Each summer of children's movies seem to start earlier every year. One of the first this year was Meet the Robinsons in March; and for each movie, a video game seems to just have to be made. Most games are an adventure where you're playing through the movie. When Avalance Software designed Meet the Robinsons for the Nintendo Wii, they broke out of this mold and created a game experience that doesn't follow the storyline of the movie, but stays true to the flavor and feel of the movie. It is a game that our whole family has truly enjoyed playing. It fits the old adage, "easy to learn, hard to master".
The story starts with Wilbur having traveled to somewhere in historical Egypt to get a picture of himself with King Tut. He succeeds, and is bragging to his robot, Carl, when he steps on a stone that causes the cave to start to collapse. It is by getting out of this area that you learn most of the controls of the game. What I liked about this opening is that it was a lot like you'd see at a movie theater where they play a bit of the movie and then roll the credits, a sort of "teaser" of what's to come. The cut scenes were very similar to the scenes from the movie, and really added to the feeling that you were playing a new adventure as Wilbur.
The game is separated into missions, and in each mission there are invisible checkpoints where you restart if you fail to progress. And fail I did, numerous times even in the first mission, which felt pretty silly of me once I figured out what I was doing wrong. All I had to do was keep Wilbur moving as fast as he could along a straight line, shouldn't have been too difficult, huh?
Actually, I should probably explain the controls for a moment so you get an idea of how simple this really is. The nun chuck controller for the Wii is used to move Wilbur horizontally. If he comes to somewhere that he'd have to move vertically, Wilbur just jumps up automatically so long as the jump is low enough. If it is a little too high, you use the A button to climb, and if the jump is a little too far down, Wilbur will drop and grab the ledge rather than falling into the cavern. You use the Wii Remote to then make Wilbur climb back up to where he just fell from, and move on. The Wii Remote is also used to redirect the camera angle, and this is what always takes the most getting used to for me. If you move too far off the screen with the pointer, it just stops moving around. If you really want to look around in a 360 degree arc, you have to sort of flip the Wii Remote left, or right, in short bursts so that you don't go too far off one side or the other. And there are times when you'll want to just put the Wii remote down so that the camera doesn't move by accident on you. At least, there were for me.
The other buttons on the Wii Remote weren't used often enough for me to hold it all the time. The A button was used in different contexts, but I could hit that even if it was sitting on my lap. The control stick was used to switch gadgets; and as I got more of them through the game, I would have to use it more, but again, I could do that with the remote sitting still. I'd occasionally have to pick up the Wii remote in order to use the B button to fire, or move back through a menu, but that wasn't often. As I said, the controls themselves were very easy to get used to.
The Z button on the nun chuck controller was actually used more than anything else because I could use it to lock on to a target. A really fun feature of having a target locked on is that you could "flip" the nun chuck quickly left or right and move on to the next target automatically. This made it very easy to target all the frogs, for example, as I had to do to complete one goal in the Robinson House. So, that's the control scheme summed up pretty well.
Back to the story and missions. The first mission probably took only 5 minutes. Learning the layout of the Robinson House took the next hour for me, however. I get horribly disoriented in a game like this where the camera doesn't "stick" behind my character's head. If I found any fault with the game play itself, it was that. And my kids agreed. In fact, it got so bad for me that I did a rough sketch of the house just so I could find my way around. You can use the "+" button to pull up a menu and select a map of the area, and that would show me where I was, and where I needed to go, but for me that still wasn't quite enough.
We're making our way through the various goals in the Robinson Home, and are still having great fun with the game. Trying to get to Uncle Art had us both jumping right along with Wilbur as we played. Wilbur is in an energy bubble making his way through the maze garden outside the Robinson house, and at one point he has to jump from one platform with flowing water to another. The "record time" for this was supposed to be a minute and a half. It took us over 10 the first time through, but we were having fun the whole time.
It is easy to pick up and play for a short period of time because you can save just about anywhere, or at least we don't recall having lost progress when we save and quit out. There are three save slots, which is enough for our family to be able to compete against one another to see who can get how far how fast.
As we played through the game, we unlocked different mini-games which were also just as fun to play. The first game was Charge Ball, a game like air hockey digitized. Only before you can take a shot on the goal you have to hit the 9 light-up squares before your opponent does with your charge ball to unlock the goal. You can block as well if you're in the right spot at the right time, and there are power-ups in the game which make it even more fun, and of course challenging.
I can't even tell you what the whole game is like because despite having played it for hours, we're not even through the second mission. Now this might lead you to think that the game is too hard, but I promise that we'd tell you if it were. The game does a great job of walking that fine balance line between a just right and you can make progress and being frustratingly difficult. It might take much longer to complete a particular task than for people with better dexterity than my son or I have, but we can still do it.
Other than the camera issue, which I've found most Wii games have, the game makes good use of the Wii controller. You do target with the Wii remote, and you get a number of different gadgets as you play through that can customize your controls to make the game more to your liking. To put it simply, we highly recommend Meet the Robinsons if you have a Nintendo Wii. The fact that the game breaks out of the "play the movie" story is what we like most about it, and what keeps us coming back day after day.
I’ve played computer games since college, addicted first to story type games like Might and Magic. I have 3 children who also love computer games. My oldest son is a typical kid who loves the challenge of pressing the right combination of buttons and levers on a joystick in just the right way to make something happens, and frequently gets frustrated with mom’s slow fingers. ;) We use computers for both education and entertainment, and sometimes even bribery for good behavior.
The “glory days” of computer gaming for me were when games like Spectre Supreme, Pirate’s Gold, the Might and Magic series, the original Prince of Persia… those sorts of games were coming out on a regular basis. Back then I owned a Macintosh and was a die hard Mac fan. I was one of the first in my area to buy an iMac and on it learned the joy of playing games on the internet like daily crossword puzzle and “mind bender” type puzzles. My first online RPG was given to me for Christmas the year EQ was released, and I was hooked from day one. I played EQ for about a year. I started playing DaoC during late alpha testing, and was hooked on it.. well, to be honest I still am. I’ve tried pretty much every MMORPG I can get my hands on, from big names like EQ, to more obscure ones such as Underlight. I’ve been writing for IMGS since the first DaoC guide, and find I love the challenge of learning a game and presenting what I’ve learned (and sometimes my opinions), to other players.
I’m not a very strong player as far as learning PvE or quick reaction times, so I tend to stay away from games where I’m pitted against someone else in a way that requires physical (rather than mental) response. I still enjoy story and puzzle games, and in a way that’s how I still approach online games. I would much rather spend hours working through a quest than 5 minutes in combat against another player. I still get lost in simulation type games, obsessing over them until I’ve gotten them beaten. And I like being able to sit down at the computer when I’ve got less than half an hour and playing through a few levels of a puzzle game. I tend not to like first-person shooter type games, or anything with person to person violence, so I steer away from them unless they are fantasy based settings. All in all, I enjoy computer gaming so much that my life feels incomplete somehow when my computer is down.
