Midway has rampaged and bullied the Wii market.... forgive me

Animated movies seem to be going out of style. More and more of them are produced, but they stay in the theater for a max of two minutes. I saw a preview for Ant Bully once, notice I say once because I haven't heard anything about the movie since so I am assuming the movie came out and was a big flop, or the movie didn't come out and was just some kind of crazy way of getting people to get the game.

Let me start off this review by saying, if you are thinking about doing an ant video game.... don't. Let us look back at past Ant video games. Sim Ant, ahh, a wonderful game. A Bug's Life, ahh, what a horrible game. And then there was that barrage of Commodore 64 ant games, Atom Ant, Fire Ant and Ant Attack. They were feeding us ants like they were going out of style. So no, making a game with ants may sound like a unique and fun idea, but no it's been done before.

The story of the game is the same as the movie, (I'm assuming). You are Lucas, a miniature boy who chills with the ants and you gotta do battles and what not with the evil dudes. It's a pretty simple story that you are likely to tune out after the first few minutes. Sorry if I'm beating up on a kid's game, but seriously this game reeks.

Ant Bully for the Wii is a port of an equally suckalicious game on that was released in July on the PS2 and PC. I cannot remember hearing one thing good about the game, so why would Midway rerelease it? Hmm, perhaps that are trying to milk all of the money they can get out of a sucky game, need I remind you of Rampage Total Destruction on the Wii. So we already know that Ant Bully is going to be horrid before playing it, so let's just see if it is more horrid than the older version like Rampage was.

Okay, the opening scene of the game is the most horrid use of what the Wii can handle. The camera flying through the air goes into the a big tunnel, the screen occasionally will turn blue because it goes into like an orb of something that is the cameras version of clipping. As the camera moves through the room, it constantly jerks around, worse than any other Wii game than I have seen.

Platformers should be a fairly easy genre on the Wii. The control on Ant Bully tries to make things easier, but in the end makes it harder Most platformers use the nunchuk's analog stick to move in different directions, such as pressing it right to have your character go right. Well, this works in the game, but also, the nunchuk is motion sensored to go left and right. So if you just so much as tilt it left on accident, (which you do surprisingly more than you think) your screen will go all crazy and go to the left and your character will start jerking around because the game can't handle it and he will try to go to the left, sometimes doing spins while is walking. It may seem like a good idea at first, but this will be a hard task to get used to for adults, let alone kids, and your hand naturally tilts to the side. Even towards the end the of the game, you'll still be tilting your hand accidentally. As you walk anywhere anyone will notice the horrible frame rate. This makes Quake for the 360 seem seem like it has a normal frame rate. You will be walking around and every five seconds or so your guy will pause and the system will.

The game, like these games generally are, is extremely repetitive. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, because the kids that would be playing this game are probably new to video games and need something fairly straightforward. This is pretty much the most straightforward video game on the market. You have a map, the ant tells you a boring task to do like throwing some larvae in a tube or killing a spider and then a thing on your map tells you where to go and your task is easily finished.

The fighting is extremely repetitious and boring and will likely hold the attention of kids for, oh I don't know, thirty seconds. You go up to the bug, who rarely ever throws any sort of attack and you press the B button over and over again. Or you can swing the Wii remote but the attacks aren't very responsive and instead of successfuly executing an easy 4 or so hit chain by pressing the b button repeatedly, you will only be able to do one or two hits so swinging it around is useless. You rarely ever face any new guys in the game, you just go after the same potato bug, (or pill bug, whatever you call it in your neck of the woods, in Idaho we call it the potato bug,) the same ol spider, and the same old bees over and over again. They never make an attempt to change up the enemies at all, they don't make an attempt to make them even look good either. You'll just be running around a field where five of the same spiders are just sitting and you just go up and whack them with your staff and they're gone right away. They could have added a more fun battle system, maybe one where the different directional swings will make your guy do different moves, but no, they made this the ultimate button masher.

Let me rant about how bad the artificial intelligence is in this game. The characters in the game follow a set path, both the bad guys and the good guys. If you sit back and watch a good guy walk for a little while, you will see he just walks in a complete circle. Put a rock where he usually walks in his circle and he won't be able to move. Artificial intelligence has had so much better than this and rarely do you ever see a game that has these set paths.

The levels are dull and they all feel like the same thing. You just go through a set path, dispose of all the enemies in your path, and get to the end. There is nothing more to the game, it just feels so boring because it's all been done before, and way better than this. Nothing about this game is unique, and every gameplay aspect is horrible, from the controls to the combat, it just feels like Midway did two things to suck the money out of people, release rampage, and release this. Rampage was a horrible game that was released almost a year ago, they released it being the only budget title so everyone would buy it. A game where parents say "Hey, I bet my kid would like this, Jonny always plays his Wiis upstairs playing that Call of Duties, I bet little Timmy would like to have a game for Christmas. And then the parent buys the game for little Timmy. Little Timmy plays the game, throws the controller through the window, stomps on the case, and breaks the disc in half. The second Midway Wii game that causes "rampages." Oh man I'm really sorry, that was the worst pun ever.

The graphics in the game are about two years before its time. This makes a few small improvements over what the PS2 version looked like, but the PS2 version looked horrible, so therefore, a few small changes isn't enough to make this game much better looking and some PS2 games that came out 3 years ago look better than this. This has the same graphical style as the other ant video game intended for kids. It looks like a prettied up version of A Bug's Life. Cartoony graphics with ugly pixelated textures all around you with a frame rate that makes you sick to your stomach. (Man, am I being too hard on this game? No!)

The music score is sometimes stuff that is probably taken from the movie, but most of the music is a constant loop of a short sound bite. You also have the jungle music and the noises of animals in the background, and they all sound alright but sometimes muffled being masked by the music. The voiceovers sound as if they were taken straight out of the movie because they sound like actual voice actors, but they really don't do a good job of doing the voicework and often sound overexaggerated and/or funny sounding.

I'm sorry Midway, but you have accomplished in my book what I though EA would be the only one to do. Sure enough EA released that stupid Sim's Holiday pack, and you made two horrible games to take people's money! This game is terrible, and kid's won't even like it. Avatar, Spongebob, Happy Feet, I've played them all and this one is the worst kid's game for the Wii yet.