Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time (Wii)

Waggle is a negative term related to the shaking of the Wii remote to perform actions in a game, this simplistic maneuver not really demanding any level of skill to execute. There are some decent uses for wiggling the controller like this, it can serve almost like an extra button that is easy to access at any time, but with the Wii’s overabundance of minigame collections and party games, waggle found itself being the only form of input for certain activities and it hardly felt like you were doing much of anything besides wearing out your wrist. The Raving Rabbids series was one of the more popular Wii minigame collections and it was certainly guilty of waggle on a few occasions, but Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time not only dispenses with any form of waggle across its minigames, but it provides an abundance of activities that make it a party game that can fill hours and hours of play despite forgoing that design shortcut.

Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time stars a group of unusual looking bunnies called Rabbids who can’t directly speak but certainly love to scream and make unusual noises. This little rabbits are mischievous beings devoted to anarchic fun, not really seeming to be driven by anything but a desire to draw the absurd out of a situation they find themselves in. When they manage to get a hold of a washing machine that can travel through time, this embrace of comedic chaos ends up leading to them rewriting the events of human history, the Rabbids visiting plenty of familiar moments in our past like the first moon landing, the sinking of the Titanic, and the creation of monuments like the Sphinx and Statue of Liberty. When a group of Rabbids lands in these important historical moments, they’ll compete in some sort of minigame that can completely alter history or keep it on its intended path but with a bit of silliness on top. For example, the California Gold Rush can become a Uranium rush instead, but if the minigame plays out differently, instead the gold rush leads to the prospector building a casino empire with the Rabbids help. You can help a caveman invent the wheel like intended or put him down the wrong course, but either way there’s going to be a monster truck involved and seeing the exact corruptions the Rabbids bring to these well known moments of the past makes the concept around the adventure already one easy to remain interested in.

To pick the minigames you want to play in Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time though, you need to make your way through a museum. There is a little menu in the pause screen if you want to teleport right into the main minigames, but the museum is packed with little side activities and amusements you can inspect at your leisure. You can put on period appropriate wardrobes you unlock by completing minigames or racking up small achievements for performing atypical actions, you can futz around with objects like breaking pottery with your Rabbid’s yell, and you can even raise or lower the pitch of a Rabbid’s voice by tilting the controller to pass the time during load screens between museum areas.

Some parts of the museum have simple minigames themselves like trying to collect a bunch of flowers in a 2D platforming area or flying through a bunch of rings around a model of the solar system, these side activities meaning every new lobby has something to explore and engage with to justify actually going to minigames on foot. Even the lobby has some unique games such as one where four Rabbids can work together to sing songs taken from both the public domain and actual licensed tracks like The Lion Sleeps Tonight, but the even more impressive extra game comes in the form of a few dance challenges borrowing their gameplay straight from the Just Dance series. As players get up and dance to match the figure on the screen, they’ll do so to recognizable tunes that almost feel like they’ve had their history altered by the Rabbids. YMCA now has a traditional Indian sound to it, Maniac from Flashdance no longer sounds like an energetic dance tune as it instead plays like a classy waltz, and Gonna Fly Now has taken the Rocky theme’s motivational angle and upped it so it is an outright patriotic tune. There are no words in the songs, but it is impressive that so much attention was given to activities you might not even find if you don’t take the time to explore.

The main set of minigames are split into a few different areas of the museum based on what types of controls they’ll engage with. Just because they’re kept in the same part of the museum doesn’t mean the games feel too similar to each other or even focus on the same period of history. For example, in the Flyarium the Rabbids strap wings to their arms and fly about the sky by way of the player tilting the controller. The flight is fairly easy to get a handle on once you understand how it expects you to move your arms to glide, but the games in the Flyarium can be something like a race against other Rabbids to try and make Mona Lisa smile, a battle to collect the most crates so you can build a statue to block the Wright Brothers from flying, and in what might be the game’s most fun minigame, battle to collect balloons in the sky where Ben Franklin is flying his kite. The balloon collection game has each grabbed balloon trail behind the player where others can fly through and steal them, and with a set of items like mines to hide among your balloons, it ends up a remarkably easy game to play again and again as different approaches and item use can lead to different outcomes.

If you end up playing against computer controlled Rabbids instead of humans you can still expect them to be fairly strong competition at times and fairly dimwitted at others. Some games like the flying races it’s pretty easy to get ahead if you handle the flying and items well, but others minigame types things can end up surprisingly close. For example over in the Runarium the minigames are all based on running around while you and another Rabbid are bound together by a little toilet paper roll tied to one of your feet. You can expect to find some races here as well, more focused on coordinating with your partner to get around dangers and find the fastest route, but the AI players can do so with ease, making them potentially hard to overcome if you’re not on the ball with your ally. Runarium also has a few other ideas though like a game where you try to help the Stock Market recover after its 1929 crash by running around and grabbing point crates to feed into your team’s resources, which since this involves Rabbids, this can mean either helping gold regain its value or lead to chickens being the new stable standard money is measured by.

The Shootarium involves players pointing their cursors at the screen to simulate guns or similar weapons, this taking different forms like players competing in the earlier mentioned gold rush minigame to see whose mineral choice wins out or players might all be working together in ancient Rome to repel the Rabbid gladiators as long as they can. Hookarium can only be played if you have the Wii Motion Plus to make reading the controller’s movement more accurate, this used for a set of games based around the idea of a fishing rod but only one involves actual fishing. One of the fishing rod game has you hurling Rabbids upwards to scale a building while another has you dragging your Rabbid behind the caveman’s monster truck to collect furry snails while a T-Rex tries to eat you, and if that sentence doesn’t really nail in the delightful insanity on show, then I’m not sure what will.

Admittedly, the humor isn’t always hitting on all cylinders. For some reason the game decides the first minigame players have to play is not only the one based on the single tragic event featured in the game, the sinking of the Titanic, but they also fill this section with fart jokes as the premise is you need to collect more beans than the other team to win. While there are a few more moments of juvenile humor this first impressions is thankfully not an indicator of the game’s overall approach to how it intends to add silly twists to the past, the game often relying more on whimsical concepts or unusual juxtapositions that the chaos-loving Rabbids can introduce to a grounded scenario.

The Bouncearium is the host to the Titanic game but has a few others that also use the same structure of 2D platforming for their games, but as always Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time isn’t content to just use the same control concept across multiple minigames. One game will have you slamming through rocks so the Rabbids can tunnel through the Earth’s core to reach Hollywood while one tied to the dinosaurs facing the coming Ice Age has players trying moving around to avoid the encroaching ice. Like the flight games the idea of outrunning the danger is used in another game, but it’s a strong one that could actually be the basis of a whole party game in itself. These minigames start slow as you navigate around the platforming or swimming area to get away from the chasing danger, but based on arrow signs you can hit, the screen will soon start moving in another direction, players constantly trying to outrun their approaching deaths and trying to rig it so other players get caught instead. These games can take a little bit to reach a challenging speed, but it’s likely so kids aren’t overwhelmed in a game that generally manages to balance having quick snappy minigames with a level of challenge often tied more to who you’re competing against rather than the design of the games themselves.

If there is one thing I have to point at as a truly flawed concept though, it’s the way it Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time handles actually seeing a conclusion to its story of history-altering chaos. To see the final cutscene, players must successfully alter the past in the twenty main minigames found throughout the museum (the Hookarium not required due to the potential need for extra hardware). It makes some degree of sense that you’d need to see all the alternate histories to see this finale even if it does somewhat devalue the still silly versions where time isn’t drastically changed. However, actually setting time on a different path isn’t as straightforward as you might hope. In some minigames when you’ve beaten them or are just about to beat them, you get to choose between an orange option or a purple option, orange keeping the past the same and purple giving you the new version of events. You need to get all the purple endings to the minigames to see the ending, but if you are playing this with a group of friends, trying to get the ending together will run into some unfortunate issues. For some minigames, the team that wins determines which ending you get, so if you are on the orange team and another player is on purple, you conceivably just have to let them win if you want the more fruitful outcome. With two players you can at least both be on purple team, but some games like the gold rush one will require someone to be on the orange side if you’re playing with more than one player. Since it’s only a short ending scene it’s not too unfortunate if you don’t get it and just enjoying the minigame designs and silly Rabbid hi-jinks is definitely more fulfilling than that small finale, but the design choice does seem short-sighted in a game that otherwise is completely focused around playing with other people.

THE VERDICT: Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time takes its deranged little troublemakers and gives them the opportunity-laden playground that is history to make mischief across, and while their humor is sometimes incredibly puerile, their unpredictable nature and subversive influence on the past makes this minigame collection funny on top of being fun. The main minigame modes have a wide spread of ideas that both fit within their theme and make direct competition with other players an exciting and sufficiently challenging affair, with some games like the ones tied to Ben Franklin and the Ice Age particular standouts for how their concept makes for something varied enough for frequent replays. With a museum rich with fun side-activities, Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time really does feel like a strong fit for a family party game if you choose to ignore the requirements for seeing the final cutscene.

And so, I give Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time for Nintendo Wii…

A GOOD rating. Long ago I had dismissed the Raving Rabbids as what seemed like loud and obnoxious mascots who leaned on jokes that could only make children laugh, but while they certainly don’t shy away from being a little juvenile, they actually make this minigame collection a lot more interesting than just its gameplay ideas. You can never really predict how they’ll choose to interact with a new scenario, and while doing something like being responsible for the nose breaking off the sphinx is practically cliche of comedies that take a look at Ancient Egypt, it’s hard not to be giddy to see exactly how the Rabbids will mess it up. Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time embraces inanity and insanity in equal measures for its scenes and the Rabbids don’t wail quite as much as their manic behavior might suggest. In fact, since you can control when they make noises and even alter the pitch, it’s a great way of adding some of your own goofiness to a scenario. Not every game type or idea is done perfectly, the singing is a bit slow, there’s a trivia portion that is surprisingly lifeless in its presentation despite having some fun trick questions, and while there is a lot of variety across the main set of 23 games, the best ideas aren’t seen to their full potential for it. You will get some new twists on the flying races or running games, but a bit more iteration in general could have really helped some of the more promising ideas draw players back even more often.

By not letting themselves rest on the basic idea of shaking your Wii remote to win, the developers of Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time were already pushed to be more creative with minigame design than many other games on the system. However, they didn’t stop at merely trying to think of fun motion control concepts, packing all kinds of extra goodies and extra activities so that Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time is more than just a menu where you pick the minigames you want to play. That may mean it’s not the best game to sit down with for some quick party game play, but if your multiplayer group is going to sit down for something a bit longer, Raving Rabbids: Travel in Time both provides a lot of little things to mess around with and wacky competitive games where the challenge and fun often comes from how you interact with the opposing players.