Media Macaroni

Can a 2-year-old play Wii? Is there a game that a 2-year-old and a 6-year-old can play together? The answer to both of these questions is yes, with Go Diego Go: Safari Rescue. 

The basic premise of the game is that the mean Magician has turned the elephants into rocks, and has caused plenty of other mischief in the animal world. Kids can go on rescue missions to undo the mayhem and help a wide range of safari animals leading up to the elephant rescue. 

Olive was a few months shy of 3 when she first started playing this game. At this point, she had done little more on Wii than roll Monkeyballs off platforms. With Diego, I was impressed with the amount of gameplay she could participate in immediately. This is a sidescroller with an intuitive twist – you hold the remote sideways, and tip it to the right to go right and to the left to go left (you can see it in action in the video below). There are also a bunch of special moves that Olive liked right away, like pumping the Wii remote up and down to make a hot air balloon rise, and tilting the Wii remote back and forth to go up ladders. I think if the game was called Go Diego Go Up Those Ladders, Olive would be perfectly content. She did start to lose steam with the game, which meant I did all of the basic walking around and collecting and she did all of the special moves.  

When we met up at the Wiinior Center with my 6-year-old niece, Elizabeth, she also liked it right away. By this point we had discovered the Safari Guide Helper mode, where we could give Olive a second controller and she could participate whenever a special icon appeared onscreen. Despite the fact that Elizabeth was controlling all of the main action, Olive was totally into it as you’ll see in the video below. 

Olive continues to enjoy this game, and is even getting pretty good at jumping. We had not watched Go Diego Go! on TV prior to playing the game. I can only imagine that fans of Diego will like this game all the more.  

Amazon: Go Diego Go: Safari Rescue

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 10th, 2008 at 3:11 am and is filed under Video Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.