Review: WiiPlay Motion – A Great Family Game

by Lori Cunningham

If you love playing Wii with your kids, you’re gonna love WiiPlay Motion*.  WiiPlay Motion includes 12 games unlike any you’ve ever played before.  It has a lot of fun family games with friendly competition.  WiiPlay Motion works with the Wii Remote Plus to get the most out of playing the games.  Fortunately, a black Wii Remote Plus controller is included in the box!  We only had one Remote Plus before, so this allowed two of us to play at the same time.

Cone Zone:  My kids and I LOVE this game, we can play it over and over again.  To play you hold your remote upright and balance the ice cream as the giant ice cream scooper in the sky piles on more scoops.  The scoops get ridiculously high as you balance your cone as if your life depended upon it.  We’ve gotten up to 45 scoops before it all comes piling down.  This game also has a soft serve version too where the ice cream comes spiraling down and you need to gingerly wrap the ice cream in the cone to pile it higher.

Wind Runner: Another one of our absolute favorite games.  To play you’re geared up with an umbrella and roller blades.  You make your way through the obstacle course by raising your umbrella to catch wind and fly at times to get “diamond” points.  Your goal is not only to reach the finish line first, but to also catch the most diamonds.  Sometimes, we play for hours challenging each other on this game.

Flutter Fly:  My kids love challenging each other to this game.  In Flutter Fly, your Mii is a set of three balloons.  Your goal is to float through obstacles to reach the top first.  Along the way, things can pop your balloons, making your balloons slower to reach the top.  If all three balloons pop, you go down a couple of levels and try to catch up to your opponent again.  My kids love to play me on this one, as they have a lot more experience playing it and they can beat me on it most of the time.

Trigger Twist:  This is one of the games behind the reason for the E 10+ rating.  In this game, you have a “shooter” and shoot at balloons and UFO’s, but in some of the screens you’re shooting ninjas.  My son LOVES this game, but yes, I would say it concerned me that he was shooting “people.”  Nonetheless, I’ve played this game with him many times and it’s a very fun, adrenaline-pumping game to play.

Pose Mii Plus:  Pose Mii Plus is a fun game where you need to position the remote just right so your Mii can enter into the upcoming template without bumping it.  A series of templates come right at you, so you need to constantly assess and move your remote accordingly.  If you completed the first stage successfully, you move onto the following stage, and the one after that, etc.   I marveled at how well my son does at this game; it definitely takes some practice to proceed to the next level.

Veggie Guardin’:  This is your basic whack-a-mole game.  Again, this game is part of the reason for he E 10+ rating.  The premise of the game is that varmints are trying to steal your veggies from your garden.  Smacking your remote in a downward fashion whacks the moles.  Up to four players can play.  It gets crazy and is a lot of fun.  The better you play the higher levels you achieve.

Skip Skimmer:  This is a fun game in which you pick up a stone and skip it across the water.  You get points by the number of skips that occur on the water.  As you progress, more stones are available to you like hearts, spaceships, musical stones, etc.  Each of these stones have personalities of their own which make skipping the stones even more fun.  You can also play an Olympic type of game where you skip your stone in a tube and try to have it skip through floating rings to gain more points.  Up to four people can play adding to the fun and excitement of this game.

The above 7 games are our top favorites.  There are also five other fun games including:

• Teeter Targets – a pinball type of game where you smash targets to gain points.
• Jump Park – where you jump and bounce on a wild trampoline park to gather points and race others to get to the top.
• Spooky Search – grab ghosts floating around the room and drag them into a machine.  Up to four players can play at once.  Some are hidden so you need to listen to your remote to get a better idea of their location.
• Star Shuttle – you need to thrust, tilt, and twist your remote to capture parts to take to your space station.  This game requires some definite training and skill.  It was a bit too hard for my kids.

 A Mom’s Perspective

I definitely recommend WiiPlay Motion.  I have played WiiPlay Motion countless hours with my kids and we’ve really enjoyed our time together.  Amazon sells WiiPlay Motion for $47.86 plus free super saver shipping.  Getting the included Wii MotionPlus remote is a good deal considering  Amazon sells the black Wii Remote Plus controller for $36.69.

I am always on the lookout for fun family games…games that unite our family and create memories.  We still play board games as a family, but with today’s generation, kids are looking for more interaction with their “game piece.”  I like the fact that some WiiPlay Motion games allow family members play at the same time as well as those games where we need to wait our turn.  Waiting patiently is a good virtue for children to learn.

As the holidays become closer, WellConnectedMom.com will be reviewing more games to help you decide which ones are best suited for your family.  For a look at some of our predicted winners, see The Best Upcoming Family Games from E3.

What are some of your favorite Wii/XBOX/PlayStation/ 3/DS games?

*Nintendo provided WiiPlay Motion for me to review.  All opinions and statement are my own.