Steven Spielberg Meets the Wii

The superstar Hollywood director has created a new video game called Boom Blox, which uses the Wii's motion-sensitive controller to manipulate 3-D blocks

by Libe Goad

From the man responsible for such film school fodder as Indiana Jones, E.T. and the original summer blockbuster, Jaws, comes a new puzzle game for the Wii, which revolves around the deceptively simple act of manipulating 3-D blocks, aka Blox, using the Wii's motion-sensitive controller.

Hollywood writer/director/producer Steven Spielberg was driven to create a game around the universal, "compulsion to build something up and knock something down," an EA producer tells us. "[Spielberg] would talk about when he got a train set as a boy; he'd spend hours building it up just to cross the tracks and watch the trains explode."

One look at Boom Blox and it's easy to see that inspiration under the hood. The game's training, single-player, multiplayer and create-a-level modes all center around using the Blox by knocking them down with projectiles, triggering nearby explosives or grabbing and manipulating the Blox themselves (as in the Jenga-like game where you pull single Blox from a stack, careful to not topple the entire tower).

A game wouldn't have that Spielberg vibe without a little drama, and the single-player Adventure mode uses mini-stories to propel players through different collections of puzzles in themed areas. In a Medieval themed area, you're introduced to a kingdom of sheep that need help collecting jewels. The player helps the Lego-looking sheep by knocking down piles of blocks to collect jewels, starting out with simple puzzles and continuing with more challenging ones. Similar scenarios play out in the other themed areas, which include Tiki Island, Haunted and Frontier, adds up to about 70 levels.

Since it's on the Wii, Boom Blox naturally includes a 'Party' multiplayer mode where up to four players can go head-to-head or play cooperatively to solve puzzles. The Tiki Tower Topple multiplayer levels require you to use the Wiimote to hurl a ball at a stack of blocks labeled with point values. The goal: whoever gets knocks down the most points wins.

The challenge in Tiki Tower – as with many other puzzles in Boom Blox—is how hard to throw the ball and at what angle to send the most blocks flying. In a way, it's like playing 3-D pool. Each player takes a turn, rotating the vantage point of the screen, aiming the ball and then flicking the Wii remote while pressing the 'A' button—then releasing it at just the right moment to send the ball hurling toward the blocks.

Taking a note from the Web 2.0 school of thought, Boom Blox's 'Create' mode lets players build their own levels. Creators can build platforms and set up stacks of blocks using a simple set of tools that looks like something from The Sims. We saw one level with a Rube-Goldberg-like machine and another that recreated the famous rolling boulder scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Certain items will be available from the start, but as you progress through the game, you'll unlock new items that can then be used to create a new level.

The cutesy Lego-like characters in the game (which seem ripe for a Saturday morning cartoon show) will also play a bigger role than just providing atmosphere for the game. Each character has its own special behaviors, which affect the environment around them. Chickens lay exploding Bomb Blox, menacing, yet cute, grim reapers erase characters, dogs protect characters by throwing bomb blocks. The producer showed us how to play characters off each other – placing a monkey with a cowboy hat in-between a pack of grim reapers and dogs as we watched the battle for life and death play out onscreen.

We'll have to wait until Boom Blox's May release to get a better feel for how all the parts fit together, but until then, it certainly seems like another solid multiplayer puzzle game for the Wii.

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