(Let’s unwrap. Future unwrapping game.)

So I bought the EU version of Let’s Tap today, which might just be the most fun I’ve ever had opening a videogame before. And yes, I know I should probably get out more. Anyway, it starts with an almost-but-not-quite-A4-sized box like this.

Slide the lovely, colourful slipcase off and you get this…

…one of the tap boxes required to control the game (in case you don’t know, you control Let’s Tap by resting the Wii remote upside down on one of these and tap the box, with the vibrations registered as control inputs). Open that up and you get…

…another tap box! And finally, inside that box…

…you get a cardboard insert keeping the game itself all warm and snug. Aww. It’s like a solo game of pass-the-parcel.

Anyway, fantastic stuff, and almost worth buying Let’s Tap for alone, especially at the rather bargainous RRP of £24.99 (though a quick shuftie online should net you the game for over a fiver less). As you may recall, I rather enjoyed the Japanese version of Let’s Tap, and am looking forward to reacquainting myself with this altogether unique Wii game.

There’s an additional surprise, too. If you have save data for Prope’s WiiWare title Let’s Catch (which launched on the service yesterday for 1000 points) you can unlock bonuses for three of Let’s Tap’s five main game modes.

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I’m still playing Animal Crossing: City Folk (or Let’s Go To The City, if you prefer) but boy is it testing my patience. Admittedly, my enthusiasm for the game waned some time ago, but my three-year-old son loves it, and so I keep visiting my village more out of duty to entertain him than because I really want to. Yesterday, something happened which nearly made me snap the disc in half.

As those of you who play the game regularly will know, yesterday an event took place named Festivale. This new event brought with it a brand new visitor to my village - Pavé the peacock. Speaking in broken English, he was a feisty little chap, singing and dancing away to a samba-style beat and requesting candy of various different flavours. I’d read in my father-in-law’s strategy guide that it might have been wise to stockpile some from Hallowe’en, but seeing as the game wasn’t released until November and I’ve not been cheating by messing around with the dates, that was impossible. I was therefore heartened to find, when speaking to one of my animal neighbours, that I could win candy from them by playing a game, but that if I lost, I’d have to give them 500 Bells. Thus began a long, expensive and arduous few hours which I will never, ever get back.

My first test was a game of rock, paper, scissors - it’s the best of three rounds, and you have to shout out an answer rather than performing the gesture. I lost 500 bells on this game, and was then tested on my ESP by another villager. Soon after, I was another 500 Bells lighter. The third game had me guessing which hand my animal chum was holding some candy was in - I got this right, but it was the wrong colour candy. The fourth game was an entertaining and well-written exchange involving a penalty-shoot-out where I and my favourite villager Chrissy took it in turns to try to save a shot from the other. After several goals, Chrissy missed and I scored, and I got to choose a piece of candy. Upon returning to Pavé, I was told I’d need three pieces, not just the one.

Undeterred by this setback, I ploughed on with the games until I had three pieces of blue candy to pass on, at which point Pavé greedily munched down the lot and gave me a piece of Pavé furniture. I took it back to my house, and put it in the basement. It looked nice, and so I decided I’d try to get some more items. Big mistake.

My play session finished several hours later. I’d visited Pavé nineteen times for ten pieces of furniture (or eight plus a wallpaper and carpet). That’s nineteen lots of three pieces of candy, which means fifty-seven pieces of candy obtained from my villagers. If I’m being generous, my win percentage was approximately fifty percent, and I’m sure it was actually much lower. Which means I spoke to my villagers well over 114 times. God knows how many repeated lines of dialogue that involved, but it sucked absolutely every single bit of fun out of the Festivale, and made me swear that I’d never try and collect a set of furniture over one day again. Snowman or mushroom furniture, where it’s one piece a day and you’ve got plenty of time to get the lot? Fine. But with this and the Jingle debacle, Animal Crossing has made the simple collecting of items more of a rigmarole than level-grinding in an RPG. Of course, some people will claim that it’s not meant to be easy to get the lot. But there’s a difference between ‘difficult’ and ‘tiresomely random’. Had Pavé given me a different item each time, then that would have been something. The fact I had no idea whether or not he’d claim to give me a ‘new item’ and then pass me the table he’d provided not sixty seconds before was the final straw.

(I’m shy of a bed and a sofa, for the record.)

Tedious collectathons, eh - don’t you just love ‘em? Well, it’s a good job my son still loves Animal Crossing, because it’s firmly off my Christmas card list this year for that particular discretion.

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A nice spot from GoNintendo here - Nintendo has some new info on its official Japanese site which says that Smash Bros. creator Masahiro Sakurai is involved in a brand new project. Naturally, this being Nintendo, there are few concrete details, but it seems to be a new second-party company working under Nintendo named Project Sora, whose rather clinical looking official site can be found here.

GoNintendo also has a quote from Satoru Iwata claiming that the game is “an experience that’s different from anything [you've played] up until now.”

Feel free to start speculating, WiiWii readers. Will this new game use MotionPlus? Will it think outside the box like Yuji Naka’s Let’s Tap? Will it really be different from anything we’ve played before? All these answers, and fewer, will be drip-fed from Nintendo when it deems us plebians are worthy of knowing more.

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Mario & Luigi RPG 3 has to be one of my most-anticipated DS titles of the year, and the latest footage of the game has me even more excited.

It seems that the brothers will spend the majority of the game inside Bowser’s stomach, with the game switching between top and bottom screen depending on who you’re controlling. As Mario’s nemesis you’ll swallow water which enables the brothers to float up to unreachable platforms, while also winding up some powerful punches to take out baddies in battle.

The combat looks to have the same timing-based attacks as the previous games, but stylus-activated moves are also available on top of the button commands. Enemy design looks even better than ever, while the attacks themselves look brilliant in motion, particularly the one which sees Luigi inflate to around ten times his normal size.

As well as the YouTube clip above, you can find more videos here and here. Oh, and should you need any further incentive to watch them, both feature an incredibly attractive Japanese model cooing and giggling over her DSi as she plays.

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If nothing else, small indie developer Semnat Studios has come up with the most stupidly brilliant game name of 2009 already, but Eduardo the Samurai Toaster has more than just a daft title to recommend it.

Its art style, for starters, is pretty unusual - a mix of pen & ink, acrylic paint and charcoal art scanned in to make for a rather unique-looking run ‘n’ gun shooter. You’ll be attacked by Peking Opera pastries (whatever they may be) and robot mangoes as you pelt through the levels, apparently shooting out various delicious pastries from Eduardo’s head to take out said foes. Well, anyone who’s ever eaten a Pop Tart will know how deadly they can be when hot.

If you’re finding the action a little too frenetic, then you can call on your mates to join in and help out, with drop-in co-operative support for up to four players in total.

The press release has a release date of ‘winter’, so it should be with us by the end of February at the latest. Will Eduardo be the toast of WiiWare? I’ll let you know as soon as it arrives.

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Earlier I discussed several reasons why existing DS owners should consider upgrading to next year’s model, but perhaps the most compelling of them all is the new DSiWare service.

Initially it’ll be the preserve of the real hardcore - those early adopters who’ve picked up a DSi just so their games look even better on those marginally larger screens and who know their way around wi-fi. (As an aside, it seriously concerns me just how many of these casual Wii owners take their console online - worryingly low, I fear.) But there should be plenty on offer which will tempt technophobes into braving online waters. There’s a new camera-based Wario Ware which uses your own shadow to manipulate the on-screen(s) action - after each set playing back the footage of you acting like a buffoon. There are two new Art Style titles - block-puzzling Aquario, and intriguing brain-cruncher Decode.

Perhaps most promisingly of all, there’s the entirely free Ugoku Memo Chou, which has already picked up quite the following in Japan, as it allows you to quickly create simple yet effective flip-book animations from your touchscreen scribbling. Already there are a few videos circling the darker recesses of the internet of fantastic anime-inspired nonsense, but the above example is a good demonstration of what the software is capable of. It could be one of the most essential pieces of software this year, and will (and likely already has) sell a good few DSi consoles on its own.

As long as enough gamers make use of the service, DSiWare could be one of the handheld’s biggest assets in 2009. Now let’s hope for a Spring release for the DSi so we don’t have to hang on to experience these quirky and unique titles which are currently wowing Japanese players.

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Sonic creator Yuji Naka has been a busy bunny of late - his new development team Prope, not satisfied with sweetly innocent throw-and-catch sim Let’s Catch, has crafted a game where you don’t have to pick up a controller at all. Because Let’s Tap is controlled by tapping on a cardboard box, with an upside-down remote positioned horizontally at the end of it.

Weird? Yep, very. But it works. The game comes with a box intended for this very purpose, though you can use pretty much any container of a similar size - the example shown when you’re learning the controls is a tissue box, so you’ve got an idea of the kind of proportions I’m talking about.

The first of five modes is named ‘running tap’ which sees you guiding a simplistic figure across a neon track against three other runners - tapping with your left and right hands helps you to run faster, and pressing down sharply executes a jump, allowing you to clear hurdles. Once I’d recalibrated the remote to a slightly more sensitive setting (I was really having to batter the box to action a leap) it worked just fine. There are plenty of levels, and it’s bound to be a hoot in multiplayer, assuming you’ve got a few small cardboard boxes lying around (a DS Lite box is just about perfect).

There’s a rhythm-action game which requires you to tap along with the beat - while the tunes are really quite catchy, it seemed quite hard to fail. It wasn’t entirely clear when I should have been tapping with my left hand and when with my right, but that’s the language barrier for you. With most of the menu options in English, it’s fairly import-friendly, but this was the one game where I wasn’t sure about what I was supposed to be doing.

The third mode tasks you with removing hexagonal tiles, which are stacked up with an item on top - the idea being that you remove them all without letting said object slip. You tap to select a block, tap again to stop a meter showing which direction you’ll be removing it in, and then gently tap to shake the tile free. It’s very tricky, but will undoubtedly be rewarding once you master it - I got down to two layers before losing out.

A strange Balloon Fight-esque game is the fourth option - instead of pressing buttons to keep your avatar afloat, you’re powering a strange creature by tapping, and destroying obstacles with missiles fired with a firmer whack on the box. I’ve not spent much time with this yet, but it looks like it could be addictive.

Finally, there are several visualisers - ranging from fireworks displays, with explosions triggered whenever you tap, to sumi-e paintings where your fingers daub splats of paint or longer brushstrokes for more vigorous taps. The fishtank one, where you’re presented with a series of koi carp, turtles and other fish as you create ripples in the water, is utterly gorgeous. One of these offers more of a game-like experience, rather akin to those bath toys where you press to squirt bubbles to manouevre balls into small containers - here you tap to guide spherical gems into jars of increasing height.

It’s all fairly slight, but it does offer a pretty unique experience (even if it could reasonably be replicated with the DK Bongos). Innovation for innovation’s sake? Perhaps, but then it’s nice to see someone trying something different on Wii, and it’s quite beautifully presented. It’s very Japanese, but let’s hope Let’s Tap makes it to Europe - though it would certainly benefit from a budget price. I’ll have a full review for you very soon.

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I’m playing the Japanese version of Hudson’s Job Island: Hard Working People (or Help Wanted if you live in the US). The confusion over its title is not the only baffling thing about the game. Even by Japanese standards, this is completely off its box, and easily the maddest minigame mash-up on Wii since Taito’s Furu Furu Park.

The idea is that the planet is facing imminent doom in the form of a comet. You - playing as one of two androgynous siblings whose hair has curiously been styled into a spanner shape (though that’s nothing; there’s an old man who has a lightbulb at the end of his ponytail) - have to take on jobs to earn money, which is used to purchase items from a TV shopping channel which can either buy you more time or help destroy the incoming Extinction Level Event. You can also buy new uniforms which unlocks more jobs for you to tackle, though you’re best specialising in a few roles rather than spreading yourself too thinly, as you can level up each job to earn more money (though the games get harder as you progress).

The jobs themselves are wide-ranging - there’s a fun fishing minigame which sees you steering a boat with the analogue stick and casting your net with a remote flick (there’s a slight lag, so timing is everything) while another sees you taking photos of a skydiving team as you plummet towards the ground. Another sees you steering an injured man around a busy hospital on a gurney, tilting to guide him around wandering patients and picking up doctors who’ll help you pick up the pace. You can get bonuses for completing the tasks in hand within the time limit or by earning a certain amount of money, while the game throws you a few curveballs by giving you specific jobs to do on certain days, with success rewarding you with extra time before the comet hits, or bonus points to buy more items which can assist you in your daily tasks.

While the in-game graphics are fairly rudimentary, the cartoonish presentation is charming and entirely bonkers - once you’re rid of the first comet, you get a larger asteroid headed your way, which I got the old man to fend off by whacking a magical golf ball at it, which I purchased from the shopping channel. The asteroid was replaced by a gigantic bowl of ramen, which in turn is followed by an alien with a planet-sized Afro. The minigames themselves are hit and miss - as you might expect - but there are some thoroughly enjoyable tasks to complete, and you’re rarely forced into doing a job you’re not keen on.

I’ll bring you a full review soon once I’ve played some more, but I’ve quite enjoyed my time as a Hard Working Person and am looking forward to seeing what apocalyptic danger I’ll be facing next. It’s released in Europe on 31st March, with no concrete release date for its US debut.

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I had my heart set on resisting the temptation to import a DSi, but seeing the line-up of software Nintendo has planned for the handheld’s own download service has changed my mind.

Today, Nintendo issued a financial report briefing which also happened to provide info on the software available for the forthcoming service. Software that just about turns the console from ‘expensive luxury’ to ‘essential purchase’. DSiWare starts up in December and the line-up is looking very tasty indeed.

First up, there’s going to be some Art Style games - in the vein of the ones on Wii, but probably even simpler if that’s possible. There are six of them in all, one of which looks rather like Art Style CUBELLO, and they’ll cost 500 yen.

Next up are some of the individual minigames from the Wario Ware series, like Paper Plane. Not the microgames but the longer unlockable ones. They’ll cost 200 yen each, which seems a bit steep. But still: Paper Plane!

More excitingly, Utsusu! Made in Wario (MIW being the Japanese name for Wario Ware) uses the DSi’s camera to take shots of the player, whose silhouette is then used to control the minigames, in a kind of micro-EyeToy style. Intriguing.

Best of all, though, is Made in Ore - here you’ll be able to make your own Wario Ware minigames, designing the sprites, the music and even the conditions for winning a level all by yourself. Brilliantly, this will connect to WiiWare game Asobu! Made in Ore, whereby you can upload your own minigames and play them on the big screen with friends. Amazing.

So, the indie spirit is still alive and well within Nintendo. It’s just residing in Japan (temporarily, at least) at the moment.

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Disaster: Day of Crisis apparently didn’t even reach the top 50 Wii games on release week, let alone the all-formats charts. Hardly surprising, seeing as Nintendo didn’t seem to want anyone to know it existed. I’ve already given my opinion on the game, but in case you don’t trust my ravings, a couple of big sites have reviewed the game today.

First up is Eurogamer’s review, an excellent critique by the reliable John Walker. It only gets 6/10, but the review’s well worth reading because it’s almost as hilarious as the game. Except this time it’s intentional.

Second up is a less amusing but no less effective analysis, this time from IGN. Has to be said that this one is closer to my own opinion - the game gets 8/10, with reviewer Matt Wales concluding thusly:

“Like the disaster movies it takes inspiration from though, Day of Crisis is ultimately more than the sum of its parts. When it works, it’s a relentless, thrilling assault on your senses; a huge grin of game. And when it doesn’t, when it starts to wobble precariously on its own flimsy parts, it’s still compulsive in its creativity, inexplicable in its uniqueness and, most importantly, one thoroughly fun ride.”

He’s right - for all its faults, you can’t say that Disaster isn’t fun, because it really, really is. While other games have pretensions towards art, Monolith’s crazy actioner is just content with entertaining its players. And there should always be room for games which do that.

Played Disaster? Let me know your thoughts in the comments thread below.

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