#Rayman the amazing maze professional#
#Rayman the amazing maze series#

Expressive and often hilarious, their over-the-top screaming, vacant stares and bizarre design are certain to provoke a laugh - they are perfect characters for movement-based slapstick comedy, which is exactly what Raving Rabbids is all about. The Rabbids themselves account for a lot of this game's appeal - unlike the rest of the Rayman universe, they are instantly likeable. Rayman is kidnapped by these ridiculous little sado-masochists at the beginning of the game and forced to perform for their entertainment, which provides the somewhat flimsy justification for the fifty-odd consecutive minigames that make up the story mode. Raving Rabbids dispenses with every established Rayman character except the limbless nonce himself, allowing the titular Rabbids to take centre stage. That's carrot juice you're pumping into their visors. Played in a group, Raving Rabbids is surprisingly entertaining and often laugh-out-loud funny - occasionally because many of the games require you to move the nunchuck up and down as rapidly as possible in a vaguely suggestive manner, but more often because of its character design, variety and general silliness.

#Rayman the amazing maze series#

Yes, it's just a series of mini-games, and no, it doesn't exactly exemplify the sophistication of control that the Wii is capable of (you'll want Trauma Centre: Second Opinion for a taste of that), but it does do a good job of showing how fun it can be. It's slapstick and bizarre and occasionally quite dark, and importantly, it makes no pretence of depth. Properly funny, too, not just immediately-forgettable, infantile funny. Now, though, I find myself unexpectedly charmed.

#Rayman the amazing maze professional#

I wasn't expecting to take to this at all on a professional level, let alone find any personal fondness for it. Whenever I played it at various preview stages, its wacky humour came across as trying a bit too hard and the mini-games themselves all seemed to involve the same three repetitive actions. Raving Rabbids also seems to represent everything that is a bit dodgy about the whole Wii concept - it is a sequence of mini-games, nothing more and nothing less, all based around controller movement. I don't hate the games, you understand - just the character, the world he inhabits, the weird little deformed things he usually has to rescue and, most of all, his silly early-90's fringe. In the interests of providing adequate background to this review, then, I feel compelled to admit that I've never liked Rayman. Even after years being forced to be professionally impartial, there are always going to be some games that you approach with a prejudice.