Review by: Brandon "Skee-ball" Cackowski-Schnell

Realism is a funny thing. In some cases, realism is very much appreciated, such as in a football game where you expect the bad teams in real life to perform poorly in the game. On the flip side, no one wants to feel the same way a real life quarterback does when a 250 lb linebacker drives them to the ground, compacting their spine in the process. New Carnival Games the follow up to the inexplicably successful carnie simulator has realism in spades—not the good kind either as every game gives you zero feedback on how to be successful and then is over before you know what happened. Short of taking money out your pocket with every try, it is the most realistic depiction of carnival midway games I've ever played, right down to the useless prizes.

Unfortunately, what makes the game so realistic is also what makes it so unpleasant to play, much like real carnival games. For many of the game's thirty midway attractions you'll be either throwing something with an overhand toss or throwing something with an underhand toss. Sometimes you'll see an arc to tell you how close you came to banking that ball off of the frog board and into the basket. Most of the times you won't—meaning you'll have to rely on muscle memory to adjust your throw. The problem is that fine adjustments, or really adjustments of any type, don't seem to mean squat in this game, despite it using, nay requiring Wii Motion Plus. Do a medium toss on the "pitch a coin on the four leaf clover" game and your coin will go sailing into orbit as if the clover were located in the Horsehead Nebula. Dial it back a notch and watch the coin impotently fall out of your hand as if you temporarily lost feeling in your digits. Increase the speed ever so slightly and it's back to your coin doing the Kessel run in less than ten parsecs. Oh, by the way, you're now out of coins. Who wants to try again?

Not all of the games require fine tuning of throwing motions. There are some shooting games, a billiards game, a game where you turn a crank like a crazy person to pull your tractor and some "games" that involve nothing more than paying tickets to stick your hand in a hole and pull out a prize or my favorite, the game where you bet tickets on which color the drunken mouse will stagger over to. Oh, did you not pick the right color? Your prize is that your pockets are now five tickets lighter! Winner winner, chicken dinner!

Along the way you'll win prizes with ten prizes available per game. At the lower two tiers the prizes are static images of various carnival detritus but at the higher levels the prizes are animated things that do, well, nothing. The prizes don't do anything and when looking at the prize screen for a particular game there's no way of knowing what has to be done to win each prize. Sometimes you'll see arrows from one upper tier prize pointing to some lower tier prizes leading me to believe that you trade them in for the bigger one. Maybe? Or maybe those lower tier prizes combine, Voltron style, into a mega powerful upper tier one? Who knows. If you're the kind of person who likes spending their hard won tickets on things, you can use your fake money to buy wacky new items for your in game character. All sorts of crazy things like booties and angel wings are available to make your character look downright silly but don't expect to be able to make an informed buying decision because the only way to see the new item is to buy it. Oh, you don't like your pirate shoes? Too bad. Back to the tractor pull with you. Go earn some more tickets and buy something you do like. Maybe.

Whatever you decide to outfit your character with, they'll end up looking like the local village lost their idiot. I'm all for funny looking characters but there's a fine line between "funny" and "lobotomized" and when you see your character clapping uncontrollably over winning five tickets in the shooting gallery it's hard not to think that you've jumped over that line with both feet. The game supports the creation of multiple characters and every family member can get in on the fun which is great if your not into corporal punishment but still want to punish your children.

The simple fact is that New Carnival Games is not an enjoyable game. The minigames are mostly riffs on the same thing with zero feedback on how to win the blasted things. I'm not sure who would want to play this as it doesn't seem to be fun for anyone, however I didn't see the appeal of the last one and it sold like six hojillion copies. The people buying these games don't read these reviews so to them I say good luck and Godspeed. Enjoy your time on the virtual Midway. For the rest of you, better you spend your time trying to recreate the other joy of the carnival, namely deep frying everything in the pantry that isn't nailed down. Who wants some deep fried butter?