If you’ve ever been to an arcade (some of you might not have, bloody whippersnappers), then chances are you are familiar with the concept of “Whac-A-Mole”. Insert your coins/tokens, grab the mallet (and a pair of friends for extra hand-based whacking), whack anything that sticks its head out of a hole, collect the tickets from the machine and exchange them for shiny bits of crap made in Chinese slave labour factories and five year old candy at the arcade’s counter. Whac-A-Mole on the DS attempts to recreate this activity on Nintendo’s handheld, replacing the mallet with a stylus and the ancient candy with the bittersweet feeling of having been ripped off of $50.
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They're asking...no, begging to be beaten. Brutally.
The game doesn’t really do anything more than what it says on the front cover. In the quick game option, moles come out of their holes, and the player has to stab them with the stylus. The animations and sprites used in the game aren’t terrible, just on the lower side of functional. The developer has obviously made some attempt to make a bit more of a game out of the concept, but adding in fake moles and golden moles that subtract points and award more points to you should you tap them, as well as ninja and thief moles that attempt to steal points from the top screen, but they’ve ignored one major fact – Whac-A-Mole is just not fun without the mallet and the physical sensation and satisfaction one achieves from using said device to bash an inanimate object.
Whac-A-Mole developer DC Studios has included a secondary mode, which is primarily a puzzle game. Basically, the player needs to line up moles of a particular type across a check board, not unlike noughts and crosses or tic-tac-toe. It’s something of an exercise in frustration, as the moles you want to pop up never seem to come, and the design of the game’s backgrounds can make distinguishing particular colours of moles somewhat more difficult than it should be.
Should a player want to actually purchase a Whac-A-Mole game for their desired platform, they’re not likely to derive more than 5 minutes worth of entertainment out of it. Progression in the game is measured by your score within a set time frame (usually 30 seconds). There’s not really any reward for progression; it just gets harder and faster. The utterly repetitive nature of the game does nothing for its long term value, but it’s a concept that’s impossible to extend past a 60 second game at an arcade.
We could only find 3 screenshots - should tell you something about the production values
In a move that’s something of a surprise for a game developed on such a pitifully small budget, Whac-A-Mole actually has local wireless play. Of course, the lengths you need to go to in order to get a friend over to play a game of Whac-A-Mole multiplayer are quite arduous (promises of beer and crisps or a quick hit across the head with a black jack work a treat – Ed), but it shows a bizarre level of commitment to the premise of mole assault on the behalf of the developer. Even better, Whac-A-Mole multiplayer works with a single cartridge, and is fully playable in that state. Unfortunately, since the rest of the game is so utterly unnecessary, nobody is likely to care. Such is life.
If you’re one of those people that like to “think outside of the box,” you could probably come up with a number of reasons why you would think a computerised version of Whac-A-Mole could work as a fully fledged product, but then you’d probably be committed on the spot and spend the rest of your life under observation, performing a rigorous schedule of psychological tests, and being probed by university students all day. It’s just a cold, hard fact of life; Whac-A-Mole is only fun when it involves the act of physical violence against a machine for the sake of earning tickets.
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