Mario and Sonic at the London 2012 Olympics: Review

I want to start this off by saying that I am not a huge fan of the Wii. I used to own one myself and was extremely disappointed with the game selection and how most games made use of the motion sense technology. In my opinion two of the best games for this counsel were Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. These games were amazing to  play and made pretty good use of the motion sense technology.  Though I sold my Wii (I replaced it with the much better Xbox 360 Slim) my grandparents still have one because they enjoy playing Mario games and Mario based games like Mario Kart. While I was at my grandparents this last weekend my Aunt Dee and I decided to rent the Mario and Sonic Olympics game from Redbox. After playing the game for 30-45 minutes we were both extremely disappointed with it.

Now For the Review

I should mention that I'm not writing an extremely comprehensive review here like you might find on ign.com, just my basic opinion of the game and how I felt about it overall.

Mario and Sonic at the 2012 London Olympics is a game made up of a ton of mini games. As you might expect these mini games are all based of events that will be taking place during the 2012 London Olympics. In addition to the standard events there is also Dream Events. The Dream Events are mostly based off of real events but they have a Sega spin to them. By this I just mean they look like they belong in a Mario or Sonic game. The graphics on this game are decent and have the expected cartoon-like graphics that you might find on games such as Mario Kart or Mario Party. Though there is a very wide variety of mini games on this game, most of my disappointment with it came from the motion based controls. A bunch of the mini games had the exact same control scheme: To start the event: shake the remote, to do the event: shake the remote, During the home stretch: shake the remote faster. After 2 or 3 mini games you can see how this would become very boring. I will give the game some credit, a couple of the mini games mixed up the controls by making you time when you flicked the remote. Sounds fun right? Not really. Now if you have younger children they may find this game enjoyable but I would strongly recommend that you rent it for as cheap as humanly possible (Redbox) before you make the decision to buy this game.

May the force be with you.
Dylan