The Wii’s control scheme lends itself to more than waggle if you do it right in certain genres of games, such as the genre of… cheerleading! But do some games do this better than others, or do they all fail? I’ll go through a couple of the most high-profile Wii cheerleading types of games: All Star Cheerleading, High School Musical 3, Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour and We Cheer. I have played these four games in singleplayer and multiplayer with a (b-boy) friend for a different perspective on the genre.



All Star Cheerleading
Also known as All Star Cheer Squad in the US, this game takes itself the most serious as a cheerleading game. Consulted by cheerleading choreography hero Tony G (of Bring It On fame), you are put in the position of a hard working male or female cheerleader. The gameplay is pretty simple, as it is in most games of this kind: a bar shows icons moving from right to left, and you have to do the right movement or pose when it passes the critical area on the left side of the bar.



What you do is: move the wiimote and nunchuck to the right position at the right time. So, you will have arrows pointing up, down, sideways or front/back and you just have to mimic those positions. However, this can be pretty hard to do if your big manly or nerdy arms are long, making it the single most important reason that this game seems to be made for girls under the age of 13. I just can’t move my right arm to the right and my left arm to the top-left without worrying about my nunchuck cord’s length, sorry.

What’s worse, the controls are shit. They don’t register most of the time or they register while you are doing something completely different. Because the gameplay is made up of chunks of positions, you don’t really get the feeling you are taking part in a dance routine either. To be fair, DDR and Guitar Hero/Rock Band have their note charts made up of separate notes or positions to, but they are made in such a way that you “flow” from one position to the other as you become better at the game. In here, it’s more like a technique chart with you as a confused adult male in the body of a confused adult male. No lolis were available for this review.

A good feature of this game is the ability to make your own move sets. If you are serious about cheerleading, this may be an interesting feature for you, Nick Chester. However, the animations of the models on screen are horrible, and the way the developers tried to make the background dancers lifelike while failing, doesn’t really convince either. In the end, you just move as wooden as the dancers you are looking at and you feel like a Kyousuke Nanbu while doing it (offtopic: what happened to that guy anyway, his account seems non-existent now!).

All in all, All Star Cheerleader/Cheer Squad is crap. You do not feel like a cheerleader at all, it’s not really fun to do in single or multiplayer. We ended up just feeling bored in multi, which is a terrible thing for a Wii game. At the least, you have to laugh at how silly or ridiculous it is. This was not the case for this game :P



High School Musical 3: Senior Year
However, that was the case for HSM3: the game. We made it through the first of around three songlists before we reached the breaking point. In this game, you have 6 locations that are mapped to 3 to the left (nunchuck up-middle-down) and right (wiimote up-middle-down). Dots or lines move from the center to these positions, and you have to move your right or left arm to those positions in time to score points. Once in a while you have to do a WILDCAT POSE! This means you unlock your inner douche and make some metrosexual pose as shown onscreen. Hold this pose and you fill up the onscreen figure for maximum points.

That’s basically the whole game. You get to see some cheesy on-screen action, some of which came from HSM3 the movie (which I watched for this review). While most of the music is from HSM3, some music from HSM1 and HSM2 is also included (I also watched most of HSM1…). In multiplayer, the focus is on getting the dots and lines of your specific color for points. Get enough, fill a bar and unleash an attack on the other player so their moves don’t register for a while. It does keep the game kind of fun and competitive, so it’s a nice addition to the usual multiplayer modes.



One side effect of playing this game is that you will actually recognize songs when you watch the movie afterwards. I can only guess at the educational effect this would have on a 12 year old girl that has seen the movie 5 times and got this game for Christmas from her cool uncle. It would probably involve her uncle having to take seat…

This game is also on the 360, which probably would require you to use the analog stick in the 6 directions. The cheevos were too hard to whore it, so I will never know. All in all it does its job as a movie game for the target audience. It’s not hard, not too easy and it can be quite fun when playing it multiplayer. It’s still High School Musical on the Wii though, and you still have to do Wildcats poses.




Hannah Montana: Spotlight World Tour
This game follows the same format as All Star Cheerlearding and fails even harder. There is not a whole lot to say that isn’t apparent from watching a vid like this:

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The gameplay is lame, half the stuff still doesn’t register and the animation is wooden. Also, there are a lot of invisible walls around things like racks of clothing or boxes of shoes. No Euphoria physics when stepping over a box of shoes? Weak…

Worst of all, this game makes Miley Cyrus look like not-jailbait. No, not the kind you illegally download, perv! Just an unfappable version of Miley, quite the achievement and double the fail.



We Cheer
Last but not least, We Cheer. While All Star Cheerleading was a THQ title/side project for the tween girl crowd and HSM3 was a movie tie-in, We Cheer is an actual solidly produced Namco Bandai title. Really! With anime eyes and a creepy western/japanese mix of anime character design, it feels much more like a videogame from the moment you start it up.

They key element that sets apart We Cheer is that it makes you do ridiculous moves, but it’s really fucking hard to do them properly. In a way, it’s like DDR or Guitar Hero in that some time to get the dexterity to pass the harder songs. You don’t ask your non-gamer friend to play DDR on Heavy, or to play any Metallica song on Expert guitar or drums.

In We Cheer, you use two wiimotes so you don’t have any issues with cord lengths or anything. On screen, stars move in rainbow formations that you have to follow one-on-one at the exact right speed. You can move them in any direction in a 2D plane, or towards/away from you. This way, you are basically doing what All Star Cheerleading failed to do: dancing with pompoms/wiimotes.



I don’t know how the girl/guy does it in this video, but it’s really fucking hard!! You have to match the movements to fill out a meter in the bottom-right in order to pass a song. Fail to fill it, and you fail the song. There’s no 3 stars or 5 stars, there’s just “fail”, “pass with X points” and “pass like a cheerleader worthy of the quarterback’s cock”.

Most importantly, it’s one of the few Wii games where the motion controls make you feel like you are actually doing something in your living room that is like what you see on your screen. Wii Sports already did this to an extent, but you could waggle through most of it if you wanted. You have to make some pretty wide moves all over the place in We Cheer, so that option is off the table. If you know a girl that thinks Wii Fit will be a good workout, get her We Cheer instead because it will make you sweat like a dirty pig.


Apparently, this is a cheerleader

Multiplayer is harder because you’ll need four wiimotes, which I don’t have. Still, watching a friend play this game provides many many lulz. Imagine seeing a friend do all the dances of 70’s Hollywood musicals… to Hilary Duff music. It’s as funny to watch as it is shameful to be seen playing this game on your own.

You get to interact with some random cheerleaders before every song, with some of them going “something something EL-OH-EL” which is always nice. Your career mode is split over a number of unlockable locations that each have around 10 songs to choose from. The difficulty requires you to put in some serious time to see all the songs in the game, and it’s pretty good value in this regard. If you play DDR, you know it can make you pretty quick on your feet after a couple of months/years, and this game does the same thing for your arms. So if you use DDR for your bottom rock stamina, you can easily use this game for your top rock. Or to fap longer to loli game characters, either way works.



Look, I know this game looks “gay as hell” but if you know someone with a Wii who has a birthday coming up, and there’s no Boom Blox 2 yet, grab this game for cheap and have many lulz. You might be surprised at how well made this game turned out to be. It’s one of the most hardcore games on the Wii in terms of how much effort you have put into it to get ahead, shameful yet fun to do and it even does that whole ‘Wii health’ thing. Some reviewers (1up and Gamepro) have given this game really low scores for being so hard and/or unresponsive. I’ve noticed that it’s actually quite responsive, but requires you to be spot on with the movements. Then again, looking at a 1up video podcast… I’m not surprised they failed at it harder than I did.

To be fair, the game is far from perfect, but there is a lot of untapped potential here. It could easily become a niche game that slowly grows if it had some Arcade version in Japan; weeaboos would fap the hell out of it if it contained some anime loli characters in cheerleader outfits.



Conclusion
Although not as much of a cancer as most family games are for the Wii, these types of cheerleading and dancing games still have a long way to go. While most are badly made or cheap cash-ins for tween girls, We Cheer showed that you can make a really remarkably fun game based on cheerleading if you want to. You just have to balance effort and reward, offer enough modes and progression to make it interesting as a game, and create a core gameplay that is there to stay. DDR did it, Guitar Hero did it, and apparently there’s still room for more. Seriously though, you read through all of this? Congratulations :)

Wildcats yeah!

/wrists

Also, here is some delicious jb Miley Cyrus that I have heard was missing from this blog: