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Wii Fanboy Review: TV Show King
Posted May 13th 2008 5:00PM by Eric Caoili

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Gameloft's first WiiWare entry, TV Show King, might turn away most gamers with its casual premise and 1000 Wii Points tag, but the publisher has made an effort to pack value in the trivia title -- 3,000 questions, Mii integration, and a game show atmosphere complete with a smarmy host and a busty blonde. Is all that enough to warrant its $10 price? Read our review to find out!

TV Show King starts with you selecting one of your Miis as your game show character, which is a nice, albeit expected, touch. Perhaps to make sure everyone is the same height, though, the implanted characters all seem to share the same body type, ignoring those extra pounds you specified when originally creating your Notorious B.I.G. Mii. The game also pulls from your Mii collection for the remaining contestant spots (four in total) and rustles a group of your system's wandering avatars into the studio as the audience.

You're given limited settings to adjust before the game starts, which is probably best considering TV Show King's casual audience. You can mark the amount of rounds you want to play -- three, six, or nine -- and your desired difficulty -- Normal, King, or Genius. For the purposes of this review and to make sure we felt smart at the end of it, we left the settings at three rounds on the King difficulty.

Keeping with its game show theme, TV Show King begins with its spinning logo and a clapping DJ while the camera pans over the studio set and audience. A spotlight scans the crowd before calling down your Miis to the podiums, just like in The Price Is Right, though the game's soundtrack never ventures from its bland music into anything iconic.

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The host, Jerry, an uninspiring man with unfortunate eyebrows, leads you into the first round of questions grabbed from a range of topics from entertainment to science. Players use their Wii remotes to point at and select the correct answer from four options as a 15-second timer counts down. You can see what other players have picked, but TV Show King makes up for it by rewarding more money to the players who first select the correct answer. Depending on your answer, a pleasant or discordant noise will play on your Wii remote's speaker to notify you if you're right or not.

After a few questions, Jerry introduces a "special event" in which, for the remainder of the round, the first player to answer a question correctly wins a significant cash bonus. Once the round's questions have been exhausted, players are invited to spin a wheel that can just as easily reward you with bonus money as it can leave you bankrupt.

The wheel will be a controversial point for many from the beginning. as it's never explained how to effectively spin the wheel. Some might feel the rewards and the risks are too much -- it's possible to win $15000 from a single spin. The wheel can also make you hand over a a sizable portion of your savings to one of your opponents. Even if you opt out of spinning the fortune wheel, there are spaces on the circle that allow other players to grab your cash. Some will welcome the break from TV Show King's formula, though, and it's an opportunity for lagging players to catch up.

The wheel spun and the damage done, the show's top-heavy presenter, Angela, directs you towards a board with the current rankings. Following that, you're taken through another similar round with the same "special event" and wheel-spinning.

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The third round brings a random twist to how the answers are presented. Depending on which mode the game picks, Scratch Quiz or Light Quiz, players will have to scratch at buttons with their Wii remotes like a lottery ticket to uncover the answer underneath or use their controllers as flashlights to reveal the four options.

Once those shenanigans are out of the way, the two contestants with the highest cash count face off in a trivia duel. Whoever answers five questions correctly first steals half of the other player's money. Afterwards, all four players are ranked by how much cash was in their pot at the end of the game.

And that's TV Show King! There's also a single-player trivia mode that challenges you to answer as many consecutive questions correctly as you can, but it's hard to imagine anyone having fun playing this game without friends. Though your scores are tracked and saved, TV Show King doesn't offer any online features, so you won't be able to share any records with your crew of trivia-game-score-obsessed friends.

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Where the game really suffers, though, is in its replayability. Even with its total of 3000 trivia questions, you've seen everything TV Show King has to offer in terms of presentation after two ten-minute playthroughs (which go by even quicker if you skip the segue cutscenes). More unique events, format variations, and an expanded audio track would have helped a lot to keep the rounds feeling fresh. Hearing Jerry's "Impressive!" compliments after each correctly answered question gets old quick.

Despite those flaws, is it worth the $10 Gameloft is asking for it? Only if you have a group of friends over who don't mind TV Show King's tiresome host and risking their earned lead to a wheel of chance.

Final Score: 6/10

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“SHOOT NOW, WIN PRIZES LATER”
TOURNAMENT & SWEEPSTAKES FOR STAR SOLDIER R ANNOUNCED

Players Can Sign Up on Hudson’s Website Beginning May 27

REDWOOD CITY, CA – May 27, 2008 - Hudson Entertainment, the North American publishing arm of Hudson Soft, today announced that registration for both a tournament and a sweepstakes for the recently launched galactic shooter, Star Soldier R for WiiWare™ on Wii™ begins May 27, 2008 and will go through June 24, 2008, concurrent with the contests.

For players who want to see if they can achieve the highest score in Star Soldier R in the nation, Hudson Entertainment is hosting the 'Star Soldier R "Shoot Now, Win Prizes Later" Tournament & Sweepstakes', beginning at 12 a.m. May 27, 2008 and runs through 7 p.m. on June 24, 2008. Gamers will have one month to vie for the high score in Star Soldier R’s “5-Minute Mode” where the top players on the ranking leaderboards have the chance to win prizes. Two rounds of tournament prizes will be awarded based on players' scores. To sign up, players must register on the tournament registration page, located at (http://hudsonentertainment.com/tourn...urnament_id=2).

The first place winners will receive Hudson's Top 5 Wii Games along with 16,000 Wii Points™, 10th place winners will receive 10,000 Wii Points, and the players in 16th place will win 4,000 Wii Points. For the sweepstakes, 10 users will be picked in one random drawing to win prizes. For more information about the contests please visit the registration page.

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WiiWare

Protöthea (one player, 1,000 Points or $10)

This is a 2D top-down shooter, the kind the Wii isn't exactly hurting for, but in this update to the years-old PC original there are more levels and better graphics. You use the thumbstick on the nunchuk to control your ship, and the Wiimote is used to aim your fire as you fly around the game's 10 missions. IGN has a few videos of the game in action, and it doesn't look bad at all.

Toki Tori (one or two players, 1,000 points or $10)

This was released in 2001 on the Game Boy Color and was very well received then, as the awesome trailer tells us. This is a 70-level platforming puzzle title where you use your weapons and abilities to grab all the eggs. Someone can pick up a second Wiimote and paint clues and suggestions on the screen, which is a nice touch when you're playing with a second person, and the description even notes that the Wii Message Board is used in a unique way. What that is, they're not saying, but it's unique!

Virtual Console

Ninja Combat (NEOGEO, one to two players, 900 points or $9)

A side-scrolling brawler from the system no one could afford back in the day, Ninja Combat should give you some love if you want to pound face and are tired of Double Dragon. The player sprites are nice and big, the throwing stars add a nice feeling of ranged combat, and you get new characters and weapons to spice things up, but this is a by-the-numbers effort that won't hold many surprises or nostalgia for most gamers. Easily skipped.

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Nintendo adds new and classic games to the Wii Shop Channel at 9 a.m. Pacific time every Monday. This week’s new games are:

My Pokémon Ranch (Nintendo, 1 player, Rated E for Everyone—Comic Mischief, 1,000 Wii Points): The Pokémon phenomenon debuts on WiiWare with My Pokémon Ranch, a game that lets you watch as Pokémon and Miis interact with each other for the first time. Enjoy the relaxing ranch life by viewing your ranch and its Pokémon, taking pictures and sending those pictures to your friends via the Wii Message Board. The more Pokémon and Miis you bring to your ranch, the more fun it becomes. My Pokémon Ranch can be linked with the Nintendo DS Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl Game Cards to deposit the Pokémon you’ve caught in these games in your ranch. You can deposit a maximum of 1,000 Pokémon from up to eight different game cards. Make your ranch livelier by playing with your friends and family.

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If you've been pining for some more imports in the US, you're in luck today - There's two of them. You might think one of them was in fact released outside Japan, but the contrary is true - It, surprisingly, never was.

That game is Dig Dug, the arcade game from Namco where you control "Dig Dug" (Later officially named Taizo Hori), a digger tunneling his way through the earth in order to eliminate the monsters lurking underneath its soil. He can do this by either dropping rocks on them or by inflating them until they pop. Dig Dug is 600 points because of import costs.

The other import is Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa. If you've managed to sample some of Konami's Parodius series you might know the titular character Upa - He appears in a few of them as playable character. Bio Miracle Bokutte Upa is a fun little platformer and well worth a look. It was originally released on the Famicom Disk System, then ported to the regular Famicom a few years later - This is the disk version. It costs 600 points.

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