Bust-A-Move Bash! - The definition of a cash-grab port

Got it today. Down-and-dirty impressions because I noticed no other sites have reviewed it yet.

The Good:
Control is insanely precise. I was able to hit targets I've never been able to hit with a standard controller.
Multiplayer has a lot of potential.

The Bad:
Like most Wii games lately, it has underscan (black bars on either side in widescreen mode).
The controller must be held at an uncomfortable angle. About 45 degrees. When flat it's sluggish, and when vertical the cursor jumps around.
There only seems to be one, insanely repetitive song. Actively annoying. There might be another song in another of the three "worlds" you can pick to start, but through the first 15 levels of the first world it never changed ... just looped. I had to shut the game off it was so annoying.
The menus are bare-bones. They look like the standard DVD menu options you get when in Nero or iMovie. Only less sophisticated.
At $39.99, it's about $30 more than it's worth.


Overall, as a fan of the series, I've got mixed emotions. It's got potential with very accurate aiming and could be a lot of fun at a party as long as the sound is turned off. But it just feels rushed. There's a huge gap in the Wii release schedule right now so I'm sure the Majesco suits were pushing to get it out immediately ... but it really could have used another few months of development time. Shame really.

I didn't see any option for custom soundtracks, but I did find where to drop the background music to zero. So that's a plus at least.

Played some multiplayer and have to revise my previous impressions.

Multiplayer is hilariously bad. Imagine dressing 8 toddlers in sumo suits and tossing them in a room filled with balloons and sirens, and it begins to approximate the experience.

Where the aiming is pretty accurate in puzzle mode, in versus it's like a completely different game. Spastic is the only way to describe it. Grabbed 6 of my friends and tried about 6 rounds. I was fighting so hard to get the damn movements to register and aim my shots that nothing was working. I was getting walloped. Maybe the Wii can't calculate 8 players together. Tried it two-player and it was just as spastic and unresponsive.

Then I looked sideways. My girlfriend and her friends were pretty much just yelling and pointing at the wall, their aiming reticules fixed in random positions, and they were pulling their triggers repeatedly. It's the first button-masher puzzle game I've ever played. You don't even need to aim ... just fire. Constantly.

There are so many powerups they literally fill the screen. For most of multiplayer you can simply mash the buttons randomly, aiming if you can for the many UFOs with destroy-all-of-a-single-color shots (and if you miss the UFO odds are your shot will land on another destroy-all-of-a-single-color-gems ... they're everywhere), and you *might* win. It's completely random. The entire screen is cycling with new gems so fast it's stupid. Just randomly hit fire, the screen explodes, and you get crazy combos. There's zero skill or strategy. There's also no on-screen score that I could see ... so no one knows how they're doing until the end. And the summary screen seems to stay up for 10 seconds or so then resets back to the menu ... pressing the buttons won't let you skip to start a new game.

Needless to say the "party" lasted about 10 minutes before my girlfriend suggested I start my PS3 and boot Motorstorm so everyone could watch me play.

Other bugs/faults:

Pressing + pauses the game. But there's no way to exit out of your current game. It just ... pauses. The only way I've figured to exit your current game is by suiciding. Mensa candidates as game designers, seriously.

You pick a puzzle level to start, and that's it. You can't exit. You just keep going. Maybe, around level 100, the puzzles might actually start to lower into the screen on a timer, but I don't know. It's just stupid easy.

There's no arcade mode. No VS arcade mode either, which pretty much every other iteration of Bust-a-Move had. And it's a complete shame because the controls (in single-player puzzle mode at least ... multiplayer is for spazzes) are the most accurate yet.

What I'm hoping is that I somehow got a beta version accidentally pressed to disc, and that the real version will come out and I can exchange it.

The core Bust-A-Move game is actually pretty fun. New gems appear at the top on a timer, pushing the stack down and forcing you to work faster.

That, the original mode, isn't even in this version.

And I didn't drop any money on it, thank god. Just wanted to warn people from wasting any money on it themselves, as it seems Majesco didn't send any early copies to review sites for obvious reasons.