii Balance Board for several of its games, several of which are controlled by seating oneself upon the peripheral and leaning one’s butt back and forth. The mini-game on display was “Beestie Boarding,” in which the franchise’s iconic psychotics had taken over an X-Treme Sports channel, and were racing down snowy slopes on the backs of wildebeests. As such, a player would steer his or her mount by leaning from side to side, or leaning back to accelerate. Then, when sliding off one of the course’s many ramps, the Wiimote and Nunchuk came into play, following on-screen QTE prompts to execute various tricks. Lacey promised a variety of difficulty would be available; players would start on easy courses and then be allowed onto the “black diamond” runs with experience. The game’s typical humor seemed quite intact — a mix of 2D and 3D animation saw the Rabbids introducing the activity, which naturally concluded with the Rabbid/Wildebeest team leaping off a ramp and plowing through the window of an inconveniently-placed chalet.
From there, Lacey promised the game would also retain its party-game possibilities, including four-player simultaneous games, and up to eight-player round-robin party modes. To demonstrate, the Ubisoft team engaged in a round of “Dancing with Dweebs,” a four-player mini-game centered around the Rabbids’ love of music. The balance board was not used for this game; instead, four players used the Wiimotes and Nunchuks to execute timed dance moves to the beat of Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.” Every Raving Rabbids game thus far has had a dance game, but this one seemed to change up the formula from the others’ “Shake the Wiimote on the beat” gameplay. The players had to mimic the on-screen moves of an animated stick figure, swaying their hands from side to side, and pulling off the Saturday Night Fever point-in-the-air with alarming frequency. As they danced, a panel of four Rabbid judges would leap out of their seats with growing (or waning) enthusiasm, based on their performance.
I’ve always found the Raving Rabbids games hilarious, and certainly fun to play, but I worry about attempting to include the balance board in a party game. In cases where players will be taking turns on the board (since I highly doubt Ubisoft expects any household to have more than one), it seems like the game would get bogged down with delays while the peripheral calibrates itself over and over again to varying weights of players’ asses. Hopefully this is an issue Ubisoft will address before the game’s as-yet-unknown launch date.
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July 16th, 2008 at 3:54 pm
[...] got to go hands-on (though not ass-on) with Raving Rabbids TV Party on the show floor of E3 2008. A few of the title’s TV-themed [...]
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