Sundry Sunday is our weekly feature of fun gaming culture finds and videos, from across the years and even decades.
When I put it like that in the title it sounds like it’s going to be salacious but it really isn’t, it’s just anthropomorphized representations of the various enemies in Wii Play Tanks.
Okay… you don’t know what that is…. I’ll explain.
Wii Play was a mini-game collection on the Wii natch, a burgeoning genre on that system. It was an excuse to release a bunch of Wiimote experiments as an inexpensive package. As often happens with Nintendo, some of them were better than you’d expect. Three of them had some real longevity to them. Table Tennis was like a faster version of Wii Sports Tennis; Billiards was an excellent pool simulation; and then there was Tanks.
Tanks put you through a series of 20 single-screen levels where you piloted a tiny tank around destroying various other enemy tanks set around each board. As you passed level after level the game would introduce new tanks with various personalities and powers, like laying land mines, firing rocks, aiming bank shots off of walls and, eventually, invisibility.
If you were playing along you had limited lives, but it also had a two-player co-op mode, where each player only had one life, but destroyed players got revived so long as the other player survived to finish the level.
After you finished the 20-level version you unlocked a 100-level version, which threw in a couple of new tank types. There’s some nice grace notes in the design, like how the background music adds different tracks depending on which kinds of enemies are in play. It was a lot of fun, and deserves to be remembered as more than just the best game in Wii Play. Here’s a marathon playthrough of the whole thing. It’s a surprising hour and 22 minutes long, but just a couple of minutes of it will suffice to give you the idea.
This week’s find is a much shorter, 3½ minute animation presenting cartoon representations of all the enemy tanks in the game, by NCHProductions.
