Yuji Naka, formerly of Sega, now of Prope, had his latest game on display at Tokyo Game Show. It's Let's Tap! a (wait for it...) supposedly penguin friendly mini-game collection that uses the Wii remote in a unique way. No, really. It's one of the few Wii titles that requires that players never actually touch the Wii remote to play. Instead, one is required tap on a cardboard box on which the Wii remote rests.
No, really.
While there are at least five mini-game types in Let's Tap!, only one was on hand for the TGS rank and file, a game called "Tap Runner." All that's required is to light tap one's fingers on the cardboard box to make your avatar run. To make it jump, smack the box a bit harder.
Turns out the Wii remote is surprisingly sensitive at picking up these little taps. Get a bit too excited and you may accidentally jump. But you can also control the height of your jump by smacking the box with varying degrees of intensity.
"Tap Runner" isn't much more than a track and field style event, full of pits, hurdles, jump pads and electrified orbs. It's disarmingly fun and up to four players can compete head to head in a series of races (GameSpot's Brian Ekberg and I ran a quick trio of minute-long sprints.)
The game has a nice graphical style, with "Tap Runner" having a bit of Tron aesthetic.
There are a handful of other things to do in Let's Tap!, but we only saw one other, a simple sidescrolling shmup called "Bubble Voyager." It was actually played by Nintendo's Bill Trinen, who tapped his way across a slowly scrolling field of spiked obstacles and cute spaceships. It looked, from a distance, like less fun than "Tap Runner" due to the more difficult controls.
Let's Tap! looks like a decent dose of fun, surprisingly so. Whether we'll actually have an interest in whipping out the orange cardboard box at home to play it, remains to be seen.