August 20, 2009
NICE TAMBOURINE!
Excitebots is pretty cool.
It just frustrates me.
The game concept is solid. “How about we make a racing game where getting first place is less important than what you do in the race?” They asked this question, and they came up with a game where everything you do, from solid turns, to jumps, to spinning about, to crashing your vehicle, all earns you different numbers of stars. At the end of the race, it’s the one with the most stars that wins, not the one in first place. Granted, winning the race gives you a hefty star bonus, and that shouldn’t be ignored if you want to win. But it’s less important than what you do in the race. Much less.
It does some really crazy things, too. Instead of standard attack items, when you hit a present box, sometimes you’ll get a tambourine, and have to tap out Shave and a Haircut to get a nice star bonus. Or you’ll grab a dart and have to throw it at a target as you drive past. Question Marks on the field make hills appear out of nowhere, or a set of bowling pins ahead of you that gives you stars if you drive through them for a strike. It’s these crazy mini-games in the middle of races that make the races themselves exciting, not to mention how much your little robot bounces and flies around constantly. It’s a lot of fun.
But when I have trouble beating the second to last course of the second set of races, something is wrong. This is a Wii game. It should have a hard difficulty mode, but it shouldn’t be so hard that I have to try a long race a number of times in the double digits to beat it. It should just be fun, let me play, and unlock things. If I don’t win, who cares?
But this game cares. And it makes me unhappy. I wanted to see it all. But I have no want to perfect my skill at this game. I just wanted to play stupid racing game for awhile. The fact that it doesn’t support 4 player split screen means I want to play it even less, because I can’t drag a nice group of friends over to play it.
No, this game has some really great ideas, but it doesn’t really know what people want in difficulty. Okay, not what people want, what I want. So I’m pretty completely done with it.
It’s frustrating when such a nice, core casual experience goes sour like that.