One year on, Sega has had the opportunity to tweak their deprived Project Rub title in the form of The Rub Rabbits, a sequel of sorts that represents a new starring male falling for a beautiful young lady, participating in all sorts of stunts just to win her over.
The game once again begins with you, a strapping young lad, who catches a glimpse of a beautiful female, and tries his hardest to woo her over while constantly fighting off other obsessed people who are captivated by her presence. From there, the story progresses in all sorts of directions involving a rival gang and a girl who hopes to force you to love her with her love potions, finding a golden flower to save the memories of a lady friend and, obviously, winning the girl in the end.
The story mode is simply a series of mini-games put together by the rather humourous and wacky cut scenes. There is a little over 30 mini-games to plow through, all of which portray different instances of our young lad trying different tactics to either impress the girl of his dreams or save her life from the pressing dangers. The mini-games are quite a big step above the originals. While the original did feature some very memorable experiences, there’s a lot more to like in The Rub Rabbits. In one instance you’ll climb an escalator descending down while you must rub your character upwards and sideward to pass other admiring men and sumo wrestlers (yes, you heard right) in reaching the girl of your dreams first. Other wacky mini-games include one of our most dreaded nightmares – deleting pop-ups on our computer. In this case you’ll need to ‘X’ out all of the virus pop-ups that litter your girlfriends computer before it consumes it. Other mini-games will require you to blow into the microphone to breathe fire at robots, tap away men wearing bull masks and rubbing at your girlfriend’s leg.
I'd love to tell you what's going on here, but honestly, I'm not too sure myself.
The unfortunate thing about the game’s mini-games, however, is that a lot of them are quickly short lived, incredibly easy or just rehashed mini-games from the previous game. So, it isn’t a far cry for gamers to finish this game in little time and effort. Another issue is the games difficulty curve. While most mini-games are fairly straight forward, and easy to overcome, there will be the odd occasion where you’ll come across frustratingly tough mini-games that become tedious because of the control mechanics. Thankfully this doesn’t occur too often, but there will be times where you’ll jump out of your seat and yell at the screen “I tapped that damn heart. What do you want me to do? Drill this damn stylus for it to work?” – or something along those lines, or so we’ve heard.
One of the major problems of the original was its lastability, or lack there of. In a sense, The Rub Rabbits has improved this by quite a lot. Once completing mini-games in the main story you’ll unlock them and will be able to replay them to earn more points that go towards unlocking certain items. These points will, overtime, unlock clothing attire and hairstyles, where you can customise your girl’s appearance. In addition, there is an Attack mode where you can play mini-games in a sort of time attack mode. There are other ‘interesting’ modes such as Baby Making and Hullabaloo. Baby Making requires two people to answer a brief questionnaire, and then must cut a cake that requires teamwork by pressing buttons with the single DS that will eventually assess the prospect of your new born. These babies can later be used in the game’s multiplayer mode where you can take your baby to the park and play with other people’s babies via the DS local wireless play. Hullabaloo is just as crazy as it sounds. It is a Twister of sorts mini-game where you and another person use the same DS to press and hold down specific buttons and continually press and release these buttons where you’ll eventually tangle your arms with one another. There are also six multiplayer exclusive mini-games that do a decent job of adding a bit more value to the game.
Irub, Ifeel, Ipod.
Like the original, the characters are all seen as silhouettes (Ipod-like characters), which do a decent job of creating a unique style for the game and its characters. The soundtrack, while a little repetitive, is a little more enjoyable than the original’s. There’s a lot more variety in tunes that suit the frantic and sometimes soothing mini-games featured in the game. The sound effects are equally annoying as the originals though. Tabbing the screen over and over will result in stupid sound effects such as ‘Rub it’ and all sorts of gibberish that only leads to more frustration during some of the game’s more unforgiving mini-games.
Even with the added modes, and all sorts of extra goodies, there’s still very little in the game that’ll hold your interest. A lot of the games are either quite boring, repetitive or just too damn easy. Much like the original, The Rub Rabbits fails to have those selective few mini-games where you’ll be hooked instantly, which similar games such as Wario Ware and even Super Mario 64 DS manage to have. The novelty of it all wears off quite quickly, and while you’ll more than likely say to yourself “Gee, I enjoyed that game”, it is doubtful that you’ll be playing it that often thereafter.
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