quote Game|Life, Hands-On: Chibi Robo Devs' Latest Weirdness, Captain Rainbow

Want more hardcore games for Wii? How about a niche adventure game that like two people are going to buy?

Yes, it's that time again: Time for Skip, the iconoclastic makers of bizarre games like Chibi-Robo and Giftpia to unleash their first Wii game onto the world. It's called Captain Rainbow, and it's got all the hallmarks of a good Skip game: A quirky, endearing story, bizarre characters, lackadaisical gameplay goals, and (most critically) weird shit.

The weird shit this time around stems mostly from the fact that this is a game about a down-on-his-luck superhero who has been sent off to a mysterious island full of down-on-their-luck characters from old Nintendo games. Little Mac from Punch-Out, Birdo from Super Mario Bros. 2, the generic golfer from Golf, and many more of Nintendo's most forgettable characters are all on this island with you, and all of you are looking to have your wishes granted.

My impressions of the game's first two hours are below.

Things begin with the Captain Rainbow TV theme song, which you can watch over at the official home page. Following this, we watch a brief cinema scene explaining what's up with main character Nick. His secret identity is the superhero Captain Rainbow, who fights crime with a yo-yo.

As you might expect, Captain Rainbow isn't the coolest superhero around anymore, and the kids are now crushing on even cooler heroes. So Nick heads to the mysterious Mimin Island, which is rumored to have the power to grant wishes. On the way, he loses his belt that lets him transform into Captain Rainbow.

When you wash up on shore, you can explore freely and experiment with the game's controls. It uses a combination of the nunchuk and pointer: You use the stick to move Nick around, then point at items and people to interact with them. When you point at something when Nick is far away, he'll look at it and you'll get a brief text description of what it is. When Nick is close up, the pointer icon will change to an exclamation point and you'll be able to interact with whatever it is.

On the beach are seashells that you can pick up, crabs that run away from you, and fruit that you can eat, although it has no visible effect. There are also haniwa stone statues that you can punch and break by holding down the B button to charge a punch, then letting go.

Cr_hikari Wandering off the beach, you'll find some characters to talk to. One is Hikari, a shrine maiden from the Japan-only game Shin Onigashima. The others are the Mimin, the little rabbit-like creatures that inhabit the island and grant wishes.

Hikari says something about you being the chosen one, or something, I wasn't paying attention. At any rate, she shows you a secret ancient door in her house that just so happens to have an impression in it the exact shape of Captain Rainbow. If only you could transform into him!

But you can't. So at this point, you can save your game (by using the outhouse, of course) or sleep on a bed in Hikari's place -- this lets you jump to the next day or night cycle. Of course Captain Rainbow has a day/night cycle! Haven't you played a Skip game before? Different characters are doing different things depending on what time of day it is.

So now you get the run of much more of the island. You can go exploring around. You'll find:

• Hidden Mimin. If you run your pointer over certain parts of the level, you'll hear them squeaking, and you can click to unleash more of the little guys into the wild.
• The soldiers from Advance Wars. Well, Famicom Wars, actually. These soldiers are currently camped out in Mimin Island, learning to be the world's best... volleyball team. I don't get it either, but they tell you that if you're looking for anything, you should talk to Hikari in the mornings when she's praying.
• The robot policeman from Giftpia. He's locked up Birdo at the police station.
• Birdo. Amusingly, the old story from the U.S. version of the Mario 2 instruction book about how Birdo is a transvestite has now been retconned into canon. He's a cross-dressing dude, now.
• A bunch of rocks you can't break and paths you can't cross. You'll have to power up before you can explore the island.

Eventually, you figure out that you need to crash at Hikari's, then ask her in the morning where you should go. She tells you the location of your belt, and you can go retrieve it. Now, you can turn into CAPTAIN RAINBOW and break tiny rocks with your yo-yo. You can transform whenever you want, but you have to eat fruit to restore your energy bar, or you'll die.

And that's pretty much how far I got. Since I'm still just puttering around in the introductory phases, I can't tell you much about how it plays -- it's slowly ramping up. It seems like most of what you'll need to do is solve puzzles by collecting items and talking to people, trying to solve their problems.

What I can say for sure is that it's a really nice-looking game. Skip's graphics designers have made really nice use of 2-D and cel-shaded elements, blending them all together with straight up 3-D to create some really attractive and stylish cartoon environments. It's a pleasure just to explore the island -- with any luck, the gameplay will hold up.

Now, the big question: Will this come to the U.S.? I think it'll all have to do with what side of the bed Nintendo of America gets up on tomorrow, unfortunately. They left Giftpia in Japan, but brought over Chibi-Robo. We could see this happen over here, or it could, itself, be relegated to the land of misfit Japanese curiosities.