Carnival Games (Wii)

The Wii’s secret to success was translating real life activities into easily understood games with motion sensing controllers, and since Wii Sports had primed its audience to expect this kind of simple remote swinging gameplay, the idea of recreating familiar carnival games in the same way wasn’t much of a stretch for the Wii’s enormous casual player base. Despite being developed by relative unknowns Cat Daddy Games, Carnival Games would ride its premise to selling millions, becoming a staple of casual Wii game collections and one of the top recommended multiplayer games for the system. Sometimes, a concept is just that appealing.

 

Carnival Games takes many of the classic staples of fairground games and recreates them for Wii remote motion controls, and thankfully, the scams and scummy nature of some real life carnivals has not been integrated into this lighthearted family game. Instead, a limbless carnival barker beckons you to his fairgrounds where a collection of 25 minigames can be played for prizes. There is definitely a whimsical look to the place despite the low graphical fidelity, little touches like a roaming monkey you can click for prizes adding to the menus that already style themselves like different regions of this little carnival. While this is definitely a squeaky clean and friendly version of a carnival though, there is at least still some moments of personality to be found, mainly if you get lucky with who is hosting the carnival game of choice. The old man host seems a little out of it, but the mustachioed one with gold teeth is definitely the standout, chiding the player lightly even if they’re doing well with jeers and taunts that spice up the sometimes oddly silent moments of play.

 

Players are able to create their own character to play as, some of the prizes found around the fairground or won from the games even providing more ridiculous outfits like shoes styled after elephant feet or a scuba diving tank. Most prizes are essentially functionless though, but these little trinkets and stuffed animals can be traded up over the course of the game. Your performance in a game will determine if you win no prize, a small one, a medium one, or a large one, but a certain amount of the smaller prizes can be exchanged for one in the next tier. Getting the biggest prize in a game will unlock new carnival games or outfit pieces. Tickets are also earned by playing, these given out much more liberally and almost always guaranteeing you get something out of playing the game, but these tickets and the prize exchange only apply to single player mode. This does give a motivation to spend some time alone with the game rather than it being a multiplayer only experience, but the odd thing about the tickets is they are used to play some rather bland carnival games. You can pay tickets to play games where more tickets are the prize, but many like the coin pusher are built to pay out poorly, the crane game doesn’t even provide you the plush you pick up, and things like the fortune telling machine and love tester are awfully bland considering you need to pay tickets to play. These do sometimes have special prizes to be earned by achieving special goals like the other carnival games, but these single player only ticket games are some of the worst on offer because they are so empty and underwhelming.

While multiplayer isn’t going to earn you any rewards for playing, it’s definitely where Carnival Games finds its footing, the competitive angle really bringing out the best in the minigames. Perhaps Carnival Games’s biggest triumph is turning one of the worst real life carnival games, Clown Splash, into a surprisingly exciting contest. Spraying a target with a water gun to fill up a balloon in real life is usually just a matter of holding it in place and waiting, but Carnival Games’s version involves you having to manually refill your gun periodically by shaking your Wii Remote, and the aiming process of the gun is not as simple as just pointing and waiting because of it. You can go for a full refill to get as much spray as possible, go for small repeated refills to avoid losing too much time, or you can try and gauge how much water the balloon needs before bursting and only refill the amount needed. Playing against another player means they’ll be trying to figure out the best method as well, and while it’s not really the best minigame in the package, it does show that some ingenuity allowed the less exciting real life games to find new life through a few small but reasonable twists to their formulas.

 

Some games don’t require much adaptation to be interesting in virtual form though. Skee ball, called Alley Bowling here, is present in the expected form, although the unlockable Super mode adds some interesting barriers to the bowling lane to make for a more challenging form of the game. Hole in One is essentially just mini golf, although the fact you only get to do three strokes before wrapping up is limiting. Super Hole in One lets you keep going if you sink your putts and has more small courses to see at least, and unsurprisingly Super Hole in One comes out one of the most interesting games because of its degree of variety. Many of the carnival games on offer are decent but fairly shallow. Throwing balls at milk bottles is going to go about the same every time you play it, but it too has a Super variant where the milk bottle towers grow larger and larger and getting the right throw becomes much more important to topple as many as you can.

 

Popping balloons with darts, launching frogs onto moving lillypads, hitting clown heads with balls… these are all some of the better games on offer even though they don’t have much longevity to them, even Super Balloon Darts just upping the balloon count instead of changing how it’s played, but there is still some consistently enjoyable ones to be found. Super Old West Shootout is not really an upgrade of any game but instead a limited shooting gallery where you need to make your shots count and hit as many targets as you can within the timer. Day at the Races takes skee ball’s concept and turns it into a bowling race instead, players trying to bowl into the higher value holes to move their fake horse to the finish line before anyone else. The Super mode adds the small but impactful complication of a moving barrier in the lane, but the sad truth is that most of the remaining games don’t have much to them to be quite as interesting or worthy of repeat plays.

Hoops is a very simple game about tossing your ball into a basket, Super Hoops at least making that basket move but the tossing is already rather unreliable because of the odd motion control detection making it somewhat inconsistent. Collection Plate, Ring Toss, and Buckets of Fun just involving tossing an object and hoping it either comes to rest on a plate, encircles a bottle, or lands in a tilted bucket, the line between being good or bad at it small and allowing for little variance in results when played. Super Ring Toss does have its bottles moving around to make for a more interesting version at least, and they all turn out better than the awful Lucky Cups. Lucky Cups is direct in saying it’s all about luck, but tossing a wiffle ball and hoping to land in a few select cups out of the almost 100 featured really is all up to luck and thus pretty boring in any mode. Test your Strength has an unusual problem, its concept being you pump your arm wildly to build up power and then need to time your swing properly, the game bad mostly because it will hurt your arm to try and reach the highest strength rating. Super Circle Drop is probably the last outright bad game at least, this game being far too easy as you just drop a few discs to cover the spot and there being almost no challenge to getting near perfect scores.

 

So far we’ve seen some good and decent games and some of the worst on offer, but for the most part, Carnival Games has pretty mediocre minigames. Hoops and the tossing games are joined by the likes of a fairly straightforward duck shooting game where you can score high without trying too much, Pigskin Pass and its Super version where its just about performing the football throws properly with one being about timing and the other just a slightly less obnoxious version of Test Your Strength when it comes to the controls, and the rest are a bit too plain and dependent on their controls. Bowler Coaster is about spinning up a bowling ball so it lands on the right spot of a rail but getting the spin amount right is all there is to it. Dunk Tank has the aiming reticle for your throw move around automatically like it did in the game where you hit clowns with balls, but the targets are small and singular here so it mostly is interesting due to the motormouth of the man you’re trying to dunk. Nerves of Steel wants you to move a ring around a rail without touching it but it seems to have issue reading the controller in this otherwise decent activity, and the only thing making Shoot for the Stars difficult is that the star you’re shooting 100 pellets at to try and completely eliminate has a small recoil that will throw you off a bit. For the most part, the fact most of the games are pretty mild doesn’t drag down Carnival Games at least, especially if you bounce between them quickly so that you aren’t immersed in their individual mediocrity for long. The multiplayer competitive angle also helps to make games where it is easy to score high more competitive, the ease less of an issue when you’re both pushing to do just a little bit better than the other. It does mean that there are very few that will draw you back into playing the game on your own though, so while that does work well for a carnival atmosphere in that you won’t dwell on a single game type for long, there were games that showed that Carnival Games could have been more robust with the right twists on its less exciting minigames.

THE VERDICT: Much like a true carnival, you won’t come to Carnival Games for any one strong experience but instead the selection on offer. Many of its individual minigames are shallow or simplistic, but games likes Day at the Races and Clown Splash have some mild strategy and variance as do many of the unlockable Super games. There are certainly some lows like Lucky Cups or the single player only activities, but the 25 games featured can entertain if stringed together properly and provide many easy or accessible interpretations of real games of skill and chance. While it may not be the best fit for deeply involved play, there is enough to Carnival Games to make it a decent choice for anyone looking to have a simple and fun time with the family.

 

And so, I give Carnival Games for the Wii…

An OKAY rating. While it is filled with basic games and some that are downright bland, it’s not hard to see why this game caught on with so many of the same players who enjoyed Wii Sports. Real life carnival games aren’t too thrilling on their own, but with some small stakes they manage to add a bit of weight to their small amount of play. Making it competitive or working your way through the prize tiers helps some of these games feel more interesting than their designs would suggest, but not to the point that these games can survive being played too many times in one sitting. The Super games have the right idea on how to add more depth and variety, but they aren’t hearty enough to carry this game either. Carnival Games still gets by on providing a variety of little activities rather than encouraging you to spend too much time with any one, but more of them could certainly use more variance or special complications, especially the ones that are currently just bad or forgettable.

 

In the end, I still feel comfortable with this game’s placement on many lists of recommended casual Wii games. It reproduces the real world experience of going to a carnival decently enough and has enough in it to entertain players who won’t touch the game too often, so this is definitely a case of a game with middling quality that is still well built for its intended audience. It found a niche and settled into it well, and even though it could have done more to reward players looking for something deeper, it provided just enough that it could satisfy casual players and ride its way to surprisingly high sales numbers.