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| Source // Wikipedia |
When Steven Spielberg makes a game, you think Medal of Honor, not Boom Blox Bash Party, but that's where we're at.
There was always going to be a game on the Nintendo Wii about flinging something at wobbly towers and watching everything fall over in a physics sandbox. For many that game was Boom Blox, but refine it a little more and fix what was broken and you get the sequel, Bash Party, the one and only title you need if you want to see some chaos on your Wii.
Don't progress any further unless you're Wiimote has a strap and that strap is around your wrist.
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| Source // Video Games Museum |
Fun Times
I have the pleasure of owning Bash Party for the Wii, but as I was never interested in the Wii to begin with, I knew absolutely nothing about the game. It looked cheap and childish, like something that was designed to appeal to the masses and keep them hooked as long as possible, with little value otherwise.
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| Source // Eurogamer |
That would be the cynical take on things, perhaps. My take on it is that there is a little more going on in Bash Party. It's not 'just' a physics sandbox for kids to hurl balls at towers. There's a game in here. A few, in fact. Puzzles and challenges, and tools that you might never have thought to put into a game about knocking stuff over, but with a Wiimote in hand, make absolute sense.
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| Source // Nintendo Life |
The game has 400 things to do, before you even begin to worry about user-generated content. Some of it is simple and boring, but some of it takes place underwater or in outer space, blocky characters reacting to various blocks exploding in front of them or collapsing beneath them as you aim for the high score, or aim to avoid a certain stage hazard.
I'm being vague for a few reasons. I've not played very many of the 400 levels, and I'm going off my months-old notes which mostly consist of moaning at Steven Spielberg, though to give Bash Party its credit, those notes are punctuated with genuine surprise - one level is a physics-based match-three puzzle, which I certainly wasn't expecting to see in a children's Wii game about knocking things over.
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| Source // Eurogamer |
Frustrations
The other notable reason for not playing much of Bash Party is that I was bored. Yes, sure, it was technically impressive, but the controls were a little fiddly too often to be fun. They've been improved, I read, and the use of a lock-on for where your ball is going to fling is handy, but actually getting the swing right to launch something towards the target was a right workout.
Levels are broken into themes, and as you can see from the screenshots they can be quite interesting to look at. Not the ones I played, though. They were a little on the bland end. Maybe I should have explored other sections for a different experience.
There's a good chance of finding a different experience, too, some levels requiring precision, others requiring puzzle solving. It's really not just about knocking stuff over. But I didn't see enough to convince me that I needed to stick around and prove that.
Final Word
Maybe I'm just a grump, or my general dislike of the Nintendo Wii is tainting all my impressions of its titles. Perhaps I have an intense dislike for waggling motion devices, especially if they don't register inputs, or require a specific motion that feels awkward for humans to reliably pull off.
Whatever my grumbles, I simply didn't like Boom Blox Bash Party enough to care about it, even if it was the polished, better version of a big seller, the one and only physics game you need to play on the Nintendo Wii.
I do, however, read that my notes concluded with "I wouldn't say it grew on me, but if I was really very bored...", so there may well be hope for Boom Blox Bash Party yet. It reviewed rather well, across the board. It is not a bad game at all and will provide plenty of stuff to do for those of you who want to fling things at the TV screen.
In that moment, and most of the moments before and since, I've simply not had much of a desire to do any flinging at all.
Fun Facts
Spielberg supposedly had thoughts of a Boom Blox movie. Probably couldn't be any worse than a fair few movie adaptations of video games...
Boom Blox Bash Party, developed by DreamWorks Interactive, EA Los Angeles, first released in 2009.
Version played: Nintendo Wii, 2009.