Time to check another console off the list. This time, we are going to go with something a little more modern.
As I've alluded to in previous posts, I consider the 7th console generation to be very much modern, even if it is going on 15 years old. It was a very interesting time in gaming, a time where online play was becoming the norm and video games were reaching new audiences outside the standard "gamer" stereotypes. The "bit wars" were over, this was the first generation of consoles I never once heard referred to by the number of bits they had (it largely stopped in the previous generation, but early media surrounding the Dreamcast and PS2 did refer to those consoles as "128-bit"). A war that started between Sega and Nintendo ended with two new powers, Sony and Microsoft, at the top of the gaming industry. The former decided to take itself out of the console market, electing instead to become a 3rd party software developer. The latter was on the defensive after its GameCube console failed to match up to the sales numbers of its contemporaries. But unlike Sega, Nintendo wasn't about to give up on the console game. For one, they were still very much competitive in their home nation Japan, where Microsoft's neon green, Mountain Dew fueled machine has always been a non-starter. They were also (and continue to be) the undisputed kings of handheld consoles across all markets. But when it came time to announce their brand-new home console, Nintendo, ever the innovative company, decided to go in a different direction from its competitors.
While there were a few naysayers, people were generally excited when they first saw the Wii. Had another company announced such a product, I'm not sure it would have been that way. But despite its lack of success in the previous generation, gamers trusted Nintendo would be successful with their latest idea: motion controls. Some called it an innovation, others called it a gimmick, but like it or not, it was going to be the primary method of control of Nintendo's new console. It also became apparent Nintendo would focus more on making the Wii a family console, with more focus on titles designed for less serious gamers. They openly admitted the Wii was not as powerful as its contemporaries. Of course, Nintendo didn't completely forget about those gamers. They offered plenty of titles that played like more normal video games and accessories to allow those gamers to do so. The Wii was going to be a true console for everyone. Oh, it was also half the cost of the XBox 360 and a third the price of a PS3. All these factors led to tons of sales and what felt like even more unique games. Of course, this was a double-edged sword. It led to some of the most interesting, unique and fun games I've played (the Mario Galaxy games come to mind). Unfortunately, it also led to tons, and I do mean tons, of lousy, gash grabbing shovelware being dumped onto the console. And that, unfortunately, is what we are going to start with today.
I'm sure most of you have at least heard of "The Amazing Race," a reality TV show that has run on CBS in some capacity in 2001. In it, teams of two race around the world, with the goal of reaching a select city before the others with a prize of $1 million. Along the way, teams would be presented with various challenges to slow their progress or earn advantages. So yeah, it's basically every reality show you've ever seen, though it has to be given credit for being one of the earlier examples of the genre. It's a family friendly show and it's certainly popular, so I guess, maybe, it would make for a decent video game? There were certainly routes they could have gone. An adventure game where you have to find clues and explore various world cities. A well-designed point and click adventure. Hell, even an educational, Carmen San Diego style game. But that's not what they did. I've talked about this before in my King Kong and Golden Compass reviews, but a lot of times, companies will simply slap a popular IP on a random game and just toss it on store shelves. That is exactly what happened here.
I can't say I'm surprised, but this barely qualifies as a game. The Wii was filled with stuff like this, just random collections of minigames with a random license applied to them. The Amazing Race was sort of like that, but I wouldn't even call it that. It's basically just a bunch of menus, with the occasional minigame in between them. These minigames last maybe a few minutes, and none of them are that interesting. The game makes no effort to use the Wii's motion controls while also making no effort to make it actually feel like a video game. It's bland, boring and has absolutely no reason to exist other than to sell a few thousand units to Wii owners who were fans of the show and didn't really play many video games.
Let's start with the graphics and sound, as there isn't much else to talk about. The graphics aren't good, though I can definitely say I've seen worse. The Amazing Race looks a lot more like a late 6th generation game than it does a mid-7th gen game (it came out in 2009, I probably should have mentioned that). The characters have a weird, deformed cartoony look and the cities involved pretty much exist only as flat, static backgrounds. The minigames are acceptable, but bland and uninteresting visually. The music is barely existent, it's just a bunch of stock music that plays over the random menus and during mini games. I wish I could say a little more, but I just can't. It's a generally mediocre looking, boring sounding game. Standard operating procedure for shovelware.
If the gameplay were any good, that would be forgivable. But the gameplay isn't any good, in fact I could barely call it gameplay. You can choose the number of legs to each race, ranging from 5 to 20. Trust me, you are going to find it difficult to complete any more than 5. Your race will start in a random city, where you will be given money and immediately prompted to choose your flight to the next destination. You must balance between how quick that flight would be and how much it costs, which seems like it will give you your first shot at gameplay. And it does. By giving you a menu and making you pick a flight. There's no mini game, no puzzle to solve, you just have to pick a flight before your computer opponents do. That's it.
Once you do get to the other cities, you will be given some brief facts before being forced to participate in a minigame. None of these mini games are particularly interesting, they range from random games that ask you to shake around the Wiimote to geography quizzes. I'm a huge geography nerd, so those were actually the most fun for me, but think about it for a second. I just said my favorite part of a video game was taking a geography quiz. Not a good look. As for the rest of the gameplay? There is no rest of the gameplay. That's it, that's all you do.
And what is your reward for all this? You get to unlock clips of the show. Now, I have to give the game some credit, these are some pretty long clips. But at the end of the day, if I wanted to watch the show I would just...watch the show. It feels weird to get all "back in the day" about a game that's barely more than 10 years old, but this was before streaming and video on demand, so that wasn't all that easy, but still. I will also note that you can't really play the game single player. You have to have an even number of players, either two or four, there isn't an option for one or three. I guess that would be okay, but most of the mini games aren't even improved by having two players. In fact, some of the mini games are for one player only, meaning one of the teammates has to just sit and do nothing. In a game where you do a lot of sitting and doing nothing, doing more nothing is a major problem.
Look, I probably could have told you The Amazing Race was going to be a bad game before I even turned it on. It's amazing to me how what constitutes a "bad game" has changed. The Amazing Race isn't broken or unplayable, like Rocky and Bulwinkle or Rise of the Robots. But it's still a boring, lazy, cash grab designed to separate unknowing casual gamers from their money. There is absolutely no attempt to give gamers any substance, or even style, and that is what truly makes a modern game bad. Again, you probably didn't need this review to tell you this, but the Amazing Race is a terrible video game that isn't worth your time. It's games like this that gave the Wii a bad reputation and, in some respects, it is deserved. Just know that there are plenty of quality titles for Nintendo's 7th generation console... but this isn't one of them.
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