Welcome to the Warthog Report, the home for my fiction and non-fiction. This post is part of the regular feature ‘Let Me Talk To You About,’ where I ramble about creative works of any medium that I enjoy. You can adjust which segments you receive here. It’s time for a trip to a forgotten theme park.
Nintendo hardware generally launches with a title meant to showcase what the system can do, the most famous example of course being Wii Sports. But I’m writing this to talk about the one on the unfairly maligned Wii U system, Nintendo Land, an excellent demonstration of the console’s gamepad controller, Nintendo history, and an overall great time.
The titular themepark is home to twelve attractions themed around different Nintendo games, too big to be minigames, too small to be full games. Six of these attractions are focused around multiplayer while the other six are meant to be played on your own. The multiplayer ones stand out for using the gamepad for some fun asynchronous multiplayer that no other console can do locally.
While you can navigate the game using menus, you can also walk through the theme park to reach each attraction with your Mii character. The park is laid out in a ring, so finding the attractions is not difficult. And as you play attractions you earn currency that can be spent on a pachinko game in the central tower to unlock decorations that are automatically added to the park, filling it up and making it more lively.
Back when the servers were up you could also see the Miis of other players around the park accompanied with their posts on Nintendo’s now defunct social media Miiverse. This concept of a hub area with social posts would later be copied by the Splatoon games even after the shutdown of Miiverse.
Guiding you through the park and its attractions is Monita, a floating monitor with a single robotic arm. She’ll sometimes play a role directly in the attraction itself, like playing the part of her evil doppelganger Dark Monita or the damsel in distress Princess Monita.
And the theme park aesthetic carries over to the attractions themselves, where all characters are either Miis in costumes or animatronics and the environments have that theme park fakeness to them. You don’t play as Mario, Link, or Samus, you play as Miis dressed up like them.
As a fan of lesser known Nintendo series I also appreciate some of the choices of what to theme attractions on, which include the usual suspects and the likes of The Mysterious Murasame Castle. It’s always nice to get a reminder Nintendo still cares enough about Takamaru and his game to give it the occasional nod here and there.
While there’s no linear progression to the game, each attraction has five stamps you can earn by fulfilling certain conditions and a star next to the name for either getting all the way to the end or just playing it a lot. And some of these attractions can be a little difficult to get full completion on.
Of the twelve attractions, my favorite of the whole batch would have to be either Luigi’s Ghost Mansion or Donkey Kong Crash Course.
Luigi’s Ghost Mansion is one of the multiplayer attractions where the player on the gamepad is on their own and the other players using the TV and wiimotes are on a team against them. Here the gamepad player is a ghost and the wiimote players are ghost hunters.
Both teams in this attraction have the same zoomed out view of the playing field, but the ghost can only be seen on the gamepad screen. The ghost hunters have to pay attention to wiimote vibrations to know when the ghost is near and zap it with their flashlights before it grabs them. The game ends if the ghost has grabbed and knocked out all hunters or if the ghost hunters have depleted the ghost’s health with their flashlights.
It’s simple enough for people to quickly join in after just the short in game tutorial, but there’s some solid depth to it that can come out once you’ve been playing with the same group for a while. Which made it one of the highlights of Thanksgiving for quite a few years.
The other multiplayer attractions follow a similar model where the gamepad player having their own screen is vital to the game working and there are multiple maps to play on. For example in Metroid Blast the gamepad player controls a replica of Samus’s gunship and flies around the map while the wiimote players dress up like Samus and fight on the ground.
Donkey Kong Crash Course is themed around the original Donkey Kong and has you move a cart through an obstacle course with the gamepad’s gyro sensor. Sometimes you need to be going at the right speed to make things work, and there are parts of the course you can manipulate with a button press. It’s simple, but difficult and very rewarding to finally best. Especially once you work out how to skip certain parts.
It’s definitely the multiplayer attractions that make the strongest argument for the gamepad, but having one of the best parts of a game be the gyro control part is an impressive feat. I spent a good amount of time mastering that attraction and earning all of the stamps and star for it.
One of the reasons I like Nintendo hardware is that it tends to be distinct and playful, and Nintendo Land put this strength on full display. Most consoles have games that can easily be replicated elsewhere, but the Wii U and some other Nintendo systems provide games that can only really work on that hardware.
Now I think it’s time I went and paid Monita a visit.