Party Game Sundays: Our House:Party!

When I heard that Landers had purchased a game that was Home Depot themed I didn't believe him. Then I actually saw the game, and immediately thought that it would be horrible. Landers on the other hand had faith that it would be enjoyable. Somehow he was actually right and in a crazy turn of events Our House Party was a pretty fun game. Also, in case you were wondering it totally does play the song Our House by Crosby,Stills, and Nash during the intro...

The goal of the game is to make your house as dope as possible. Obviously you do that by playing mini-games. In the beginning you need to choose one of twelve home improvement projects to work on. Once that's decided the game throws you right into a Home Depot! In the store you can purchase tools in exchange for screws, which are the games currency. Each tool is a power-up for specific mini-games. I didn't find any of them helpful, so I tended to run my cart around the store and use it to block all the other players from buying things. It worked sometimes.

There's a game where all you do is smash things!

After the shopping portion the game moves you into a series of mini-games. Each home improvement project is made up of 2 to 5 themed mini-games. At the end of each project your rank determines how well it comes out. So if you come in first place when improving your lawn it looks amazing and is worth a butt-load of money, but if you come in fourth it looks like someone took a flamethrower to it. At the end of the game whichever player's house is worth the most money wins, or at least that's what I assume happens. When we were three projects away from finishing the game hard locked the Wii. It locked up so badly that we had to unplug the console, because it wouldn't turn off... It took us a long time to get to that point, so we decided not to go through it all again.

We didn't want to go through it again, but that doesn't mean that Our House Party isn't a fun game. The mini-games are actually pretty varied and control well. They were eventually repeating, but they were far enough apart that it didn't matter. I got to mow lawns, dig holes, and even tile floors! I still don't know how I should feel about enjoying a mini-game that had me tiling floors. Hell, even digging holes was fun. We had to dig our own hole, while shoveling the dirt into a different hole. What was cool was that every mini-game was conducive to sabotaging your opponents. This meant that we rarely focused on completing the tasks the game handed us, but instead messed with each other the entire time.

The mini-games are all about screwing with your opponents.

What I really don't understand is why Home Depot decided they needed their own video game. Nothing about this game made me think about Home Depot, except for the part where you needed to shop for tools inside of one. Some of the loading screens were flyers too, but that's really it. Kids are certainly the target audience for this and they don't tend to want to shop for tools. Kids also don't care about improving their homes for the most part. I know I've said it multiple times now, but the most puzzling part of the whole thing is that the game is actually well put together. Sure, the load times are a bit long, but it plays well and actually has a wide variety of activities. I wouldn't mind playing it again, once I get over the hard locking incident.

     -Manny

Party Game Sundays: Raving Rabbids TV Party

Somehow I missed all the Raving Rabbid games. I know that they began as a Rayman thing, but quickly spun out into their own wacky shenanigans. That was about all I knew about the Rabbids prior to this game, was that they were crazy. After playing I can safely say that my knowledge checks out. The Rabbids are totally crazy.

When we know that a party game is good we tend to hype it up to ourselves. This is mainly due to the fact that we play a bunch of garbage on Party Game Sundays. This led to me being a bit dissapointed by Raving Rabbids TV Party. It's a great selection of mini-games and most of them work well. None of them blew my mind or anything though, even the overall premise wasn't super funny.

Sure, rabbits in a wrestling ring. That sounds about right.

The Rabbids somehow got control of a TV studio and they're producing all kinds of weird programming. All of this programming is what you're playing in mini-game form. The TV analogy goes a level deeper, in that when a player is behind in a game they can activate an ad break. Whichever player does what the ad asks for first they'll get a boost to help them in the min-game. It's an interesting concept, but it really doesn't add anything to the overall experience. You're still playing a bunch of mini-games with weird loony rabbits.

I personally like rhythm mini-games and this game was chock full of them, perhaps a little too many of them. One had you dancing to licensed music by putting the Wii-mote out into certain hot dance positions. This is fun the first time, but when you see the game keep coming up in the list to choose from it gets a bit tiring. They have the same mini-game named different things for different musical tracks. The same thing goes for the other musical mini-game, which was essentially a crappy version of Guitar Hero. You just had to hit the button when an icon crossed the right area of the screen. It's impressive that Ubisoft got a whole bunch of licensed music, but it's less impressive that they didn't come up with more games to use that music in. Playing the exact same mini-games twelve or so times is dumb.

Yes, I did bust out some hot dance moves.

I specifically bring up the rhythm based games, because that's what I remember the most clearly. There were a ton more games however, and quite a bit of variation in those. One that didn't work so hot had you drawing lines and shapes with the wii-more in order to break through asteroids. It didn't work super well for me. Most of the time I would need to draw a straight line and the game wouldn't even be able to recognize it...

There were a lot of games that were compatible with the Wii balance board, but sadly we didn't have one. Without the balance board the games amounted to using the Wii-mote to steer some sort of vehicle. One of them had us snowboarding down a mountain weaving in-between flags. One of the weirder games had us dressing up the Rabbids to meet certain requirements. They didn't necessarily make sense, so it was kind of hard to determine how I was supposed to make a Hillbilly with a sense of style.

mmmhmmm

Overall the game was well put together and I think that if I was younger I would have liked the game a whole lot more. It has a manic feel to it, and the mini-games controlled in a manner that didn't make me want to smash everything. It was a cool game, so we might end up playing other games in the series at some point.

     -Manny

Party Game Sundays: King of Clubs

I promised that I'd eventually get around to writing about a god awful game, and today is that day. I have not been this distraught while playing a video game in a long time. I'm going to preface this by saying that Landers was advised that he could not return the game after he broke the shrink wrap. He purchased the miniature golf themed game King of Clubs at Gamestop for the incredible sum of $3. The employee on staff took it upon themselves to let him know that once the seal was broken he would no longer be able to get his $3 back. Much to my dismay the seal was broken, and I was forced to play King of Clubs.

This game has been in Landers' pile of games for many months now. Every Sunday when asked to choose a game I tried to put off King of Clubs. See, I don't find good golf games enjoyable, so playing an awful miniature golf game wasn't exactly on the top of my to do list. In an unsurprising turn of events the game upset me greatly.

If you ever see this cover, avoid it!

To start off there's a cinematic of these weirdos dressed in themed costumes. For some reason they're in a TV studio and it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The characters all have golf themed names like King Putt, which might be the best part of the game. I guess the costumes are themed along with each of the golf courses, but I don't know for sure since you need to unlock courses by playing the game. Hopefully I never have to find out what the other course themes are, but I can tell you that the first is prehistoric. There's a whole bunch of lava and dinosaurs.

Prior to starting the course you need to pick a character and buy equipment. I opted out of buying equipment, because I didn't care. However, you do have the option to buy various types of balls and clubs. For some reason you can also buy sound packs, which come into play while your opponents are playing. If you mash the B button sounds will play in an attempt to distract them. The catch is that it's not distracting at all... Luckily the distraction doesn't matter, because of the controls.

Look at the beautiful graphics!

The controls themselves are bullshit. You're forced to use a nunchuck, which I assumed would be used to position your golf swing. Instead what it does is control the camera in a completely useless fashion! You need to use the d-pad in order to position your shot. A colored line will sometimes appear coming off your club to show you the trajectory of your ball. I say sometimes, because the shot line would disappear at random. We would be playing and then all of a sudden none of us would be able to aim properly anymore with absolutely no indication as to why. 

When putting a power bar will appear, which is supposed to be controlled by swinging the Wii-remote like an actual golf club. That doesn't work, so I had to twist the Wii-remote in various ways to make my power increase. I can't tell you exactly how, because it was different almost every time. Once you do have the desired power you hold A and swing. Once again the swinging doesn't work as intended. Sometimes it was fine, other times I could flail the Wii-remote violently and have absolutely nothing happen.

Unsurprisingly it's hard to find pictures of this terrible game.

What really bothered me though was the complete lack of physics King of Clubs had on display. Say you hit a ball up a hill and it stops halfway. You'd expect it to roll back down, but not in this game! Instead it gets caught in the middle and goes nowhere. The lack of physics continues with just about every collision in the game. For some reason hitting walls and obstacles would vary between making the ball stop completely, or sending it off in a direction that makes no sense. 

I can't even make this post funny! It was just an awful golf game. It controlled poorly and made me want to cry a little bit. The course was only 9 holes, and we didn't even finish it! At some point the four of us playing just decided that we'd had enough and I shut the Wii off in despair. At least most of the games we play on Sundays are funny, but this was not one of them. I don't want to play King of Clubs ever again. Thinking about it makes me sad and angry. 

I leave you with this 4 star amazon review of the game.

"this i a fun game once you figure out the controles the instruction book does not explane the controles but once you figure them out this game is a blast"

     -Manny

Party Game Sundays: The Amazing Race

We've been sitting on The Amazing Race for months, because in order to properly play we needed four people. In case you've never seen the long running CBS reality show I'll explain it a bit for you. There are multiple teams of two, and their goal is to travel to various destinations around the globe. Each episode of the show is considered a "leg" of the race. So teams will travel to various places and compete in challenges. At the end of the leg the last team to arrive is eliminated. Sometimes it's more than one, but for the sake of this game it's only one at a time.

So, the game is kind of like that. You make a team of two and you compete in stupid mini-games, while ridiculous load times and stuttering happen. When we were playing I could hear the Wii reading the disc very loudly. It was even happening when nothing was really going on. There are short vignettes where the host of the show will have some terrible pre-recorded voice-over and they are literally two seconds long. The freaking console would kick into high gear reading the disc and then the frame-rate of the poorly rendered version of the host would drop drastically all in a two second period.

This looks just like Phil Keoghan!

With that being said the game itself was alright. We chose to play five legs, but only ended up doing four. At the beginning of each you choose a plane to take to your destination. Some will be faster, but cost more money. So generally we would pick the free plane in order to save funds for a faster ride later. This eventually came back to bite me and my teammate in the ass. The same thing would be done at the end of each leg to reach the final destination, except with buses and taxis.

In one of the legs my friend Justin and I were three hours ahead, which in terms of the show would mean exactly that. We would get to leave three hours before everyone else. That wasn't the case in the game. We ended up getting eliminated in the fourth leg, because we chose the free plane and got pretty far behind. We thought we'd be okay, because of our three hour lead in the previous leg. Turns out the previous times mean literally nothing, so we were eliminated. Not taking the previous legs time into account means that only your results in the final leg matter as long as you don't get eliminated prior to that.

Don't pick the free one. Trust me...

Needless to say I felt pretty cheated, but on top of that the game itself wasn't even really super great. The mini-games also had some hot frame dropping problems. I only remember two of the mini-games. One had us scrubbing plates clean to discover a specific symbol. The other had us counting down time so that we could push A when the timer was close to zero. We played the timer one a few times. There might have been one about water balloons too? I don't know we played three games that week.

     -Manny