When I was about ten or so, I read an article explaining how the games at a carnival are usually rigged to keep folks from winning. The hoop for the basketball toss is just a bit too small, the milk bottles have lead in them so they won’t knock over, and so on. It never stopped me from going to the fair, though, because despite the fact that I knew I was going to lose, there was still something magical about being there, smelling the cotton candy and hearing the calliope. The games of Carnival Games are just as rigged as their real world counterparts, but I’m not ten anymore, and there’s no cotton candy to be found.
Magical, this ain’t.
You start off Carnival Games by customizing your egg-headed, armless character. At first there’s only a modest assortment of shirts, hats, and shoes to choose from, but you’ll unlock more as you play. Because as everyone knows, a game’s fun factor is directly proportional to the number of accessories you can acquire for your avatar.
Once you’ve outfitted your Mini You in a manner of your liking, it’s time to hit the midway. And by “hit the midway,” I mean “choose a minigame from a series of menus.” Granted, the menus are rather fetchingly designed as signposts and game booths, but they’re still just menus. The roster of games at your disposal will be instantly familiar to fans of the fair: take aim at ducks in the Shooting Gallery, send the loudmouth swimming at the Dunk Tank, or loop rings onto bottles at the Ring Toss. If the closest you’ve ever come to a carnival is watching Big, don’t worry—each game starts with an explanation of how to play.
Where Carnival Games begins to really fall apart is in the controls for the minigames. For the “flying disc” control scheme, you flick your Wii Remote sideways, as though you were throwing a Frisbee. It almost never seems to work, though, and can only be done right-handed. Other games require you to shake the Remote vigorously to build up a meter of some kind (strength at one booth, water pressure at another) which takes far too long and leaves your arm tired. You’re not stuck dealing with these control schemes, of course; progress through Carnival Games is non-linear, so you can pick and choose what games you’d like to play. However, if you cut out all the games whose controls are aggravating or problematic, you’ll end up skipping about a third of Carnival Games’ entire roster, which at about 25 booths isn’t that big to start with.
Not all of the games are a drag, though. The Hoop Toss, Shooting Gallery, Skee-ball (they call it Alley Ball, but let’s call a spade a spade, shall we?), and the Dunk Tank are all extremely fun and enjoyably challenging. But their bright spots just aren’t enough to counteract the frustration that builds after losing yet another game due to uncooperative controls.
Carnival Games also doesn’t do much to create a sense of atmosphere. We don’t, for example, actually see the carnival that we’re virtually attending, just close up views of whatever booth we’re currently patronizing. Because your interaction with the carnival is all through menus, you never get a feeling of continuity, of actually strolling down the midway of a local fair. There’s no real sense of purpose as you play, no goal to work towards. Winning games earns you prizes and tickets, which can then be cashed in for…bigger and better prizes. If you take great joy in unlocking rotating images of teddy bears, then t his is the game for you, but if not, there just isn’t much about Carnival Games to compel you to keep playing.
The game does have a handful of genuinely entertaining minigames to offer, but you’re likely to get all the entertainment value out of it that you’re ever likely to after just a few hours. Even should madcap multiplayer zaniness occur (seriously unlikely, but all things are possible with the right medication), this is not a game that you’re going to revisit more than a handful of times. There are just too many better party game choices available for you to pay full price for this.
