SB Recommends Wii Games

There were some high hopes for Nintendo's Wii round these parts: thoughts that it would broaden videogames appeal, make interaction more intuitive, that the Virtual Console would make the generational aspect of videogame hardware less restrictuve—but it never really lived up to that. There have been lots of hardware sales, but not the diverse software range we usually see in similarly do-welling systems (NES, PlayStation). There are some interesting games, though!, as well as Gamecube backwards compatibility, and digital releases on WiiWare and Virtual Console. It's also really easy to get homebrew stuff running on it, so it's easy to play imports, and makes a great emulation box.

• Baroque (also on: PS2)

• A Boy and His Blob - forum thread

• Boom Blox - forum thread
  • wourme: The best use of the Wii remote's motion controls that I've come across. Shallow in many respects but a lot of fun. The sequel is good, too, but I'd keep the first game if I had to give one up.

• Dawn of Discovery
  • wourme: Very compelling. Simple strategy that reminds me of the original SimCity.

• Deadly Creatures

• De Blob
  • robotdell: So goddamned charming, De Blob pulls you in with its alluring gaze then traps you inside itself with a fantastic jazz soundtrack and Katamari-esque gameplay. It's also very relaxing!

• Dewey's Adventure / Suisei Dewy no Daibouken (JP)
  • Pijaibros: I would put it up there with Kororinpa in things that made my buy a Wii. Plus I enjoy all the silly aquapod marketing. Kinda like all the DOLE bananas in the first Monkey Ball.

• Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors
  • Pijaibros: I like Dragon Quest Swords. I don't care if Tim says it sux. I pretend I am Lion-O calling the Thundercats when I unleash the beast on those slick metal slimes.
    Also the protagonist's Dad is Toups.
  • Persona-sama: 'I like Dragon Quest Swords. I don't care if Tim says it sux. I pretend I am Lion-O calling the Thundercats when I unleash the beast on those slick metal slimes.
    Also the protagonist's Dad is Toups'
  • monaco: it's the love child of Virtua Cop and Dragon Quest, with all of the latter's quirks. One of the most earnest efforts from a big developer on this console.

• Endless Ocean 2: Adventures of the Deep​

• Excite Truck - forum thread
  • Sniper Honeyviper: A game entirely about the childish glee of watching vehicles ram into stuff and shattering it with delicious physics. Wii-waggle steering is mandatory, but the designers were nice enough to make the tracks largely wide-open straightaways. Amazing sense of weight and momentum on the trucks. Has extra curio value for being one of the few Wii games to (officially) support custom soundtracks, which you'll want to use since the music is tiresome arena butt-rock.
  • elvis.shrugged: This is honestly the most fun I've had with a racing in years. It combines the insanity of San Francisco Rush and the changing terrain of Wave Race 64 with an incredibly addictive combo points system.

• Final Fantasy Fables: Chocobo's Dungeon
  • BenoitRen: a charming and addicting rogue-like perfect for anyone who's new to the genre or looking for some rogue-like fun without needing to make a big investment in it.

• Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn
  • wourme: A direct sequel to the GameCube Fire Emblem title. Not quite as good as Path of Radiance, but still very good.

• Ghost Recon
  • 1CC: Decent mix between Time Crisis and a third-person shooter.

• Ghost Squad
  • bleak: may be the best wii game.
  • boojiboy7: If Sega were to make a Tom Clancy game, but not actually care about Tom Clancy, and want to make Virtua Cop 3 instead, this is the game you would get. And you would like it.
  • stoteiheim: Ghost Squad is by AM2 BTW FYI and is perfect in every way.

• Gunblade NY and L.A. Machineguns Arcade Hits Pack

• The House of the Dead 2 & 3 Return
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Lovingly presented, perfect ports of HotD 2 & 3, with all the extra content from their respective Dreamcast and Xbox releases! Somehow the games don't seem much easier with a visible crosshair, but you can turn it off all the same. It's kind of amazing how great HotD 2 still looks compared to most Wii fare. No good reason for the original not being included, though.

• The House of the Dead: Overkill (also on: PS3)
  • BenoitRen: a competent on-rails gun game with a well done B-movie theme.
  • notbov: Stay the hell away from HotD:Overkill, game's bad. Even the manual is like “you aren't allowed to criticize the game on the internets without beating the unlockable mode first”. Maybe you assholes should [have] made that the game to begin with (not that said mode is any better).
  • smartblue: Mechanically the game is easy and boring. Aesthetically the game is one of the most juvenile and ugly looking games. The first level is kind of silly funny but I was embarrassed for myself and any onlookers the rest of the way. Seriously, play Ghost Squad for all your light gun kicks.
  • gatotsu2501: The dialogue in the last scene alone vindicates the entire game.

• Ivy the Kiwi? (also on: DS)
  • 1CC: An obstacle course like the Kororinpa and Kurururin games. If you want to play a cute platformer, I'd suggest this over Kirby's Epic Yarn.

• Klonoa
  • wourme: A quality remake of my favorite PS1 platformer (well, it's tied with SOTN). Just be sure to turn off the English voices. What I've seen of the extra content is just kind of punishing and not all that fun.

• Kororinpa / Kororinpa: Marble Mania (NA) - forum thread
  • Moogs: Kororinpa gets even better once you unlock the Star Soldier song.
  • elvis,shrugged: This game is everything Super Monkey Ball isn't. It's smart, endearingly adorable, and relaxing. It's extremely easy (I've only been playing about an hour and I'm already 25 percent through the game, according to the menu, but imagine that I shouldn't go by that), but that isn't a deterrent. In fact, it works to the game's advantage—it takes a potentially frustrating experience and turns it into a relaxing one. It's damn fun, and anyone who owns a Wii here and hasn't played it is doing a disservice.
  • dessgeega: Yeah, the thing about Kororinpa is that you set your own difficulty. You could either take the stages slowly, playing one of the easy balls (cute noises!), falling and restarting as many times as you have to, or you can barrel through the stages with one of the fast, slippery hard balls, Star Soldier anthem blaring, trying to finish the course fast enough to earn the gold trophy. Either way, the game gets much more demanding towards the end, especially once you get into the hidden stages.
  • Felix: I'm a huge sucker for ball-rolling games, and even I think this game feels like it's held together with screws and tape, but it was probably the only game released during the year that I had a Wii that I felt was doing something reasonably compelling with the hardware.

• Kororinpa 2: Anthony to Kiniro Himawari no Tane / Marble Saga: Kororinpa (NA) / Marbles! Balance Challenge (PAL)

• Little King's Story
  • TORUMASUTA: […] especially if you liked Pikmin at all.

• MadWorld - forum thread

• Mario Strikers Charged / Mario Strikers Charged Football (PAL)
  • Vikram Ray: a tightly designed soccer/hockey/basketball mashup with fantastic sound and animation (I wish there were a more robust replay feature, though—I almost always watch the post-goal replays, they're never not interesting). virtually unlimited replay value when playing with real people sitting in a room next to you.

• Metroid Prime 3: Corruption
  • Sniper Honeyviper: I hesitate to refer to this as a Metroid game. Basically it's single-player Halo for the Nintendo crowd; a bunch of fragfests and lame setpieces loosely connected by lock-and-key upgrades and “exploration.” Play it through once to experience the Best Controls In A Console FPS Ever and never touch it again.

• Mini Ninjas
  • Toptube: is pretty alright if you are like me and enjoy pretty much anything resembling a platformer.

• MiniCopter: Adventure Flight / Radio Helicopter (PAL)

• Muramasa: The Demon Blade
  • Panoptic: The up to jump shit made me want to stab everyone while I played this.

• New Super Mario Bros. Wii - forum thread
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Still kind of lacking something, but a massive improvement over the DS version. Level design is nicely varied, and overflowing with little crunchy elements and motion-control gadgets that don't feel like bullshit. Co-op mode is hilarious broken fun, as you'll all be bouncing off each other's heads and tossing each other into lava pits with everyone enjoying themselves too much to get angry. Gets tiresome pretty quickly by yourself, though.

• No More Heroes (also on: 360 - JP only, PS3) - forum thread spoiler thread

• Opoona
  • Smartblue: Overlooked RPG with a wonderful rich world. Complete with museums and fictional art history periods, a fun job searching bureaucratic society to dig into, and a mind blowing soundtrack by Hitoshi Sakamoto.
  • Smartblue: I am the guy who always comes into Wii threads to talk about how great Opoona is. You should try to find Opoona somewhere because it is the most charming RPG because because because:
    
    1. Graphics and art style like a cross between PSO and Bumpy Trot.
    2. Music done by Basiscape.
    3. Play as a fat kid with a ball hovering over his head who either frowns when he runs or rides a hover board that makes noises like Magneto's car in those old cartoons.
    4. Unlike the rest of the game, battles all have music that sounds like it came out of Dragon Quest.
    5. You can watch TV shows that are all goofy at any time from your pause menu.
    6. There are art installations all over the place, each with a plaque explaining who created it, when and what fictional art movement it was inspired by. These range from empty picture frames out in the combat areas that frame up on something cool, to giant neck ties attached to windmills, from a rainbow of televisions showing test patterns to a robot endlessly walking on a giant globe floating on water.

• Pokémon Ranch
  • Persona-sama: the best screensaver ever made. It helps if you have heaps of Pokemon from your Nintendo DS game you can just dump in there too, and if you name your guys vulgar things.

• Punch-Out!!
  • Sniper Honeyviper: It's more or less the exact same game as the NES version with obnoxious presentation, so you might as well just play that.

• Resident Evil (also on: Gamecube)
  • gatotsu2501: The Wii port is compatible with the Classic Controller and its actually usable D-pad, and is therefore the preferable version.

• Resident Evil 4: Wii Edition
  • Dark Age Iron Savior: pretty much the best version hands down.
  • gatotsu2501: Perfect example of a game stretched too thin. The first third or so is really engrossing, tense stuff, but by around the time you reach the castle the game has already introduced and explored its most novel mechanics, and starts increasingly to rely on setpieces and gimmicks to keep it going for the next dozen hours or so until it finally sputters out. I can't think of another game that makes such a drastic transition from excitement to exhaustion over its running time. The story and cutscenes are mood-ravagingly, inexcusably bad. (Wii Edition is generally considered the definitive version, though one could argue that its super-slick controls break a game that wasn't designed for them.)

• Rune Factory: Frontier

• Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (also on: PS2, PSP) - forum thread with (marked) spoilers
  • gatotsu2501: Forget BioShock, FUCK Heavy Rain, we've got this generation's milestone achievement in interactive storytelling right here. Shattered Memories uses the video game medium to craft a fluid yet firm narrative that shapes itself around the player, and more specifically that exploits the uncanny nature of the relationship between player and avatar in ways I've never seen in any other game. If David Lynch made a video game, this would be it. Somewhere inside me there is an Adilegian-caliber essay dissecting the brilliantly surreal nuances and postmodernism of the narrative. One day we will look back and marvel at its unsung brilliance. When booting it up for the first time, be sure to read this helpful article for the optimum playing experience.
  • wourme: Probably my favorite Wii game. It's a departure from the other Silent Hill games, but definitely a successful one. I immediately played through the game again upon finishing it, which is something I almost never do. Being a third-party Wii title, this probably didn't get the attention it deserved.

• Sin & Punishment: Star Successor
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Almost justifies the Wiimote's existence.
  • Felix: I love lightgun games, and this is almost certainly the best game on the Wii by best-game standards, but it also (depressingly) pretty much plays better with a mouse & keyboard, emulated.

• Sonic and the Secret Rings
  • BenoitRen: if you can get past its weird control scheme, you'll find a decent Sonic game with a charming story book and Arabian aesthetic.

• Sonic Unleashed
  • BenoitRen: a very competent Sonic game with two modes of play: racing and some 2D platforming at day time, and slower-paced platforming and fighting at night.

• Super Mario Galaxy - forum thread forum thread
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Not recommended at all. This is irredeemable shit for toddlers and grandmas only. Well, they did throw in some quite difficult postgame challenges for Mario veterans, but they're just re-visits of existing locations covered in a purple fart haze, and the anemic, limp-noodle physics prevent them from being any fun at all. Galaxy 2 is a slight improvement but still not worth it.
  • gatotsu2501: One of the best console games ever designed to be played in 20-30 minute bursts. Definitely not one of the best Mario games, though.

• Super Smash Bros. Brawl
  • gatotsu2501: A definite step back from the greatness of Melee, but still quite a bit of fun with some friends.

• Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars

• Trauma Center: New Blood
  • Sniper Honeyviper: DO NOT attempt this game without a skilled second player. All the missions were designed with co-op in mind, and they aren't ever adjusted when playing alone. If that's not a problem, this is a refreshingly engaging and challenging puzzle game; otherwise, go with Second Opinion or the upcoming Trauma Team.

• Wii Fit
  • CubaLibre: If you have a scale and a DVD player you don't need this horseshit.

• Wii Sports Resort
  • koholinttakeout: pretty much the party game of the generation

• Xenoblade (JP) / Xenoblade Chronicles (NA/PAL)* - forum thread
  • Levi: Jumping is good. Jumping off of really high places is good. The battle system is like Final Fantasy XII run through the filter of people considering what would make something like this interesting. The game is generous. It's open in a curiously satisfying, direct way. You can just start swimming and climb up on an abandoned highway structure and get your shit totally wrecked by a giant bird. A lot of monsters just want to hang out, and don't pick fights unless you start shit with them. The extremely low resolution textures on the characters faces remind me pleasantly of Megaman Legends or Vagrant Story or something. The cutscenes are not an hour long. I hate Bioware and Bethesda. I like the hero's sweaters, and how he does the ”Citan thinking” pose as an idle animation (what a fantastic and subtle fanservice that is!) I'm mildly frightened that some of the things I find novel about it's approach are from World of Warcraft or something, but I'm blissfully ignorant of that game. The skies are very very blue.
  • negativedge: Xenoblade is a lost game from the year 2000—which is not to say it plays like a Chrono Cross or what have you, but rather that it plays and acts like you'd have imagined games were going to play and act if you were playing a lot of JRPGs in the years 1997-2000. It's world design is an evolution of the Xenogears/Grandia style of stuff that I was always in love with, and the battle system and all that feels like where the genre was supposed to go (though there are reservations, here—it's clearly more of a “lets copy MMOs” than a “lets critically think about JRPGs from the ground up”). It's as blue skies as video games can get. The environments are really smart, because they're “huge” in a way that isn't even really huge—it's hard to describe. Like, it's not so much that the surface area itself is mathematically as big as something like an Elder Scrolls game, or that it is particularly open, but rather that it is just enough of these things, and then the sense of scale does the rest. The town you start in is situated in a valley, only the valley is large enough that it doesn't feel artificial—it doesn't feel like it is a valley because they needed someplace isolated to keep you on target, and it doesn't feel like it's a valley because the hardware isn't powerful enough to give you a draw distance miles away. It just feels like a valley. The sides of the surrounding cliffs and mountains are huge. When you climb a few of the overlooking areas, the town below you looks small not because it's a small town (it's a fairly large JRPG town, even if you can't enter any god damn buildings), but because you're really high up and everything else is bigger than the town. When you jump off of that cliff into the water below it's just about the greatest thing. When you finally leave that starting area and its associated dungeon, two things happen: first, you get a fantastic view of one of the giant robots that makes up the game's world (which is just weird enough to be delightful); second, you spill out into a giant fucking plain replete with herds of elephant things and rolling hills and Fuck Yes.

• Zack & Wiki: Quest for Barbaros' Treasure

• Zangeki no Reginleiv (Japan only) - forum thread
  • 1CC: It's probably the best reason to own a modified Wii, and I really enjoyed both of my playthroughs (one offline and one online). It has the best single-player campaign among the EDFs I'd say, because of the varied levels and because the NPC team-mates got some characterization and personality to them.
  • Chris B: It's basically the fantasy version of Earth Defence Force. Dismembering giants is a lot of fun and the Motion+ enhanced controls work reasonably well, but it takes some time until you figure out how to trigger actions reliably and without flailing your arms all over the place. I'd say that compared to EDF, the game feels a bit less frantic and more methodic. It's all about positioning and reading your enemies' attack patterns, to judge if you have the time to pull of that slow but powerful slash. The two distinct character classes from EDF 2 (marine and jetpack girl) also make a return, yet this time the differences are more subtle. The girl can't fly, but she takes 3 instead of 2 weapons into battle and her powerful staffs burn Mana, which can only be recharged by going melee. The guy has bigger swords and HAMMERS, but his bows are no match for the girl's magic.

• ANIMA: Ark Of Sinners
  • monaco: A tremendous blend of Nomura shlock, unashamed SOTN love and very poor skill. Features a ridiculous translation to boot, as well as multiple poor design choices. Pass the controller aroound and marvel at the kusoge-ness within.

• Castlevania: The Adventure ReBirth - forum thread
  • Isfet: Part of me wonders if I enjoyed this game so much because I've become so disillusioned with the franchise's most recent entries and it will probably be some time before I can tell for sure. But as of right now, I'm confident in saying that the game is perhaps not as good as the originals, but it does things extremely well 70-75% of the time.

• Contra ReBirth
  • monaco: it is good.

• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a Darklord

• Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles: My Life as a King

• LIT

• Lost Winds 2

• Maboshi's Arcade

• Mega Man 9 (also on: PSN, XBLA) forum thread forum thread
  • BenoitRen: Very competent Mega Man platformer in the form of a NES game.

• Muscle March
  • Sniper Honeyviper: Homoerotic parody reflex tester on rails. If that doesn't sounds like fun, you must truly be a callous soul. It'll only last you about an hour, but what a glorious hour that is, made all the better by some ridiculously catchy original J-pop tracks. Not to mention that it's five bucks.

• Orbient

• Swords and Soldiers

• World of Goo (also on: Android, iOS, Linux, Mac, PC) - forum thread
  • internisus: This is one of the very best games to come out all year [2008]. It is obviously a very nice game and one that you would be hard-pressed not to enjoy thoroughly, but what you don't know and what I only found out today is that in addition to being generally lovely and wonderful it is also brilliant. I can't talk about settings and gameplay variations and the (superb) story because it would ruin the discovery for you.
  • wourme: This game really does get more and more amazing as you go along. Playing this kind of reminds me of playing Katamari Damacy for the first time. I hope these guys make a fortune.
  • bruin: Like Portal (and many great puzzle games before it, I guess) it takes one (when it comes down to it) simple concept and riffs on it throughout the game. It stays fresh, but you will learn to make things you're proud of by the end of the game. Struggling to make that bridge at the beginning of the game, then making much bigger, far more elegant structures at the end was really satisfying. Also it's host both to puzzles that require the “cognitive leaps” (like Zelda) as well as the ones that require you to manage time and resources (like Lemmings) […].
  • dessgeega: The thing about this game is that these aren't just abstract engineering challenges as one might expect. Each level is a story. Eighty-hour games get to be eighty hours long because they repeat the same ideas over and over. If World of Goo was an eighty hour game, it would eventually get stupidly, impossibly difficult because there'd be no other direction to build these ideas in. Because World of Goo is only so long as it needs to be to relate these ideas, the difficulty of the stages remains reasonable. Each level is genuinely interesting in a way levels in eighty-hour games cannot afford to be (because they each have maybe an hour of interesting ideas, if that).

• SB Recommends Gamecube Games - Playable via backwards compatibility.
• List_of_Virtual_Console_games
• Wii VC is now actually better than the Wii itself. Discuss.
• Wii: Worth getting by now, right? - Forum recommendations.
• I have a Wii now