This week, Destineer ships Magellan Interactive's Word Jong Party for the Wii to retail. A follow up to the successful Word Jong on the Nintendo DS, Word Jong Party adds new multiplayer modes, power-ups that take advantage of the Wii motion controls, and updated visuals.
Destructoid loved Word Jong on the DS, its simple and addictive design came highly recommended when they ran their review for the game last year. So when they heard there was an updated version coming to the Wii, they hunted down the game's designer Scott Balaban to see what it was all about.
Balaban is a veteran of both the videogame and traditional toy industry, starting work with Hasbro and its interactive division in the late 90s. This is a guy who knows a thing or two about a thing or two when it comes to both the toy and the videogame industries.
About writes: "I understand that in a low budget game there isn't always the manpower to proofread everything, and normally I wouldn't consider it that terrible if a character in a game spoke in a text bubble that said, "You have great insticts [sic]." But when that game is called Word Jong Party, and is centered entirely on the English language, such a mistake somehow seems particularly egregious."
WorthPlaying writes: "Puzzle games are popular and prevalent on the Nintendo DS and with good reason. Not only are they easy to make, but they also have the pick-up-and-play aspect that makes them very appealing to both the hardcore and casual gamer alike. The same goes for party games, which the Nintendo Wii has in abundance. The popularity of both consoles has led publishers to take their popular Nintendo DS puzzle titles and make them work on the Nintendo Wii by adding party and multiplayer aspects. While it can work some of the time, the experience is mostly diluted and makes for an experience that doesn't replicate the original game very well. WordJong Party belongs in the minority because even with the additional elements, the title translates into a good gaming experience for solitary and multiplayer game sessions."
CSM:
"Based on the popular PC game WordJong, WORDJONG PARTY is essentially a mishmash of MahJong and Boggle. Players are provided an elaborate stack (or stacks) of letter tiles from which they select to form words, the longer the better. The catch is that they can only use letters from the top of the stack. The stacks are arranged such that the removal of a particular tile could reveal between zero and four new letters, with the upshot being that there are times when a player has a dozen or more letters from which to choose to form a word and others when they have as few as just one or two (at which point the player must shake the remote to make new letters to fall onto the stack). Play is scattered across several modes, ranging from a puzzle-of-the-day challenge to a single player campaign played against computer opponents to the titular party games that allow up to four players to compete head-to-head."
