Carnival Games
Publisher: Global Star
Developer: Cat Daddy Games
Genre: Mini Games
Release: August 27, 2007
Platform: Wii
Reviewer: Eric
Another game that is packed with mini games, but Carnival
Games is different. I didn't care for Cooking Mama, Brain Age
Academy and Boogie, they got stale too fast. Not only that the
price for all three of these games is robbery, you can get a
better product on these games for your Nintendo DS, except
Boogie for now. Carnival Games like I said is different, it's
ten dollars cheaper and it has almost the lasting feel that Wii
Sports does.
Carnival Games is what you'd expect it to be. This game is
packed with over twenty five mini games, some in which have to
be earned by unlocking them. That aspect gives Carnival Games a
pretty high replay value but the difficulty on earning these
games is not too challenging at all.
Each mini game has you earning different prizes. You need to
earn three small and medium prizes, they are your typical
plastic toys or some nice stuffed animals. The large gifts,
which you need to earn two, are a little better, most of them
include a nice little sound effect. With all those prices you'd
think that would be enough, right? Wrong because you need to
earn the ultimate prize on every game, this is where you unlock
new mini games and special items for your character to wear.
The problem I had here was how you actually earned the
ultimate prize, you need to trade in your two large prizes.
Instead of getting a set score on the mini games you just need
to trade things in, you can also do this to earn the medium and
large prizes. If you wanted to earn everything the cheap/lame
way all you need to do is purposely suck, earn the small prizes,
and trade them in. This would be time consuming and it would
take away from the fun factor but you'd at least earning
everything in a timely fashion.
Before you can even play Carnival Games you need to make your
character. As usual with third party games you can't bring in
your created Mii's, instead you have to pick from a small amount
of cloths and accessories. You do get to earn more outfits for
your character but I would have rather seen my Mii in here. Even
if you earn everything in this game your character just won't
look like yourself or Hitler. Admit it you made Hitler as a Mii,
he is one of the most popular creations, I'm not even kidding. I
have at least eight Hitler's in my Mii Parade.
Every game for the most part feels right with the Wii's
controller. I am not too happy how the creators of this game
used a moving aim symbol for all the throwing games but it might
have been better to do this way so people wouldn't get too
pissed off when they didn't even knock down any milk bottles.
This doesn't make Carnival Games feel too authentic but like I
said it was in their best interest to do this I think. One mini
game that I can't stand is the famous Test Your Strength one.
Here you need to move your Wii Mote back and fourth, pretty much
shaking it like a mad man. Even if you get to the very top on
this meter you're not guarantee getting a perfect. In order to
get the large gift here you need to get more than one perfect,
maybe three (I can't even get one perfect), so your best bet
here is too cheat with the above method.
Multiplayer in Carnival Games is a blast. You can either
share one Wii Mote or have up to four, which is great. Out of
all the mini games I've played you usually have to share one Wii
Mote. I'm sure it's safe to say developers realize people have
more than one Wii Mote now so this shouldn't be a problem. When
I did play multiplayer a set of mini games were given and the
winner was decided by who won the most. I'm not sure if you can
pick which mini games to play but I don't really care, I think
having a set amount of games given is a much better choice.
Final Verdict
Carnival Games offers some good Game Cube era graphics, same
with the sound. The graphics and sound might not be up to par
with other games like this, but who cares. It is a little
annoying hearing the same guy talk for all the mini games but
they try to trick everyone by using different "Look I Can Make
This Guy Too" characters. If you can get past that though you
will find a great set of mini games that should appeal to
everyone. Multiplayer is fantastic, you can share one Wii Mote
or use four, something that isn't seen in too many of these
games. Wii Sports still might be my favorite when it comes to
mini games but Carnival Games is in second place.
Rating
7.75 out of 10
Carnival Games Gameplay Footage
