One final note about multiplayer: Xeno Xtraction is downright disturbing. It’s a take-off on the board game Operation, the goal being to grab what is apparently a monster egg with the Wii-mote pointer, and then guide it through the maze that is your young boy patient’s intestines. Meanwhile, the poor kid sobs, and cries out whenever you brush against his organs. If you hit the egg off too many things before getting it out (very likely on the first few tries), the baby mauler breaks out with a frightening noise. We guess that’s where the 㥶+” in the rating comes from.

If multiplayer isn’t your thing, you can try the single-player adventure. The first thing you’ll notice is that you can’t steer your character around the screen; rather, you have to click the spot on the screen where you want him to go with the A button. It’s understandable they wanted the game to work for Wii owners who somehow never invested in a Nunchuk, but couldn’t they have made it so that people who do have Nunchuks can steer normally?

In the adventure, you’re given a fairly large world to explore, in which you accomplish very simple tasks for a variety of people (it’s kind of like Grand Theft Auto for pre-schoolers). Your goals are to unlock as much of the park as possible, and to accumulate coins and tickets (for some reason, the Six Flags video game universe has two forms of currency). Sometimes your tasks will involve playing the various mini-games, but other times you’re charged with mundane chores like picking up trash and planting seeds. If that’s what your kid wants to do, why not take him away from the Wii and send him to the garden? The reason we play video games is that we get to do things virtually we couldn’t do in real life. All in all, the single-player mode demands too much boredom in between the games (which are, of course, mostly the same games from the multiplayer; there are more than 40 total in the whole game).

The presentation is the one thing this game has going for it. The graphics are pretty threadbare, but they work, and it’s easy to imagine a kid going ga-ga over the various costumes you can unlock for your character. The game’s inhabitants discourse in what’s apparently a gibberish language, but the English text is surprisingly well-written and sometimes even funny. The sounds are amusing and dramatic, save for the aforementioned Xeno Xtraction torture scene.

In short, pass on Six Flags Fun Park. There are better Wii games out there for kids and fans of casual entertainment. At least, there must be, somewhere.

By Robert VerBruggen
CCC Freelance Writer