Post Description

M&M’s Beach Party is a collection of six beach and carnival style games. They promise summer fun, but instead deliver the doldrums. The games themselves aren’t so terrible, but really bad controls and a lack of good instructions make this collection very difficult for young gamers, and there isn’t much here to interest older gamers. 

The games are available immediately and are scattered around an island. Each one can be played against in-game characters, or against real people, each with a Wii-mote. Besides the six games, there are seashells to collect; these will garner additional powerups and extras for the games. 

The games are: Skeeball Race; Mr. Runch Slam, an arcade style game with a hammer; Kayak Race; Beach Volleyball; Colornator, an arcade paint shooter; and Ring Toss. Each game uses the Wii-mote only, as the nunchuck isn’t used. 

For each game, there is a graphic description of the game rules and controls. The instructions are difficult to understand, even for adults, let alone children. And, the pictures show an odd alignment of the Wii-mote. For instance, in Beach Volleyball, the Wii-mote is pictured sideways, which leads one to believe that it should be held that way to play. Not so. It is held straight in front of the player, not sideways. The instructions are too wordy, also

Beach Volleyball is one of the better games, but the controls are hard to use even on the easy level, and it takes too long to finish a game. The winner has to be two points in the lead after the first 10 points. That is way too long. The other games are not fun to begin with, and are made more exasperating by unresponsive controls. There is not a good connect between the motions with the Wii-mote and what is happening on the screen. The worst game is Mr. Runch Slam, which is difficult to win no matter what level is played, as the AI character is always much better. This game entails slamming a hammer down on a mini-catapult, which launches a ball at a disk that is floating by in the water. It’s almost impossible to actually make contact between the hammer and the catapult.

Besides the games, players can collect seashells in order to earn extras for the games. The extras are all right, but collecting them is boring. Players use the directional keyboard on the Wii-mote to run around the island, looking for the seashells. When they spot one, they only need to run over it and it is theirs. 

M&M’s Beach Party has some good ideas for games, although there really should be more than six for this type of game. However, the unresponsive control system and unclear directions really detract from any fun that may have been had. Kids will become frustrated, and adults bored.



platform : Nintendo Wii
Region...: NTSC                
languages: English               
format ..: cISO                    
source ..: DVD                     
Method...: WBFS Manager  
size  ...: 440mb