Like at several other booths, Nintendo’s Wii had a waning presence at this year’s E3, though a number of companies were pleased to show off their 3DS wares. UTV Ignition Games, makers of Muramasa: the Demon Blade, had switched almost exclusively to games for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. They did have one Wii game available for play, however: a port of the trivia game National Geographic Challenge!
As one might expect, Challenge! is a geography-focused trivia game, one that’s already seen like on Xbox Live Arcade and PlayStation Network; it’ll see the light of day on Wii in Q4 2011. From what was available in the E3 demo, there are two kinds of questions available: the standard multiple-choice trivia question, and a sort of hidden-picture question, wherein glimpses of an image are shown periodically and one has to guess what the image was.
I’m not really the best with geography, so I naturally decided to go for Hard mode, aided by an expert on Canada who was also checking the game out. As the name suggests, Hard mode on this game is quite difficult, and a serious test of one’s geography skills; many questions I was drawing a complete blank on, knowing nothing about the region or geographic feature in question. That said, the game controls fine, using the Wii Remote’s IR pointer to select a correct answer as several trivia games have before it. The normal questions, while highly difficult, seem fair.
My major problem with the title are the hidden picture questions, which are less geographically focused and, frankly, a bit inane. I can understand identifying things like the Taj Mahal, which happens, but you also get pictures as general and irrelevant as “house”, which is frustrating. On top of that, there will be times when you’re never actually shown any useful portions of the picture, or at least not until it’s too late, making some questions difficult to answer. These questions are about half the game, and most of them aren’t too annoying, but it happens often enough that the while hidden picture setup left a bad taste in my mouth. Still, if you’re good with geography, or perhaps want to learn more about it, this title does provide a good challenge, though a lot of our questions were about Canada for some reason.
National Geographic Challenge! will be released in Q4 2011. Stay tuned to Nintendo Gal for more impressions from the E3 show floor.
