Go Diego Go! Safari Rescue (Wii)

“Based on Nickelodeon research with preschoolers and their families to determine how the platform’s motion-play capabilities are absorbed by younger children, Go, Diego, Go! Safari Rescue was designed with 13 intuitive Wii-centric motions that maximize the engineering of the Wii Remote for a preschooler. Taking on the role of Diego in a race across Africa, gamers stomp to scare away lions, jump with Baby Jaguar, paint stripes on zebras, climb up ladders and swim across the jungle river by mimicking those actions with the Wii Remote.” (from Metacritic)

After some research on the net, I decided that Safari Rescue was going to be the first game I tried to get Aidan to play on the Wii.  I mean, sure, he likes holding the Guitar Hero guitar and watching the notes scroll by, but he’s not really playing.

The set up

A mosquito lands on a magic wand, turning it into a magician.  The magician decides she doesn’t like elephants and turns them to stone.  Well, some of them.  Diego and Baby Jaguar have to find and use a magic drum that can turn the elephants back.

Seriously.

But, you know, we don’t have to really worry about characters’ motivation do we?  It creates some tension for the kids and gives them a goal.

The execution

The story and controls are explained by Diego in cut scenes.  The cut scenes are just like the TV show, with Diego addressing the audience directly.  The graphics are the same as you’d expect from the show and the character voice is identical too.  OF COURSE THAT MEANS HE’S CONSTANTLY SHOUTING! But somehow Diego’s not quite as grating as DORA!

Gameplay is a typical side-scrolling adventure.  Diego has to travel along the path, jumping over the occasional obstacle, retrieving the occasional object behind trees, rocks, bushes, and sundry other things.  There are platforms that boost him to other areas, trampolines, meerkat holes, zip lines, muddy hills, and other interesting devices to make it a bit more than a simple side-scroller.  Again, the graphics and sounds are essentially what you’d expect from the TV show.  Every once and a while you get interrupted by the backpack or the camera, or the occasional story-advancing cut-scene, but it’s pretty much get Diego from one end of the scene to the next.  There are tokens to collect along the way, and food for various animals, but there is no consequence to not collecting “enough” tokens.  Also, there is no “dying”.  If you fail to jump over some obstacles, Diego trips and mutters something (oops?) but keeps on going.  You can’t fall off ledges.  You can’t fall off swinging vines.  You can’t miss jumping on the swinging vines.

The crowning glory on the game is the control scheme.  You control Diego entirely with moving the Wiimote and a single button.  The Wiimote is held horizontally, and to get Diego to walk to the right, you tilt the Wiimote right.  Want to walk left?  Tilt it left.  Jump is pushing the button.  Which button?  Well, the “2” button (under your right thumb) works.  So does “1”.  I think even “A” works.

Climbing ladders is tilting the Wiimote left, then right, then left, then right, etc.  Getting things out of trees?  Push the button to climb the tree, and then shake the Wiimote.  Push over a rock?  Push the button to brace, then push the rock with the Wiimote.

The control scheme is just brilliant and a full realization of the potential of the Wii.

But it gets better.  The game also has a parental assist mode.  For some of the more “complicated” manoeuvres, a parent, sibling, or friend can perform the exact same motion as the main player with a second Wiimote.  This gets the child beyond parts that might be more difficult, but also brings in an element of teamwork and cooperation.

The reaction

The boy loves this game.  He’s able to follow the story line.  He’s able to perform all the control actions.  It’s not scary.  It’s not violent.  It’s not frustrating.  It’s Diego (for some reason, this is a plus for him, but a minus for the parents).

From an adult point of view, the tasks are repetitive and your focus will wander.  Not so Aidan.  He was thoroughly enjoying himself.  I’m not ashamed to say that he played for over an hour the first time.  We’ve limited his play time since then, though, to about 20 minutes once or twice a day.

The only other down side is that pressing on the “D” pad causes Diego to interrupt and give a little cut scene on how to move him using the Wiimote.  Given that the “D” pad is under the left-hand thumb, this can be very irritating as the toddler accidentally presses the pad again.  And again.  I wish there were some way to prevent the “helpful” cut scene from happening.  Also, the little graphic showing how to use the Wiimote shows a stylized person tilting the Wiimote back and forth.  Aidan tried to duplicate that motion identically and of course all it does is twitch Diego back and forth.  And back and forth.  It didn’t take a long time for Aidan to work it out, but it was a bit misleading.

The verdict

Wow, a home run with the first swing!  This game is absolutely awesome for the preschool set.  It features someone they’ve inevitably seen on the TV.  Gameplay is preschool-friendly, non-violent and non-frustrating.  The Wii’s control scheme is amazing.  It’s both interactive and physically active.  It’s probably not a game for kids much older than … oh 6 or so, but it’s perfect for the 3-6 crowd.

This past weekend has been interesting in terms of seeing Aidan interact with technology.  First, while chatting with Grandma, she was getting him to move the mouse to various places on her face (her nose, her head, etc).  Now, I had never seen Aidan try to do this before — and he was doing it with very little problem.  Adding to the level of difficulty is that he was using a trackball !

The next day I was sitting on the sofa with my Eee and he crawled up on my lap.  On a whim, I tried to find some Flash game for him to play (since that’s where kids games seem to have gone) and found the incredible companion site to one of Aidan’s favourite shows (and ours):  Peep and the Big Wide World.  That site has a number of different games, some of which were easy for Aidan, some of which were harder.  His favourite game was one where you made Quack jump on one of three tubes of paint (each of a different colour) to squirt paint onto a fence.  The goal was to combine the primary colours to match the colour on the card that Chirp was holding up.  Aidan’s favourite part of the game was making Quack jump on a nearby hose, which causes water to go everywhere, cleaning up the fence and soaking Chirp in the process.  And, as any fan of the show knows, Chirp hates water.

That time, Aidan was using the touchpad on the little Eee.

*I* can’t use the trackpad reliably well.  Although I suspect it has something to do with the size of the pad compared to the size of my hands. :)

After a blog post from Kerry, I started in earnest looking for a real video game appropriate for Aidan.  I was originally thinking about the DS, what with it supposedly being a kid’s game system.  But then I was picking through the racks at the Superstore and saw some Wii games that might be appropriate too.  After picking some up … and putting them back, I headed home to do some research.

Video games for the pre-school crowd are just not *there*, you know?

But consistently one stood out, and on Monday Aidan and I wandered up to Toys R Us and purchased “Diego Safari Rescue” for the Wii.

I’ll write a real review of this soon, but suffice it to say that it’s gone over quite well.  And … Aidan’s conquered this control system too.

I continue to be astonished at what a different life Aidan is having (and will have) compared to what Gwen & I have had.

Hmmm, a dramatic title for a post with no substance!  Just to bring the Kayla story-arc to a close:

• After hiking on Monday, a cliff collapsed on the Sea-To-Sky highway (on the Tuesday) closing it for 5 days.
• It rained for a good part of the rest of the week.  Gwen and Kayla did lots of shopping (Gastown, Pacific Centre, etc).
• Friday Kayla took us out to dinner, back to Shabusen.  It was going rather well until Aidan … um, soiled himself.  And the booth bench.  And his shoes.  Ugh.  I got him all cleaned up and then Aidan and I drove home (and I tossed him in the shower) while Kayla and Gwen finished up and then walked home.
• Saturday we went to Lynn Canyon in the morning, and the Gwen and Kayla went to Playland that afternoon.

The Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge

The view north from the Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge

Kayla and Aidan in the Lynn Creek Park

Kayla beside Lynn Creek

Playland at PNE

• To end out the day, Carla and Tomer (new engaged!) came over and we had a games night, mildly interrupted by the Festival of Light finale fireworks.
• And on Sunday, we put Kayla on the plane to head back to Nova Scotia. According to her mother, she arrived safe and sound … but overtired and excited.

This weekend past, we took Kayla to stay with a friend she had in Halifax who now lives in Metchosin.  This involved getting everyone up and going early Saturday morning to head to Tsawwassen to catch the 8 am ferry.  Early was leaving the house at 6:30 am.

It was a nice trip across to the Island, lots of sunshine, calm waters, and not too chilly.

After a stop in Sidney to grab some breakfast from Smitty’s, we headed to Metchosin.  Metchosin is south-west of Victoria.  Getting to Kayla’s friend’s house was interesting … we had the wrong street address and the GPS took us to a place that didn’t make a lot of sense.  With a little bit of a description from Kayla and the belief that we couldn’t be that far out, we eventually found the base (CFAD Rocky Point) and appropriate PMQ where her friend is living. Good thing because it turned out that none of the 3 cell phones we had with us were getting signals that far out.

We dropped Kayla off and headed over to visit with my cousins Mike and Gert and their kids.  It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen Mike’s kids, and wow, they’ve grown.  We visited a short while and then the 3 of us headed out with Mike to do some geocaching on the grounds of Royal Roads University.  Mike has one of those high-sensitivity GPSr’s (a Garmin Rhino) and was getting much better reception than we were.  Even still, he was smoking hot, nabbing all the 5 or 6 caches we got that afternoon (well, actually Gert got one too).  Gert came and met us half way there.  Aidan, unsurprisingly, took quite a shine to Gert.

We headed back and had supper with Mike and Gert and their daughter Marie.  After a great supper, we drove up the Malahat to Nanaimo to stay the night before heading up to Campbell River the next day.

It was the first time we’ve stayed with Aidan in a hotel room.  It was rough.  He just wouldn’t go to sleep, insisting on talking to us and singing.  When the fireworks started going off (no, seriously, fireworks) at 10 pm, fortunately he was asleep.

We found out that night that our Sunday plans had changed and instead of going up to Campbell River, we were going to meet my Aunt Jean in Nanaimo.  That meant we had some time to kill that morning, so we decided to do some geocaching.  Well, none of us slept particularly well, so you can imagine the moods we were all in.  Cranky 3 yr old, cranky 34 yr old and cranky and pregnant 30-something.  Adding to the geocaching difficulty were the Nanaimo bath tub races.  Muggles everywhere!

We only managed to grab two caches, one  of them down near the berth of one of the new “Super-C” class ferries.

After a bit of communication SNAFU, we found Aunt Jean on the edge of Nanaimo.  Yes, found.  The GPS came in pretty handy.

After lunch with Aunt Jean (note: Aidan has been saying “See you later, Sunshine” since then) it was a leisurely meander back down towards Victoria.  We stopped in Cowichan Bay and grabbed some artisan cheese (from Hillary’s) and bread from the wonderful “slow food” stroll along the shoreline there.  After Cowichan Bay, we headed into the Cowichan Valley and stopped by the Merridale Cidery and I picked up some hard apple cider.  I had been to both places while participating in the Grape Escape 3 years ago.

After that, it was pretty routine.  We headed back to Metchosin (and took some pictures along the way) picked up Kayla (Aidan really missed her) and headed back up the highway to the ferry.

Good thing we had reservations … we would have had a one or two sailing wait otherwise.  We were a little bit late leaving and didn’t pull into Tsawwassen until 10 pm.

Whew, what a long weekend.  Then the hike yesterday.  Now, it’s 9 pm and I’m ready for bed.