ESRB: E +10
System: Wii
Genre: Party Game!
Players: 1 – 4
Publisher: PDP
Release Date: October 15th, 2009

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If you’ve been around since our E3 coverage, you shouldn’t be too surprised that I was anxious awaiting the arrival of the game Squeeballs Party.  I’m excited for the Xbox 360 version that will come complete with it’s own version of motion control, but that’s not what we’re here for now.  Instead, I want to talk to you about the Wii version that was released about a month ago.  However, if you’re one of those types of people who plays a lot of party games: Super Smash Bros., Rock Band, Wii Sports.  Stop reading and just go order the game now, through our Amazon store.

I’ll just have Jazz keep all the Squeeballs company while we wait for you to come back.

Okay, so you want to know more?  Let me help you with that.  First, I was lucky enough play this game for a while at E3.  And you may have heard, was immediate enamoured of the adorable little creatures that you get to be utterly mean to throughout the challenges in this game.  They’re cute, they make funny sounds, but ultimately you do damage to them or with them in almost every challenge.  Now, at E3 I only glanced at the Wii game, and spent most of my time with the 360 version, so I’ll admit when I first got the Wii version, I was a little worried about the quality of graphics I was going to get.  But I shouldn’t have been worried.  The game looks fantastic.  Each cute and scary looking little Squeeball is adorably rendered on your television.

So, what about these so called challenges?  The game toutes over 150 challenges are waiting for you, and while I don’t think I got that far, I can say, I’ve played A LOT of Squeeball challenges in the past two weeks.  So much so that my arms were sore on several occasions because sometimes I didn’t want to stop playing because I couldn’t wait to see what the new challenge category would be, and sometimes that was because I hit a really tough one!  I still can’t manange to get Octo skipped across the water right.  Technically, the 150 challenges are based on 11 main challenges with the rest being some sort of tweak on one of those 11 ideas.

Now, about the multiplayer.  4 controllers is best, some of the challenges are short enough that passing controllers back and forth isn’t a big deal.  But there’s others that are simultaneous challenges, which means you need at least as many for the people that are playing.

And before you go thinking that this ‘party’ game is just one in another long string of challenge games released for the Wii, it’s not.  Most of the challenges are unique and adorable at the same time, and though some of them will get a little tiring, the challenges do get genuinely harder, but not inhumanely possible.  Plus, there is an equally nice story to go with the challenges, where you, a nice toy tester somewhere an island in the South Pacific must put all of these 12 Squeeballs through their trials in order to be safe for kids.  It a nice touch to have a unique story to go with this great party game.