Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party Review (Wii)

Rayman runs for cover as the Rabbids return for a third instalment on Wii in Rayman Raving Rabbids TV Party (RRR TV).

As the title suggests this latest game has a heavy emphasis on the world of TV and Movies, the title "story" goes something like this:

Rayman is being chased through the woods by the pack of crazy raving rabbids, just as he reaches his house the screaming rabbids get distracted and struck by lightning somehow getting sucked inside his TV via the now electrified aerial on his roof. The rabbids are now trapped in TV world and quickly start invading and taking over every show on every station.

Much the same as the previous two games RRR TV is wacky, quirky, weird and most of all, funny. It's fair to say that Raving Rabbids can be counted as its own franchise now, this latest game barely features the title character as the rabbids rightfully take centre stage.

Concept wise RRR TV is also the same as the other two games, your here to play countless and often completely stupid mini games in order to score points. Score enough points in the mini game and you can progress to the next one, simple.

You get to play in either Solo mode or Party mode, we'll explain the Solo mode as you can probably guess how Party mode works.

You start off on Monday, your given a TV schedule and its up to you to choose a channel to "play" for each of the seven time slots throughout the given day, completing five time slots successfully opens up the next day, get it?

There are seven channels to choose from, each with their own logo, ident and style of programming. Every time you open up a new day your given another snippet of the overriding story, the rabbids are trapped in the TV with the screen gradually cracking as you get closer and closer to the end of the week.

The different channels are:

"X-TRM Sports" featuring shows such as "Beastie Boarding" where you must slide down a piste on a cow.

"Groove On" featuring the "Top of the Flops" which is a fairly accomplished scrolling music/timing game, complete with licensed music.

"Trash TV" featuring all sorts of crazy challenges.

"Shake It TV" featuring "Strictly Come Idle" a scrolling music/dancing game where you must copy on-screen dance moves also with licensed music.

"Raving Channel" featuring shows such as "" an interesting pearl collecting bouncy ball platform game.

"Macho TV" featuring shows such as "Pimp My Rabbid" an completely bizarre dress-up-rabbid in a certain style game.

Finally there is the "Cult Movies" channel featuring a number of well known spoof movies such as "Zombies at Dawn" which mainly plays as an on-rails plunger shooter similar to those found in the previous two titles.

Of course the majority of the mini games are predictably silly with lots of screaming rabbids, most of them control well, make sense and are easily to get along with but of course like all mini game collections there are a handful that can confuse, frustrate and annoy.

One of the new things to this third title is support for Nintendo's Balance Board. RRR TV shows off the fact that it is probably the first game that can be controlled using your butt - sadly that's not a good thing.

Whilst quite a lot of the mini games support the Balance Board in some respect it often doesn't bring anything new to the game. Okay it's amusing to see someone control their character by sitting on the Balance Board but essentially its another gimmick, you certainly wouldn't buy one just for use with this game.

On the other hand RRR TV boasts around 50 mini games, a pretty impressive number considering not all of them are as shallow as meets the eye. Ubisoft certainly have been busy packing in as many as possible.

It's no surprise that the game shines brightest in multi-player Party mode, Solo mode is better than a lot of mini game collections but with a relatively easy difficultly level you'll find you've played through all the mini games in around 4 hours play time.

Another new feature to the RRR TV universe is the mid mini-game advert (a micro game?). When triggered by one of the four players an animated advert is presented on screen, the player that reacts the fastest to the WarioWare style action gets a bonus for use in the currently active mini game - simple eh?

Apart from Solo mode and Party mode there isn't a whole lot else to do, the additional Training mode is relatively useless as you can only play games you have already beaten in Solo mode.