I got a bit of windfall this week, so The Redhead and I decided to treat ourselves to a couple video games. The Redhead got My Spanish Coachfor the DS, and I got Boom Bloxfor the Wii. I got Boom Blox for two reasons: a) I figured I would like it better than Mario Kart Wii and b) I couldn’t find Mario Kart Wii.
I’m sure I’m committing a bit of heresy here when I say that an EA game ranks higher on my priority list than a key Nintendo franchise, but, when I played a few minutes of Kart in the store a few weeks back, I felt underwhelmed. It looked like a slightly more polished Double Dash, and it played like the superb DS version I already own. The motion controls irked me a bit. And, after firing up a three-way match on the DS with my brother and his fiancee, I realized that I would far rather play Kart that way than on a shared screen. I realize that the Wii version has Internet play, but so does my DS. I get my ass kicked on it. It’s no fun.
So, Boom Blox. Awesome. It’s often compared to Jenga, but it’s so much more than that. It’s essentially a physics engine, one that comes with the tools to craft your own Rube Goldberg machines and moving body nightmares. There are tons of Jenga-like topple tower puzzles, but that’s just scratching the surface. It’s a great party game as well, ripe for trash talking. My only complaint is that the developers seemed obliged to put shooting galleries and escort missions into the game. The former severely taxes the Wii’s processor with too many rendered objects and their accompanying physics calculations grinding the CPU to halting slowdown. The latter is just dumb. I HATE escort missions in any format.
