The Shrekoning: Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games (Wii)

The Wii played host to many motion-controlled minigame collections, and after the breakout success of Carnival Games in particular, it’s not surprising someone with the rights to a recognizable family franchise would want to cash in on the craze. However, while making a carnival-themed minigame collection wouldn’t require too much creativity, trying to explain how it would work with a property like Shrek would be complicated a bit by the affable ogre’s famously antisocial leanings. However, 2007 not only brought us Carnival Games but the film Shrek the Third, and with that movie moving Shrek towards family life with a set of triplet children, a sound setup could take root. Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games, sometimes known simply as Shrek’s Carnival Craze, wouldn’t feature the ogre breaking character to participate in party games, instead his friends and family would come together to entertain the new babies who managed to tap into his softer side.

To Shrek’s Carnival Craze’s credit though, Shrek does try to resist the mirth and merriment of a carnival atmosphere at first. While his friends like the wise-cracking Donkey are eager to go to entertain his children and himself and even the swashbuckling Puss in Boots seems to be intrigued, Shrek resists the entertainment even as his wife Fiona and the babies manage to at least get him to tag along. Things do change when they arrive at the carnival though, the villain of Shrek the Third, Prince Charming, attending it as well in hopes of winning enough of the minigames to be crowned the King of the Carnival. Already irritated by the pompous prince’s presence and at least two films of that antagonist interfering with his life, Shrek now has the motivation to put his heart into participating in the carnival, although the player is free to pick from a set of seven characters for both the story mode and regular play. Interestingly enough, despite many of the minigames being styled to best fit human hands or bipedal arrangements, Shrek’s Carnival Craze does not shy away from making both Donkey and one of his dragon/donkey hybrid Dronkey children playable even if it does look a bit odd to see them participating in a sack race or milking cows with their hooves. One of Shrek’s children is even allowed to participate, known only as Baby Ogre, and there doesn’t seem to be any advantages of disadvantages across the cast. The Magic Mirror will change his game show style presentation of the minigame results based on who you pick though, even choosing to highlight your failures rather than others’ successes in single-player oddly enough.

Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games features 28 minigames total with each game featuring four participants that can include 1 to 4 human players or have computer controlled opponents substitute in. Oddly enough, while clearly meant to be a kid’s game, the AI players do not hold back in any mode, meaning if you do want some legitimate competition from the likes of Puss in Boots and Prince Charming you will definitely find it. However, the single player story mode is about becoming the King or Queen of the Carnival, and having overly competent AI opposition could jeopardize a young player’s ability to complete it. However, Shrek’s Carnival Craze does come up with a rather wise compromise, the player not actually needing to win the minigames but instead needing to hit score thresholds to have that minigame marked down as complete. This does mean outside of direct competition in multiplayer or casual play the other players are fairly unimportant, especially since only seven of the minigames on offer even feature any real interaction with the opponents and two of those, the target shooting game and fishing, the interaction is just potentially removing a target from play the other players could be going for. The other minigames where you can actually interact with your foes are usually rather weak as well such as one where the characters actually run around stiffly trying to play keepaway with candy but the swiping is oddly touchy so it’s hard to know if you will grab the candy when you go for it.

Some of the minigames require players to wait to take their turns, and for some this makes a good degree of sense. The javelin throw, while sometimes struggling to pick up the Wii Remote’s motion controls, involves players weaving their javelin through the air to fly through hoops, and being able to have the full screen makes it easier to actually do so as the hoops shrink between each round. On the other hand, the skeeball portion definitely didn’t need to have everyone waiting to take their turns when the lanes are all lined up next to each other and fit on screen fine. You can at least skip the turns of computer controlled opponents in all modes to speed things up though, and some games they may go from showing no mercy to being utterly incompetent. In Food Fling, this game’s version of a hammer toss, the AI barely ever seems to get any good distance on their throw and often toss the pumpkin you’re playing with into a wall to grant you a fairly easy win. Dronkey Racers, a take on the common horse racing carnival game, has players race wooden horses across a 2D track by waving their Wii Remote and Nunchuck, and while the game does seem to have a sense for if you’re doing it too fast, the AI barely puts up a fight as you can easily win this with controller waving that isn’t even too involved. The fact it does seem to try to discourage the player flailing too rapidly does raise the question of what the player is meant to do to beat other players doing the same in minigames that feature it, but most of the minigames on offer focus mostly on a few limited motions such as pumping the controller or flinging it forward like casting a fishing line.

There are games that run into major control issues though, although part of it is poor detection. For something like the bell ringing “test your might” game you need to slam the Wii Remote forward to bring your hammer down but at times it didn’t seem to approve of the speed or angle of the swing, and even in games where it wants you to spin the Wii Remote in the air it felt like the game would be picky about the direction or forget which way you were rotating after a bit. Most of the time the Wii Remote will do fine with its part of the control situation though, but the Nunchuck’s weaker motion detection but almost equal reliance in this title can lead to moments where you need to forcefully swing it much harder to make sure its input is picked up. In one game where you need to either jump over or duck under bars as you climb a tower, even a small delay to either will likely lead to an instant loss, so the Nunchuck must be vigorously swung to ensure you can get the minimum amount of points to satisfy story mode or beat others in the competitive multiplayer modes. My left arm was legitimately sore the entire next day after playing Shrek’s Carnival Craze’s story through, and it doesn’t help that many games do have a brief power-building moment where you swing both arms rapidly to get your strength up to where it needs to be to do something like slide on a board through mud or build up water in your water gun.

While there are also other games similar to Dronkey Race where you need to pump both the Wii Remote and Nunchuck up and down to make progress like the cow milking contest, tricycle race, and climbing Rapunzel’s hair, the best minigames usually involve more interesting concepts than simply swinging the remotes around as fast as you can. One game involves gingerbread men coming down a conveyor belt and you need to identify their missing piece and swing the remote the right way to reattach their body part, the player able to earn more points for doing it rapidly and without error. That extra thought and the unique concept makes it a standout in a game that often leans on emulating carnival amusements but with some fairy tale twist or swamp-themed spin. Eyeball Toss is just about tossing balls into bowls, the dunk tank themed minigame just features villains from Shrek the Third being dunked into mud, Frog Fling has you throwing frogs into buckets for points, and the hoop toss now features snakes you toss onto dwarves instead of something like milk bottles. They all play pretty similarly with an unusual feature of aiming with the remote, pressing A to hold it in place, and then swinging to do the actual toss, but it is usually functional enough you can outpace the AI so the few flubs in detection don’t drag it down.

Surprisingly the dance game is fairly good at determining whether or not your mimicking the dance move of the leader, and the final minigame of the story is a rhythm game where you actually need to be fairly quick in your movements to play your character’s instrument properly. For the most part though, the minigames on offer are usually short, simple, and prone to either mindless play or issues in properly reading your inputs, and while you can push through all the little issues to eventually become the King or Queen of the Carnival, besides a few cutscenes that do a decent job of capturing the personalities of a few of the characters, the reward for the effort will either feel hollow or be the same soreness I felt in my left arm just trying to get things to work.

THE VERDICT: While Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games did contrive a convincing reason for Shrek to willingly play carnival games, I wouldn’t have blamed the ornery ogre for sitting out. Interaction between players is limited so most minigames are just about comparing scores, but the game made the AI so capable that the story mode had to offer alternate goals to make completing all 28 achievable without constant replays. It is nice to have some actual competition admittedly but in some minigames they are conversely absolutely awful. Most of the carnival games on offer are fairly plain or suffer some issues with motion controls, especially when the Nunchuck is leaned on despite its weaker motion sensing capabilities. You may get a brief creative game like Gingy’s Crazy Cookie Conveyor, but more of them are likely to be variants on waving the controller wildly or pointing at the screen to toss something. Thankfully though, there are enough simple ones that you can weed out the weakest for at least a nearly tolerable time.

And so, I give Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games for Wii…

A BAD rating. While some parts of the game like Puss in Boots’s character model are ugly and it is a touch odd that Baby Ogre goes nameless, Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games does attempt to give you some Shrek humor and character both in character voice lines, scenes, and the shapes of the minigames. Still, despite some commendable work trying to make this carnival truly feel like part of Shrek’s universe, things break down when it comes time to actually participate in the minigames. Waving your controllers around wildly might get children up and moving but it leads to minigames that are shallow and not too great to replay. Some minigames like the javelin throw or the muddy board slide don’t even need the arm flailing to be interesting but slip it in instead of focusing on making sure the control of the actual action segment is spot on, but it’s those moments where control breaks down or Shrek’s Carnival Craze struggles to read your motions that really let the game down. Not many of the minigame designs are truly creative or interesting admittedly, but games like Eyeball Toss fit the theme and could be mild amusements while jumping over the bars in the tower climb could work better as a reaction time test rather than relying so much on hoping the controller keeps reading the motions you need to overexaggerate to ensure your continued safety. Successes and failures often feel more tied to motion control detection than your actual inability to keep up or skill in the game format, and that’s perhaps one reason the surprisingly strong AI opposition ends up a nuisance as they just perform as well as they like. A quick look at the PlayStation 2 and PC release of this and they do fare better with button controls, but some minigames conversely become much too easy and plain with full control like the bell-ringing hammer swing and anything that involves building up power. More minigames where direct competition is possible so you can actually think about things like trying to undermine each other or focus on your own points would give the game more life, and a greater presence of creative concepts like the conveyor belt gingerbread man game that reward consistently good performance would help this actually settle in as a serviceable minigame collection on any system. Unfortunately the Wii’s motion controls definitely lead to some of the failings of this version of the Shrek party game even though they’re likely what would make it the most appealing version to general customers.

While it could have definitely been worse, especially if more of the minigames punished motion control problems, it’s also not too hard to push your way through Shrek’s Carnival Craze Party Games since most of the amusements are simple in concept. Some might literally hurt your arm if you want to be able to clear them for the story or beat friends in multiplayer competition, but for every outright bad minigame like the candy stealing one there’s a few that are basic enough to brush off or a rare winner when it comes to engaging design. The combined package still puts you through too many problems with input detection, mindless concepts, or lifeless play, but at least some thought was put into Shrek’s trip to the carnival to make it truly feel like it is him and his friends participating in the kinds of games that suit them.