Step right up and get your money taken in Carnival Games, a scattershot minigame collection that offers 25 interpretations of real-life carnival competitions. In real life, most of these games are scams. Carnies hoot and holler at would-be suckers to get them to try to win a prize--all it'll cost is a couple of bucks. In the case of Carnival Games, the shady carnie is publisher Global Star Software, and for $40, you can play a variety of games that are typically either too easy or too broken, and rarely anywhere in-between. And your prize for playing? A bunch of virtual toys and a few more mediocre minigames to play. If that isn't a classic carnie scam, nothing is.
The game initially offers up 25 different minigames to play. These challenges run the gamut from skeeball, to target shooting, to knocking over milk containers with a baseball, to the classic test-of-strength game. All of these games use the Wii Remote in one fashion or another. Skeeball is mechanically just like the bowling game from Wii Sports, the ring-toss game has you flicking the Wii Remote as if you were actually tossing a ring, and anything that involves throwing a ball requires you to fling the remote forward in an overhand motion, sort of like passing the football in Madden.
This guy looks pretty trustworthy.
The trouble with all of these games is that none of them are much fun beyond a couple of plays. Some, such as the milk toss and the shooting gallery, are so easy that you would have to have some seriously diminished motor skills to fail. Others, such as the football toss and the "nerves-o-steel" game (which has you moving a metal ring over an electrified wire, while trying to avoid getting shocked), just don't feel right at all. They're not impossible, but the controls feel too dodgy to allow for any level of consistent success. Others still, such as the lucky cups game, are utterly strategy-free in that they completely rely on fateful bounces in order to win. A few of the games are just amusing enough to be worth playing multiple times, but most simply aren't.
