Ah yes, Jenga, the fun childhood pastime of playing with a set of wooden blocks, because someone was just that bored. I never played much of the board game when it was at its peak of popularity. I was more of a CandyLand kid. Aw yeah, coming up on the Candy Cane Forest, motherfucker! But, I do understand the basic concept of the game, stacking bricks to make a tower and pulling them out and making sure it doesn’t topple over. What I don’t understand is making a full game for the Wii and selling it at full retail price. Who made this game and why would they make it. Oh wait, it’s an Atari made game. Well that explains everything. Published by Atari and developed by Atomic Planet Entertainment, mostly known for their Gameboy ports of existing games and went defunct as of 2009. They also may have had some involvement with the infamous game, The Guy Game, which had a lawsuit for showing underaged nudity, but I can’t find any proof of that. Maybe Jenga will have some creepy creepy bullshit in it. Let’s take a look



So Jenga World Tour sets us up with a set number of modes. Free Mode, World Tour, Arcade Mode, and Options. The game is filled with a lot of annoying chatter from background characters. Every time you move or your opponent gets a turn, these people talk in these annoyingly chipper voices. So the first thing you’ll want to do is turn the voices way down, I mean all the way down to shut them up. So now that we got one problem fixed, let’s look at the remaining dozen more. Any other mode is worthless, because at the end of the day, it’s all just Jenga, so I decided to go with World Tour. I thought for a second this was like an online mode or something, but it seems like this is the quote-on-quote “story” mode. Kind of a shame, I genuinely wanted to know who had the highest score in Jenga World Tour. Well, with that said, how does the gameplay? I thought I was going to come into this game with a bored expression, tell you it’s just Jenga, and move on, but I kid you not, this game had me the most frustrated out of anything I’ve talked about thus far on this mini series.
Jenga World Tour is a lot like playing real Jenga, if you had to play it drunk and after waking up from a month long coma. Pulling out the brick from the tower is like trying to rip out a tooth from your own mouth. Slow and painful. Even if you get a brick you know won’t knock the tower down, you still gotta fight with the motion controls for dear life until you finally manage to pull it out. Once you finally get that sucker out of there, you can move on to the next part, stacking the brick on top of the tower. This is even worse. No matter how right I feel about it, the brick always seems to fall off the tower and I gotta pick it back up and try to stack it onto the tower again. If I try to move the Wii remote forward, the controls just stop and once I get it back on, the cursor and the brick fly all over the place and I gotta reset everything just to get it stacked onto the tower. This game makes me feel like a dumbass. And it doesn’t help that it can take you two minutes just to do all that thanks to garbage controls, but the AI opponent you’re up against can pull out the brick and stack it in less than five seconds. And I can tell, the game times both of your movements. And that’s it. That’s all Jenga World Tour has to offer. That’s it folks. All the real fun of Jenga, if you were playing while incredibly intoxicated, only you don’t have the benefit of having any alcohol to make the pain better.
I was not expecting to get as angry as I did with this game. I thought this was just going to be a short article where I tell you, “Yep, that’s Jenga alright”. But no, that ain’t Jenga. That’s trash. That’s bullshit is what that is. You’d have more fun going outside and stacking bricks on top of each other than playing with this. Next up, something that doesn’t raise my blood pressure to unhealthy levels… hopefully