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Looking for good family Wii games
Calling all Wii-sters! The only reason I bought the Wii last year was so that we could play games together as a family. Too tired at the end of the day to haul everyone in the car to the tennis court, I imagined playing tennis in the living room and getting in a four or five sets every evening during cocktails. I could skip the trip to the gym, play with the kids, and savor a beverage (and maybe even a bit of cheese and crackers). The reality was/is that the wife grew tired of tennis after about three matches and my four year old’s swing must more like a ballet pirouette. Tennis was less than exciting, and for my daughter, age eight, plaintively frustrating.
So I joined Gamefly with the idea that we could try lots of movies, Ã la Netflix. We then tried
Mario Kart Wii. What a game. Lots of excitement and fun cars. Four players can play, though my wife only joined in one time before pronouncing it too stressful. However, for the rest of our merry band, we had a great time. My four year old was oblivious to the fact that he was always last. I cribbed by reading all the on-line cheater notes I could find, and within a few games, my daughter was wiping the floor with us in every race.
This was so much fun, I increased our subscription to two games and ordered Ratatouille, in Wii form. This was a mistake. Despite a description that it is good for four players, the game basically allows only one person at a time to solve the little rat’s puzzles. Small mini-games exist, but can only be accessed once you reach certain levels, which we appeared to be too incompetent to achieve, except by using cheater codes (thank God for the internet!). We never figured out how to remove ourselves from whirlpools, which rendered the game pretty much useless after a while. I finally sent it back.
We moved on to Deca Sports. Looked fun, but again, we could find no way to play with mulitiple players at one time, so we sent it back.
Wacky Races was next. This is a fun game, especially for little kids, and even for dads for a while. Unfortunately, it requires that everyone has a nunchuck to play. We only invested in two nunchucks and I’m not about to buy a third, so Wacky Races was gone in two days.
And that’s it. Now, only Mario Kart Wii remains and I’ve kept it so long I might as well have bought it, which I’m sure is part of the Gamefly business model. Does anyone out there have any good suggestions? My kids know that the Wii is only for weekends, and only if everyone is playing, which seems like a fair rationale to buy the thing in the first place. There’s no reason TV or video games have to be bad per se, but I do think parents should find ways to use them to stimulate involvement with kids rather than as a babysitting device, as tempting as that may be for both parents and kids.
