Some games should not be played alone, and that is particularly true of any game with “party” in the title. Case in point: puzzle game Boom Blox Bash Party. Sit on the couch by yourself playing the single player mode and you might dismiss Bash Party as a middling casual game, but invite a few people over and the game becomes something quite different; an excuse to mock your friends.
Single Player: Something That Would Be More Fun if I Were Still Five
For the most part, Bash Party involves throwing things at towers of blocks to knock them down. To throw a virtual baseball or bowling ball at your target you hold down the A button on the Wii remote then flick your wrist forward as you release the button. Throw it well and blocks will fall, hopefully knocking down other blocks on their way down. Some blocks will explode, taking down even more blocks. Just keep throwing until there are no more blocks standing.
I enjoyed knocking down towers of blocks when I was five years old; I would pile up my alphabet blocks just for the pleasure of knocking them down again. As an adult I find this less entrancing. While there is some challenge in knocking the blocks down as efficiently as possible, the game feels more like an activity than a game, and that activity is throwing balls at towers of blocks, which is kind of boring.
Sure, there’s more to it than that. Sometimes you grab a block and fling it into others. Or you throw a green chemical block into another chemical block to create an explosion. In one of the most interesting challenges you throw paintballs to create matching rows of blocks that will disappear when they touch. And the physics engine that makes those towers fall so precariously is well done.
And yes, there are a lot more challenges and variety in Bash Party than in last year’s original Boom Blox game. And the little block-like creatures that wave and dance around the towers are cute.
Multiplayer: The Party Begins
But I just wasn’t feeling it. I said this to my friend David, who I met through a mutual enthusiasm for swing dancing, and he asserted that the original Boom Blox was a lot of fun in multiplayer mode. He agreed to come over to my ramshackle apartment to play the game with me, recruiting two other swing dancers, Yi and Jeremiah, to join us.
David and Yi showed up around 9:30 or so. Yi fell in love with my cat Tropicata but was eventually persuaded to stop petting her so we could play the game.
There are a lot of multiplayer selections in Bash Party. In some arenas you throw balls, in some you fire cannons, in some you grab and fling objects, each player acting in turn.
We started out with a simple game in which players compete to knock down the most blocks. Yi, who had shown such an affinity for cats, turned out to have a less sure hand with the Wii remote. Almost every ball she attempted to throw would drop like a stone in spite of David’s determined efforts to teach her to release the A button at just the right time.
David did a better job, but had apparently spent more time working on his trash talking skills than his gaming skills. If I had a bad throw he would tell me I threw like a girl, but he still lost almost every time. At one point he did win a round, announced that like a fine machine he had to warm up before he could become unstoppable, and then lost the next 6 rounds.
Yi had more luck with a game in which you fire cannons at opposing players’ block ships. You light a match to the cannon and then point it at an opponent’s stronghold. Without the need to flick-release, Yi did much better, although I found the cannon levels rather uninteresting.
The most engaging set of levels we tried were a Boom Blox version of shuffleboard in which you have a set of blocks that you throw baseballs at, nudging them into point areas labeled with numbers. As long as a block is in a point area you will get that number of points with each turn. You can knock opponents’ blocks out of point areas, and even knock blocks entirely out of the arena.
Once again, Yi could not throw the ball hard enough to hit many of her blocks and David continued to prove more skillful at throwing zingers than baseballs.
Then Jeremiah showed up. He brought along two friends, Maritsa and Ben. Since Bash Party allows a maximum of four players, David and Yi gave their remotes to the newcomers. Yi went back to playing with Tropicata and David kibitzed.
Like Yi, Maritsa began by announcing she had never played the game before, yet her first throw was a fast ball down the center that knocked over a great many blocks and got a startled “woah!” from the group, taking the sting out of David’s “throw like a girl” insults.
In spite of my new opponents’ evident skill, I continued to win, even though the three of them kept giving one another advice on the best spot to aim for. In a level in which a set of beams held up blocks, they all discussed which beams could be knocked out to release the most blocks, yet the three of them could not beat the one of me.
I was feeling pretty smug by this point, but that didn’t last. When David suggested that the shuffleboard-like game was worth revisiting, all my skill disappeared. Even though I had just played and won in this game against David and Yi, I suddenly was the bottom scorer every time. This seemed to please David, who may not have stopped to think that if they could all beat me and I could beat him that my loss was his as well.
David also began insisting that there should be a house rule that you could only knock opponent blocks out of the arena by bouncing your own block into them, even though the game allows you to throw a ball directly at anyone’s block. When it was pointed out that it wasn’t actually his house to make rules in, he countered that I was a lousy host and that since it had been David who had thought to offer my guests the dried mango he found in my file cabinet, he was more in charge of the house than me. This wasn’t a bad argument, but everyone ignored his house rule anyway.
Around 1:30 we decided it was time to wrap up, and my guests all went their separate ways.
