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Nintendo: Wii Previews

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Preview

Let's Tap

Format: Nintendo Wii

Developer: Prope

Publisher: Sega

Genre: Mini Games

14-Apr-2009 Tapping into the brain of Sonic creator Yuji Naka

8 Comments

A lightning-fast blue hedgehog with a two-tailed fox at his side. A flying jester-type character who lives in a dream world. And now, the world's first controller-free game.

Sega veteran Yuji Naka had a hand in the creation of fan favourites Sonic The Hedgehog and NiGHTS, and he's rightly hailed as one of the most original thinkers ever to grace the videogames industry. But Let's Tap is probably the strangest entry on his CV thus far. As the blunt, self-explanatory title suggests, you place your Wii controller face down on the Let's Tap box and the vibrations from your tapping are then reflected on screen in the various mini-games.

Tap And Unwrap
Exactly how they are reflected depends on the game you're playing. The flagship game of the package seems to be Tap Runner, a pretty straightforward racing game for up to four players. But it's no Track & Field-style tapping frenzy; it is in fact a lot subtler. Keeping your cool and maintaining a steady tapping rhythm is the way forward. Tap too hard, and your colourful little opaque avatar jumps, losing vital seconds in the scramble toward the finish line. Tap too lightly, and you simply won't run fast enough.

That's not the end of it though. There are tightropes which require gentler, more considered taps, balloons to pump up, hurdles to negotiate and plenty of other hazards which make things more interesting.

As with so many games dependant on the Wii Remote's motion-sensing capabilities, there are a few instances where it's a little unreliable, which can grate in single player. But quite frankly, Tap Runner isn't designed for solo play - get four people together and you begin to understand what it's all about. With the playing field levelled, Tap Runner looks like being a highly intriguing entry in Wii's ever-expanding catalogue of impressive multiplayer titles.

Next up is Silent Blocks, a futuristic fusion of Jenga and Connect 4 (or connect three, in this case). The aim here is to remove blocks from the tower to connect three of a kind, which in turn disappear. Playable solo or with up to three friends, your average game goes like this: you tap once to stop a cursor, which scrolls up your tower, then tap again to select the angle at which you'll pull the block out. Then there's more tapping in order to wiggle the block out from under its brightly-coloured buddies. It's a well-thought out game mode and in multiplayer, with the extra incentive of stitching up your rivals, it's a blast.

Sega wouldn't let us play the other three game modes available in Let's Tap for some reason, but the one that interested us most from the demos on show was the single-player-focused Bubble Voyager, a Balloon Fight-esque odyssey in which you're tasked with negotiating levels of automatically-scrolling levels full of obstacles via the medium of - yes, you guessed it - tap. Rhythm Tap seems pretty straightforward - keep in time with the Guitar Hero-style action with a well-timed tap, while Voyager mode can be described as an Electroplankton-style ambient music and visuals plaything.

It's a case of so far so good for Let's Tap. Could Sega have crammed a few more modes into the game? Probably but nevertheless, Yuji Naka's unique use of the Wii Remote looks destined to become a cult favourite and potentially the quirky party gaming hit of the summer.

Tom East