Unlike many of the more vocal opinion-makers engaged in games coverage, I don't have anything intrinsically against minigame collections. One of my favorite DS games and its sequel were just that, actually (Feel the Magic: XY♥XX and The Rub Rabbits). But those two titles, I felt, had a little something special; they had a fun story which managed to be coherent with even the weirdest of the minigames, which themselves were almost uniformly enjoyable to play; fair, yet challenging.
Hudson recently released Help Wanted, which is definitely a minigame collection—it's right on the cover, there; you can plainly see there are 50 of the little buggers on the disc. And they're packaged together with a story that's decently entertaining and does maintain coherence with the decidedly wacky theme (as advertised). So is it enough to make it an effort worth getting into?
As I said, the story is actually pretty amusing. It's got a very cheaply-made feel to it, to be sure, but it's just so out-there from the premise (there's a meteor about to crash into the world; you need to do odd jobs to earn money to buy a superhero transformation watch and thus repel the threat) to the scenes and implementation that I couldn't help but laugh. My six-year-old daughter, who I enlisted to help me evaluate the title, raved about it as well.
But then you get to the jobs themselves, and the picture looks a little less rosy. The starter set of minigames almost completely turned me off. One job involved pulling carrots by swinging the Wii Remote upward when a rotating marker was in the "good" zone, which I found both uncomfortable and unpredictably laggy. Another involved using the Nunchuk's analog stick to run around a garden full of dogs and sprinklers and deliver a package—getting barked at by a dog would make you stumble, and the dogs had a tendency to bark at me from some invisible point offscreen. Had I hair, I would have been tearing it out.
As for my family, my daughter attached herself to the few decent minigames and pretended the rest didn't exist, which seems like the most positive way to approach a game like this. (At press time, she's still hooked on the game, actually; she thinks the story's hilarious and is content to pretend all the bad minigames don't exist.) My wife watched us both struggling and declared she did not want her own turn.
As I continued to play, I unlocked quite the motley crew of additional games. Some were actually reasonably entertaining, but they were offset by games that were either okay with a troubling flaw or just plain bad. I ended up getting a little better at some of the games, enough to press on and perhaps even do well, I thought. I did enough work to buy an item that would presumably attack the currently-falling heavenly body with my hard-earned cash, used it... and was informed that I "missed". A second item purchased several game days later also "missed," and suddenly, I found myself staring down the possibility that I would lose—even though I had settled on a number of minigames that I could fairly reliably do well at, thus earning myself a steady flow of cash with which to save the world.
If it wasn't enough that a sizable number of the minigames were poorly-programmed and badly-conceived, the random punishment aspect just cemented it, sucking away what little enjoyment I did derive from Help Wanted's story sequences and the few enjoyable minigames (though I don't think there were any I really felt like playing more than a few times.) While it is certifiably wacky, wackiness cannot surmount the undercurrent of frustration that permeates the game for me. Sorry, Help Wanted, but I'm going to go find work elsewhere—though it seems you might find a less-picky kid or three looking for a summer job.
Hudson recently released Help Wanted, which is definitely a minigame collection—it's right on the cover, there; you can plainly see there are 50 of the little buggers on the disc. And they're packaged together with a story that's decently entertaining and does maintain coherence with the decidedly wacky theme (as advertised). So is it enough to make it an effort worth getting into?
As I said, the story is actually pretty amusing. It's got a very cheaply-made feel to it, to be sure, but it's just so out-there from the premise (there's a meteor about to crash into the world; you need to do odd jobs to earn money to buy a superhero transformation watch and thus repel the threat) to the scenes and implementation that I couldn't help but laugh. My six-year-old daughter, who I enlisted to help me evaluate the title, raved about it as well.
But then you get to the jobs themselves, and the picture looks a little less rosy. The starter set of minigames almost completely turned me off. One job involved pulling carrots by swinging the Wii Remote upward when a rotating marker was in the "good" zone, which I found both uncomfortable and unpredictably laggy. Another involved using the Nunchuk's analog stick to run around a garden full of dogs and sprinklers and deliver a package—getting barked at by a dog would make you stumble, and the dogs had a tendency to bark at me from some invisible point offscreen. Had I hair, I would have been tearing it out.
As for my family, my daughter attached herself to the few decent minigames and pretended the rest didn't exist, which seems like the most positive way to approach a game like this. (At press time, she's still hooked on the game, actually; she thinks the story's hilarious and is content to pretend all the bad minigames don't exist.) My wife watched us both struggling and declared she did not want her own turn.
As I continued to play, I unlocked quite the motley crew of additional games. Some were actually reasonably entertaining, but they were offset by games that were either okay with a troubling flaw or just plain bad. I ended up getting a little better at some of the games, enough to press on and perhaps even do well, I thought. I did enough work to buy an item that would presumably attack the currently-falling heavenly body with my hard-earned cash, used it... and was informed that I "missed". A second item purchased several game days later also "missed," and suddenly, I found myself staring down the possibility that I would lose—even though I had settled on a number of minigames that I could fairly reliably do well at, thus earning myself a steady flow of cash with which to save the world.
If it wasn't enough that a sizable number of the minigames were poorly-programmed and badly-conceived, the random punishment aspect just cemented it, sucking away what little enjoyment I did derive from Help Wanted's story sequences and the few enjoyable minigames (though I don't think there were any I really felt like playing more than a few times.) While it is certifiably wacky, wackiness cannot surmount the undercurrent of frustration that permeates the game for me. Sorry, Help Wanted, but I'm going to go find work elsewhere—though it seems you might find a less-picky kid or three looking for a summer job.