The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

People on the Podded Casts had mentioned that Roogoo was not shit. I had played the demo of it on XBLA, and gave them props for trying to create a new kind of puzzle game, but it didn’t hook me. Still, hearing a bit of the hype about it, I decided to throw the new stand-alone version, Roogoo: Twisted Towers for Wii, into my Gamefly queue to see what was up, and if it would really hook me.

I still have to give them props for creating something original, but dammit, they really went out of their way to fuck this up.

Quick description of the game: Children’s shape blocks fall from the sky through little discs with proper sized holes. You have to constantly rotate these discs to get the Star to go through the Star hole, and the Square to go through the Square hole, etc. It’s a different kind of matching gameplay, but still standard puzzle fare, in the end. If you let too many shapes bounce off of the discs and fall into oblivion, you lose the level and have to restart.

It is no secret that I hate with the burning passion of a thousand suns pointing at the screen with the Wiimote. I figured there would not be any of that in this game, besides perhaps the menus. It was a puzzle game where you rotated little discs about. That happens with buttons. I didn’t think it would be a problem.
However, the developers decided that this was a Wii game, so you had to do Wii things. Constantly, little butterflies fly about the screen, and you have to point at them with the Wiimote to catch them in your net. Bosses will do all kinds of things that require you to point at the screen to shoot at them, or will fog up the screen so you have to run the pointer over where you want to see to wipe the screen clean. This is all extremely annoying and extremely frustrating, as you have to do most of this while still trying to play the game normally.

Mixing it up in a puzzle game “story mode” is all well and good, but in the end, you need the basic puzzle gameplay to be there. It needs to be something that I can pick up and play mindlessly for an hour or so while listening to a podcast. It needs to be something that can get me into a groove. All these constant stupid Wii-styled distractions just ruin this for me. I can’t stand it. It just makes the game less fun.

Maybe on XBLA, where the game probably has less gimmicks, Roogoo would be better. However, I would have a very hard time recommending this Wii version to anyone. It just fights you every step of the way. It is unpleasant. If the developers had just tried to make a good game, as opposed to trying to make “an amazing Wii game that uses all the Wii features amazingly!” then they probably would have caught and fixed these problems. As it is, it’s just kind of a mess.