Too many games today are bleak and feature desolate worlds filled with dark blacks and grays. Comedy once prospered in videogames, but it has become a lost art form it seems when it comes to games. However, along comes Rayman Raving Rabbids, and with its flare for the lighthearted and comical, it remains a game that is simple fun and will leave you with a smile on your face.

THE STORY SO FAR
While having a picnic with his little blue frog looking friends, up from the ground pops the rabbids (rabbits basically). After kidnapping your friends and throwing you in a prison, the rabbids force you to compete in their gladiator games where you are the combatant everyone wants to see fail in their games. As the story moves on, the bunnies start hating you for not losing at their games and then ultimately they quit coming to see you, and then finally you prove yourself the champion and they love you (your prison cell starts off grungy, but gets better looking as the story progresses). As you complete each tourney, you'll win a plunger. I know, stupid prize, but it won't be long till Rayman finds a use for the plungers and the ultimate way to escape. The game is actually pretty light on the story elements, as the only cutscenes you get are a few that are played multiple times over, but the story is still cute and funny.

SINGLE PLAYER: GAMEPLAY
The game isn't really a single game, but rather a collection of 70 mini-games. Unlike many games where you are given a series of game traits that carry throughout from beginning to end, the 70 mini-games continue to mix it up and keep things new from one level to the next, though there are some that repeat throughout the game and only get harder. The dance sequence game plays out once each level set, but it is so fun and cute you won't mind getting your groove on with it each time.

Since there are so many mini-games, it would be impossible to list them all, but just to name a few, you'll: dance, pull worms from teeth, milk cows, jump rope, navigate a brain, smack choir boys, draw food, reunite pigs, race warthogs, skydive through smoke, run, whack bunnies, close bathroom doors, and many more.

Unlike Super Monkey Ball, which also had a ton of mini-games, each one is presented here with plenty of information and diagrams to show you what you must do and never once did I start a level not knowing how it should control. The game does use the nunchuk attachment, so you must have it to play the game. There are so many ways in which the controller and nunchuk are used, it would be impossible to list them all here from memory, but you'll use the controller to point it like a gun, shake the nunchuk to reload, alternate shakes to make you run, keeping in time by shaking nunchuk or controller in time with moving rabbids, shake the controller to whip a warthog, flick one or the other to jump in the air, etc. A good bit of the games you'll be able to breeze through in one try, while others will require some experimentation to perfect them to the level specifications, but only one (closing bathroom doors) suffered because of controls, while all the others worked perfectly fine with the controls.

Once the game is finished, you can go into the Score Mode and compete in the individual mini-games in order to complete them and unlock your best score, and then after that you can take your code online, plug it in, and see how you stack up in the ratings. It's sad there is no Xbox Live feature that would enable the game to automatically do this for you, but I guess it works.

The real joy that goes way beyond the leader rankings is simply experiencing the game and basking in the humor. The cute design of the rabbids, plus the sound of them, usually equals a good time right there. However, when you start having rabbids gets blown up, tossed, shot with plungers, smacked on the head, and even seeing them dress up like Sam Fisher from Splinter Cell, you've got a game that will have you laughing out loud more than once.

MULTIPLAYER: GAMEPLAY
Take the same mini-games from the single player game, but allow you to compete against your friends or with them by playing in turns or either at the same time. And really, that is all there is to the multiplayer and all you need to know about that.

GRAPHICS
As a trend with the Wii so far, the game won't push the boundaries of next-gen graphics and fulfill those graphic minded fans, but it still looks good and crisp. The character style and visual look of the game is a really strong point of the game, as the world looks very familiar, but slightly warped. As long as you don't mind the game not looking too advanced, the graphics are perfect, except for the one glitch that happened to me many times if I chose to skip a cutscene after passing a test, in which the screen would very quickly (probably less than a second) flash white and then go back to normal; it isn't much, but it will annoy you once you start noticing it happen.

SOUND
The music is really fun, as it is very cute, but the best is the licensed songs such as this rocking guitar number featured in Kill Bill, plus Cindy Lauper's "Girls Just Wanna Have Fun" or Naughty By Nature's "Hip Hop Hooray." Basically, if you hear the song in the dance mini-game, it is great, because it sounds just like the original version, but has a high pierced rabbid singing it instead. The sound effects are also great, with the bunnies getting the most attention and therefore the most love from me as they sounded so oddly perfectly you couldn't imagine them sounding any different. More than anything, the humor comes from the sound of the bunnies, which is saying something about the level of quality from the sound department in this game.

IN CONCLUSION
Look, Rayman Raving Rabbids isn't a deep game by any stretch of the imagination, and it is a really, really short game that can be completed in only a handful of hours. However, if the idea of some quick, Mario-Ware (though longer) type games with a cute sensibility and a genuine sense of humor is something up your alley, then don't be afraid to purchase the game. It isn't a game for everyone, but you'll know who has been playing it if you see someone turn the television off, put the Wii controller down, and then turn around with a smile on their face.

Rating:
Our Scoring System