TV Show King for Wii is an exclusive downloadable game from Gameloft (the software developers behind many popular cell phone games) for Nintendo’s WiiWare service. Let’s see if they can bring over their portable gaming magic to the Wii in our review of TV Show King Wii.
There aren’t many gamers who love every game genre, it’s just like TV and Movies, people enjoy different things. However quiz games are a bit of a Trojan horse, managing to slot into everyone’s realm of taste. Who doesn’t like to pit their knowledge against someone else and come out on top? You can never go wrong with a good quiz, there’s always something for everyone.
TV Show King, as the name suggests, is a TV Show style quiz for your Wii and supports one to four players. It comes complete with a swanky host called Jerry, Angela (the compulsory busty hostess) and K-ly the DJ. Thankfully you don’t have to shrink down to the size of a micron and enter your TV set to take part, but simply choose a Mii from your roster and get answering those questions. If you’ve played Buzz on the Playstation or Scene it on the Xbox then you’ll know what to expect here.
There are two game modes to choose from in TV Show King, the Main Game and Quiz Attack. The Main Game sees you and three opponents (either CPU or Human) battle is out in up to 9 rounds of quiz questions to see who comes out on top. As with most quiz games, TV Show King is very easy to pick up and play. In most cases it’s as simple as pointing at the answer and pressing the A button; sometimes they make it a little harder by disguising the answers by darkness, or a lottery style scratch panel. In these scenarios you’ll have to hover your pointer over the answer panels to reveal them before you can choose your final answer. You all get 15 seconds to choose your answer, but the highest prize money is awarded to whoever answers quickest, so you get more money for being the first to answer correctly and less if you’re last (of course, you don’t get anything if you’re wrong!). Jerry will also announce bonus dollars to be won for answering questions correctly during the show. At the end of every main round you get to decide if you would like to spin the ‘Wheel of Fortune’ style gamewheel. Here you can win extra money, steal it from another player, or in a reversal of fortune, send some of it to a rival of your choosing. It’s risky but can see high rewards for the brave and large losses for the foolhardy. The final round sees the two top scoring players in a head to head where they are in a race to answer five questions correctly; the winner steals half of the loser’s cash and wins the game.
Quiz Attack is a solo player high score type affair – just keep on answering those questions for as long as you can. It’s very addictive and harder than it sounds. This time the pressure is all on you, and you still get a time limit to answer each question. Not quite as much fun as a four player game but certainly a good deal quicker with no cut scenes to deal with – great if you want a quick quiz round before bed! Sadly there is no online mode or internet leaderboard, but the good news is you can keep track of your highscores in the records channel.
TV Show King for Wii is at its best with 4 human players (you’ll need a Wii Remote for each player though!). Of course you can play with the CPU but there is always the sense that it’s being deliberately stupid on some occasions and super smart on others. However that isn’t a fault of the game – there hasn’t been an artificial intelligence system created that could replicate a human quiz contestant…yet.
Graphically TV Show King is very good for a WiiWare title. Everything looks great and has a real TV show feeling about it. The use of the Miis on your Wii system for the in game contestants as well as the audience really makes the game much more atmospheric. If you don’t have a large collection of Mii’s then it will fill up the seats with randomly created Miis. Sound wise the game is acceptable; Jerry has a few simple lines of dialogue which unfortunately do get slightly repetitive after a while. The questions are all in text and not spoken, which whilst a shame, is perfectly understandable for a small download title like this.
With over 3000 questions covering many categories (such as: history, geography, literature, science and sports) the game should last a while, though not indefinitely. I hope Gameloft have cleverly engineered an update system which could allow extra question packs to be purchased at a later date, though somehow I think we’re more likely to see a TV Show King 2 in the coming months.
The game is retailing for 1000 Wii Points ($10) and occupies 290 storage blocks (approximately 36MB). You should get quite a few hours of enjoyment out of this game, and even though you will see repeat questions after a while, it will still remain a fun party game. TV Show King for Wii is currently the best quiz game on Wii by far, and we give it a rather good 7 out of 10.
Related: UK WiiWare titles, WiiWare Major League Eating
I’ve found a couple of errors in the dutch version of the game. i hope these are fixed by an update!!