It's not often that I find myself especially blindsided by a game's quality these days. Working in this business as I do, I usually have some kind of insight ahead of time as to whether a game is total garbage or kind of awesome. This past weekend I worked on Zack & Wiki for the Wii, a game I knew next to nothing about, and only had vague claims of "that game looked kind of neat" to go on from folk around the office. That's a real vague claim as claims around here go. I've played plenty of games that "looked kind of neat" only to end up sucking, and sucking hard. And, of course, the opposite is true as well. Frankly, I took the assignment because I had the most time this weekend, it had a Monday embargo, and it just made sense. I was not, in any sense, looking forward to this one.

And yet, here is the review, altogether positive and wholeheartedly recommending the product. Again, I expected very little out of this game, and yet the more I played it, the more I was simply shocked as to how well the whole thing was put together. I'm notoriously bad about playing games over the weekend. My ADD goes absolutely haywire when I'm at home and left to my own devices, and I can rarely focus on anything for more than a few minutes at a time, but with Zack & Wiki, I stuck with it. Not just because I had to for work, but because I seriously wanted to get through all the game's excellent puzzles. I was legitimately hooked. Pretty much the last sensation I was expecting from this one.

It just goes to show you that as predictable as this industry can be, sometimes something comes from out of left field and knocks you back on your coal-mining ass. Puzzle Quest did that to a lot of people earlier in the year, and more recently, Portal has kind of taken on this kind of mythic level of praise from practically everyone who plays it. But you know what? I'd dare say that both those games, though maybe better than expected, were still expected to be pretty rad. Zack & Wiki, for all its "looked kind of neat" comments, never really built up much hype. Maybe a few of those crazy forum kids knew something I didn't, but it's safe to say that general expectations were low. Now, I would hope, expectations will raise, as will sales. This is a game absolutely worth owning. I can't say I've said that about a whole lot of Wii games thus far.

Now, let's be fair, the game ain't perfect. Zack & Wiki as characters are kind of lame, and for as much trouble as Capcom went to creating this new property, it sure didn't spend much time on the script. But what it did spend the time on was the gameplay--and the presentation too, but more importantly, gameplay. Specifically, it did something most third-party developers haven't really done with the Wii. It took the time to make the control mechanics work, and work well. Every now and again I'd encounter an off-feeling mechanic, or a stage that didn't feel quite as great as the other 20-some-odd stages (I think there was one boss fight I legitimately disliked, and maybe one or two puzzles that bugged me--that was about it), but those were, by and large, aberrations in an otherwise great game.

To me, this begs a question: How many Dewy's Adventures' and Dragon Blade: Wrath of Fire's were people going to put up with before enough was enough? I've seen some people complain that we hate the Wii and that our scores are always lower than everyone else's and blahblahblah. Whatever. While I understand that's the typical forum kid rabblerousing, I'd like to think that Zack & Wiki proves a point. It proves that it's not a matter of disliking the Wii, so much as it is a matter of being pissed off at how few developers were really putting this console through its paces, taking the time to build something unique and awesome, something that isn't from the Mario Factory and yet smacks of the kind of quality we've come to expect from the console builder's software over the years. I mean, let's face it: Occasional Barrel Blast aside, it's been practically all Nintendo coming out with the hot games for this thing, with a very few exceptions. Zack & Wiki shows that when you put in the time, you can make controls that are intuitive and fun, you can make a game that looks truly excellent, however limited the system's hardware might be, and you can do it all without shoving standard Nintendo characters into the mix--even if this game's hero could have used a bit of tweaking.

Now the question is, will it sell? One would hope, given the insane number of Wii consoles out there. Given the $40 price tag, it seems almost criminal to think that people might ignore this one. And yet, at the same time, I can't help but get a Psychonauts-like "critics darling" vibe off this one. I don't want that feeling, but it's there, nagging at me, the same way it did when I played that fateful game. I'd like to see Capcom get rewarded for going out on a limb here, much the same way I want to see publishers who shovel utter dreck onto Wii shelves like compost onto a pile lose a good deal of money and be forced to rethink their strategies. To the nearly 150,000 people who dropped $50 on the utter mediocrity that was Cooking Mama: Cook Off, and the more than 350,000 people who put down full price on the buggy, mindless, altogether unpleasant garbage that was Red Steel, you are hereby required to pick up Zack & Wiki, or I'm coming to all your houses, and it's going to be extremely unpleasant.

I guess my main motivation for writing this was to make a semi-plea to all the Wii owners of the world not to ignore this one. I know the review should be enough, but, you know, the review should have been enough for Psychonauts too, and look how well that went. If the cute is too much for you, I get it, I really do. But even still, it's worth giving this game a look if you like challenging adventure games.