Finally a transcript
I fixed all my errors? so stop commenting about it
"Long ago in the mists of time, when main characters didn't need to have biceps bigger then their faces, and when bump mapping was just something cartographers did to their wives, there lived adventure games. This shy thoughtful tribe was known for its great story telling tradition and ruled the great PC gaming plains for many years before mysteriously dying out around the onset of the Quake era. Some blame the aggressive expansion of neighboring first person shooter tribes. But personally I think it?s more to do with the fact that most of them were shit.
Most of your average adventure game experience was spent carting a truckload of miscellaneous knick knacks around, patiently rubbing them all one by one against everything else in the hope of hoping on to the train of logic unique to the game?s designer. For every decent adventure game, like Monkey Island or Grim Fandango, there were five excess baggage fests driven by moon logic. Funnily enough all designed by Roberta Williams. So the genre popped its unintuitive clogs.
Not that adventure game fans have ever been able to accept that. Attempts are constantly made to revive the genre by jumping on its gas bloated stomach. But this rarely causes more then a feeble squirt of pungent fluids from one of the less wholesome orifices. Now it?s Capcom?s turn to take a whole-hearted two-footed bounce on that poor defiled body with Zack and Wiki, an adventure game for the Wii, featuring Western style point and click controls and adventurery puzzles. But that?s where the internationalism ends. If you find the Japanese offensive, then you?ll find this game offensively Japanese. The main characters are a brash youth with no voice and stupid hair and his aggressively cute monkey friend, voiced by some painfully shrill harpy thing. And the antagonist is a hot angry girl in a mini skirt. Now all it needs to do is dispense used panties and oppress the Chinese.
Another thing this game doesn?t have in common with nineties western adventures is a connecting story line or indeed much of a story at all. Wack and Ziki uses a mission based format, breaking the adventure game play into manageable bite sized chunks, Plunking down a couple of obstacles between you and a treasure chest, and leaning back folding its arms, waiting to see what you do next. And this is the point where the game shines, because the point where you figure out that your supposed to put the key in the door or perturb the angry sloth with the freighting large dildo creates the same smug cock ?oh look at me, I didn?t have to consult GameFAQs? good feeling that I?ve always liked about adventure games. And the fact that there are only a handful of inventory items that you use repeatedly rather then a billion, each with one ?UND PRECISELY VON? application, removes one of the major things I don?t like about adventure games.
But then of course Zim and Spacky breaks the cardinal sin by making it possible to die, not just a result of insistently clicking on a grizzly bear six times, often without warning, as a consequence of simple curiosity or in some in some cases just letting your mind wander for a few seconds too long. And if you do die, you have to go buggering right back to the start of the mission. Meaning you?ll have to repeat all the spastic wiimote flailing you?ve had to do to get to where you were.
Which links me neatly to my next paragraph. Once again the Wii proves its self some kind of patron deity of gimmicky pointless bullshit. Every time you use a tool or item you have to make an equivalent gesture with the wiimote, but half the time the movement of the onscreen tool bears only rudimentary similarities to the gesture you're expected to make. The one that sticks out in my mind is when I was expected to turn a big horizontal wheel, and none movements that seemed obvious cause the damn thing to budge an inch. So I ended up randomly waving the wiimote around like it was an uppity bat trying to find out through trial and error which of the many possible movements the game was thinking of.
I would say that I would prefer the game to not showcase the Wii?s exotic abilities, but I?m pretty sure that was the whole idea. Come to think of it, Wank and Sticky is a game with a lot of needless attachments, like the fact that you can buy hints (totally useless while the internet still exists). Or the practice of awarding points based on how quickly you solve puzzles (which I frequently took personally). But if you complain about unnecessary additions you?re just being a tosser. It?s like complaining about, say, a perfectly good hotdog because the vender is the Boston Strangler. You can still enjoy the hotdog and just try not to make eye contact. And overall I enjoyed Zack and Wiki. It?s fun, and original, and has a lot of charm, as long as you can tolerate a slightly childish tone. Which on reflection, you probably could if you?re an average Wii owner because statistically your eight years old.
Oh yes, and some people might find the characters pseudo verbal grunts and squeaks a bit annoying after the first few hundred times. I didn?t, but my roommate said it was like have his ear canals raped by a man wearing a sandpaper condom. Not in those exact words obviously?"
