Game developers desperate to pay the rent often think, “I bet I could make some quick cash with a mini-game collection for the Wii. An assortment of simple, colorful games at a budget price released before Christmas might catch the eye of a few gift-shopping grandmothers and keep this company going so I don’t have to take that job in my Uncle’s car wash.”
Some mini-game collections are abysmal, some are fun, but there are so many that I get a little depressed every time another one shows up in my mailbox. That being said, I have to admit to finding the mini-games of Circus Games rather pleasant.
20 Mini-Games That are More Fun Than Not
The theme, as one might surmise from the title, is games under the big top. There are 20 games in the collection, although many of these games are simply slight variations of one another.
In fact, the vast majority of the games involve either shooting, in which you point the Wii remote where you want to fire and press the B button, or throwing, in which you point the Wii remote where you want to throw and flick the nunchuk stick. Shoot at planes bothering King Kong, throw balls at a dunking booth, shoot at monsters in a haunted house, throw pies at clowns. The game does a decent job of differentiating these mini-games by putting a different twist on most of them, but they are still fundamentally the same thing.
A handful of games go beyond the shoot/throw formula, as when you must keep a tightrope walker balanced as birds land on his balancing pole or garnish hotdogs as they slide down a conveyer belt. There are also a couple of memory games, in one of which frogs sing and you must then flick them in the right order.
Some Lazy Design Typical of Budget Titles
Most of these games are fairly enjoyable, so it’s a shame that the developers of Circus Games weren’t willing to go the extra mile. There are a few minor things that would have improved the game enormously. For example, since the main game screen takes about 20 seconds to load, it would have been nice to have the option to replay a mini-game right when you finish it, instead of being forced to sit through the load time and reselecting the game and then sitting through that game’s load time. Also, in quick mode, which allows you to choose any games you want, there is nothing in the game selection method showing what you have scored the last time you played.
Besides quick mode, the game has a story mode, which is a fairly perfect example of just going through the motions. There is some story about a kid stuck in the circus after hours that is painfully dull and is told not with animation but with still pictures (with little animated movements tossed in occasionally). Then you simply have to play a certain collection of mini-games before you can play the next collection. But since you can play them all the mini-games in quick mode, and since story mode is so utterly worthless (although at least it does show you your score from previous plays), you will want to skip this altogether.
There is also a two-player mode that allows you to play against a friend, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes by taking turns.
