TGS 2008: Let's Tap Hands-On

TOKYO--One of the more intriguing games on the show floor here at the 2008 Tokyo Game Show is Let's Tap. This collection of minigames for the Nintendo Wii also boasts one of the greatest taglines we've seen since we began covering this show: "World first, the game that even penguins can play!" Lucky for them, there were no penguins hogging up Let's Tap this morning (or else we would have busted them in their fat beak for honing in on our territory), and we had a chance to try out this fun little game for ourselves.

There were a couple of demos of a straight-up footrace for up to four players and an interactive art piece that let players create splashes of color on the screen simply by tapping their fingers.

As it turns out, the entire game is controlled by tapping your fingers, or at least that was the case with the demo we tried. For each station in the Let's Tap area, a Wii Remote was placed on top of a rectangular cardboard box. To control the action, we simply placed our hands lightly on the box and tapped away. Presumably the sensor in the Wii Remote picks up the tiny vibrations from the tapping and controls the game accordingly.

What surprised us beyond the novelty of the controls was just how sensitive they were. For instance, in the footrace, we controlled our runner along the 2D scrolling plane by tapping on the box. To jump over the multiple objects that were placed along the path, we simply tapped slightly harder. In a tight footrace, with two evenly matched runners, it was all too easy to get overexcited and tap too hard on the box, causing our virtual runner to lose momentum in the process.

Still, once you get down with the tapping in Let's Tap, the game is really fun. The footrace demo had three stages, each progressively more complex than the previous. The first stage was a fairly straightforward race to the finish line, with a couple of jumps to navigate. The second stage introduced elevation changes--your runner slows down when running uphill--as well as a few more challengingly placed obstacles. By the third demo stage, we guided our runner across rope swings, tightropes, and even a section where there was a contest to see who could blow up a balloon fastest.

In addition to the footrace demo, there was a more artistic slant on tapping, with a vision piece that would splash paint on a virtual canvas as we tapped lightly on the box. There didn't seem to be much more to it than that, but it hints at the variety that the developers at Prope are aiming for with Let's Tap. The visuals in the footrace demo were stark and 2D, with neon-colored stick figures running across a similarly stripped-down course. A trailer shown in the Let's Tap section showed a bunch of different minigames that are considerably more graphically involved than the footrace (we spied a particularly lush koi pond with rippling waves presumably caused by tapping).

So we know that Let's Tap is fun, and we know it's pretty easy to jump right into and play. However, we don't know the answer to that most crucial of questions: Is Let's Tap truly so simple that a penguin can play it? Sadly, we'll never know the answer to that until we can smuggle a Wii into our local zoo (or our state's pet ownership laws loosen up a great deal). Nonetheless, Let's Tap might make us forget our petition for penguin ownership if it makes it stateside, which isn't a guarantee. The game is currently due for release in Japan this December.