There are some “classic” board games that translate well to the digital medium. Even the more childish, adolescent games can make the jump from reality to video game. Connect Four would be a fantastic five-minute game in-between conference calls and boring reports. And then there are the juggernauts of German designs: Settlers of Catan and Carcassonne, Xbox Live Arcade titles that introduced many to the quality and complexity of their physical counterparts. One could say that these two games have rejuvenated the business of board game ports.
Some board games, however, should never leave the realm of reality. Games that rely on manual dexterity and tactile response, such as Hasbro’s Jenga, will probably never translate well to traditional controllers. That leaves the Wii as the last great hope for lonely Jenga aficionados, desperate to pull blocks in the privacy of their own home. Jenga World Tour could have been just the thing they were looking for, but it’s really, truly not. It’s not that the game is just bad. It’s more like the game is an affront to everything good.
You might want to strap in and brace for impact.
Let’s assume for a moment that you had some sort of deprived childhood -- spent, perhaps, stranded in the jungles of Amazon or the frozen wastelands of Antarctica -- and have no earthly idea what Jenga is. The game is simple: Wooden blocks are stacked in a tower, and the object of the game is to remove blocks one at a time from the middle of the tower and place them on top, all without knocking the structure over. It’s a game that requires patience, planning, and a shocking amount of sobriety. Above all, it requires the ability to feel out your situation. If pulling a block out of the tower is going to bring the whole structure crashing down, you can feel it when you’re nudging blocks and planning your move.
This tactile aspect is what’s lacking in Jenga World Tour. The Wii Remote’s curser is a poor excuse for a person’s hand and doesn’t simulate the experience of grasping anything. You point, you press a button, and you move the remote in a direction that hopefully will pull the selected block free. If you want to nudge a block, you press another button, again distancing yourself from the motor skills required to play well. There’s no vibration and barely any audio feedback when you’re close to making a disastrous mistake. Awkward camera angles make placing the pulled piece on top of the tower extremely difficult, and controlling the camera with the Nunchuk is more frustrating than helpful.
If the game’s lack of feedback doesn’t make the game completely unplayable for you, the graphics and sound design will drive you off. The basic premise of Jenga World Tour is that you’re competing in a variety of locales all over the world, some even in different eras of the past. As exciting as that may sound, each level is uglier than the last. Backdrops look as if they were pulled from a blocky first-person shooter from 1999, so busy with muddy textures that it’s often hard to tell what’s supposed to be happening as you knock the tower over on purpose in a fit of exasperation. The very first match takes place in what’s supposed to be an upscale apartment in Manhattan, but the only thing that stands out in the background is a practically comatose dog that doesn't even react when your tower inevitably falls. The sounds are muffled, sampled poorly, and do almost as little to rouse the player as the bland, uninspired music. Maybe the dog's the lucky one, after all.
Don't expect the multiplayer component to rescue you from this sinking ship of non-fun, either. Assuming you can convince your friends and relatives to attempt to play -- it helps if they haven't already watched you struggle against the campaign -- you can expect to equally take turns experiencing the irritation of gesticulating wildly to pull a block from the middle of the tower. Misery may love company, but your company will hate you for inflicting this game upon them.
That's the argument against Jenga World Tourwhen it's all said and done. There's no need for a digital version of this game. The only possible way a videogame version would make sense is if there were online multiplayer modes, something the Wii has barely accomplished. When you compare the $30 one would spend to the $12 price for the physical game, the only rational response to someone hellbent on purchasing this game is institutionalization followed by frequent shock therapy sessions. There's nothing in Jenga World Tour that justifies getting off the couch to put the disc in, let alone spending your precious free time attempting to play.
