Bust-a-Move Bash! ^(Wii)

Genre: Puzzle Publisher: Taito Developer: Majesco Players: ?

By Keith B (11th Jun 2007)

Dust off the NES, kids, and save your money.

It’s almost too easy to give updated and re-released puzzle games bad reviews. One hit wonder; you’ve played it once you’ve played it a million times; one-trick pony; a one-off--almost any threadbare cliche will do. And while it’s easy to hate in principle the perpetual haters--those who celebrated the original and lambasted its later installments--it’s also hard to argue with them. It’s akin to disliking chocolate because it always tastes good. Even Tetris, brilliant though it was, never really went miles beyond its most basic, monochromatic GameBoy version. The same can be said for most puzzle games: gist be got, game be done. Business must be good for those in the puzzle-bashing racket--and maybe for good reason. 
 
Bust-A-Move Bash!, Majesco’s latest incarnation of the Bust-A-Move franchise, does little to undermine the almost knee-jerk puzzle-game dismissals of most reviewers. For those who have never encountered Bust-A-Move, a recap is in order. The game is simple: using a mini-cannon you must fire balls from the base of the screen either directly or by bouncing them off the sides of the game-play area at the top of the screen. There the balls, all one of several colours, are lodged. Your goal is to eliminate the cluster of balls at the top of the screen by matching the randomly produced to-be-fired ball with the already existing balls; the more balls matched, bridged, and eliminated, the more points gained. This more or less summarizes the series’ progress over the last decade or so. 
 
So what’s new or, at least, been modified for this latest release? Well, beyond the addition of more punctuation--Bust-A-Move Bash! flirts with a seemingly impossibly high words-to-punctuation ratio--almost nothing. A run-of-the-mill shooting game has been added and interspersed, while a practically impossible eight-player (yes, eight-player) play mode has rather arbitrarily been concocted. 
 
The shooting game, which, I suppose, picks up on the object-firing Bust-A-Move mainstay, is a decently conceived if poorly executed add-on. Between each main level (so every ten stages), this firing game appears: several differently coloured balls float across the screen, while you, both hands clutching the Wiimote (one tapping away at the plus-minus to switch colours to match the aimed-at ball, the other locking and firing), try to clear the screen of the offending orbs post-haste. This clumsy process--which makes you feel something like a near-sighted fat man, little screwdriver between corpulent fingers, trying to fix a pocket watch--is little improved by the mini-game’s redundancy. 
 
If not necessarily a worse addition, then the eight-player play mode is good example of a late-night game-designer brainstorming session gone awry. “Here’s an idea,” one designer beams as his colleagues pick at hours-old Chinese take-away, “how about an eight-player mode?” “Yes,” they all agree in unison, “so let’s all go home and figure out how to make it work tomorrow.” Problem is, of course, that no one actually did figure it out. So how does it appear to work? Well, eight players (four with Wiimotes, four with Nunchuks, which is indeed clever, though a tad inconvenient if you don’t have four love seats bandying about) all play simultaneously on the same game screen, just as one would by himself. Unfortunately, though, after about three minutes, anything resembling cosmic order has been lost, as all but the MENSA-certified have lost either physical or mental control. This insanity--and, yes, it’s the bad type of insanity, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining rather than One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest--is exacerbated by numerous unindentified flying objects: balls waiting to be exploded for extra points or some other inscrutable function. Needless to say, don’t call over seven of your dearest puzzle-enthusiasts over for a lax night of geometric fun; there’s simply none to be had. 
 
The control scheme proves little better than the game’s quizzical add-ons. Just as the interspersed firing game lacks a natural, or at least sensible, control scheme, so the overall employment of the Wiimote and Nunchuk is less than impressive. The default mode has you wagging your Wiimote back and forth, the on-screen canon mimicking most of your pendulous movements. Problem is, though, that the developers forgot to add a feature to adjust motion sensitivity. As a result, only some, rather than all, of your movements appear on screen. This is particularly frustrating for two reasons. One, because all Wii titles should by now have adjustable motion controls, as standard setting have already proven useless with this technology; and, two, because moving the canon back and forth is the crux of the game: if you can’t fire accurately, especially during the faster-paced later levels, then you can’t win. 
 
The other control schemes prove little better. The Wiimote-cum-joystick is little more accurate than the default pointer scheme, and as about as tiring as churning butter. The D-pad control scheme might be the worst; in lieu of sensitivity issues, the D-pad scheme offers old school tedium. Sitting in your living room, playing a thirteen-year-old game with what appears to be an elongated NES controller, you’ll wonder if you’ve been transported back to your youth--maybe even the womb. Regardless, the control schemes are an utter failure. Apparently no one at Majesco Games got the email from Nintendo: the Wii is supposed to make gaming easier and more intuitive, not more tedious and clumsy. 
 
Visually the game is more or less identical to its precursors--crispness has naturally improved much in the years since the game’s introduction, but the aesthetic remains decidedly Bust-A-Move. This is, in part, to be expected: the Wii, thus far, hasn’t proven itself to be the console upon which graphic revolutions are to be built. With a few exceptions-- maybe Red Steel, for instance--Wii games generally lag graphically behind the games of its competitors; only upon the rarest of occasions will a Wii game exceed even last-gen standards. 
 
Maybe worst of all, Bust-A-Move Bash! is frightfully easy. Calling it a puzzle, maybe even a game--the less considerate might go so far as to say that this later installment is little more than video-based busywork--seems to stretch the words’ allowable limits. Not only is the game easy, though, but it’s also needlessly long and redundant to the point of folly. The good people at Majesco Games, somehow deluded into believing that some segment of the video-gaming public--even those who do not play games, but have stumbled, half-consciously, into an arcade in the last decade--hasn’t played some version of Bust-A-Move. To compensate for this, the developers lard on the levels (for those craving more, simply switch to the aptly named Endless mode). How many times do we have to do the same thing before we feel we’ve completed a game with a self-satisfied expertise? For those already familiar with the game, mastery is but a few levels away; for those new to the game, proficiency will be acquired shortly thereafter; and for those possessing but one hand, one finger, and half a frontal lobe, by level 250�"a mere half way into the game�"you’ll be salivating onto your drool bid with hearty satisfaction faster than when your handler says “mashed potatoes.” Let’s be clear: Bust-A-Move Bash!, for all of its tedious controls, mind-boggling multiplayer mode, and its penchant for punctuation, is in many ways the exact same game we’ve all played a million times. It is, indeed, a good time to bash re-released puzzle games.