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