WiiWare - Game We'd Most Like to See on WiiWare

Geometry Wars 2

We here at NWR just can't get enough of Geometry Wars. Not all of us have an Xbox 360, but those of us that have had one for a while couldn't help but love the original Xbox Live Arcade release from late 2005. Three years later, many more of us had 360s, so many more of us got hooked on a little guilty pleasure known as Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2. Similar in concept to the seminal Robotron 2084, Geometry Wars places your ship in the middle of a playing field and dares you to shoot everything in sight.

In a departure from the already-released Geometry Wars: Galaxies (available on both DS and Wii), Retro Evolved 2 eschews multiple levels, instead focusing more on multiple modes of play. There are six altogether, namely Deadline (eliminate as many enemies as possible in a pre-defined time limit), King (hop from safe island to safe island, blasting as many enemies as you can before the island disappears), Evolved (the game you already know and love), Pacifism (avoid enemies as long as you can, using only bomb gates to defend yourself), Waves (attempt to survive pre-defined waves of enemies), and Sequence (beat as many of the twenty levels as you can until you run out of lives). There's also local competitive and cooperative multiplayer, a cool mode in which one player shoots and the other steers the ship, and the ever-present online leaderboards (long has JonnyNWR's 13 million-plus score in Deadline mocked us from the top of the scoreboard...damn you Jonny, damn you). All in all it's a great package, and retro gamers continue to eat it up.

Geometry Wars: Galaxies was well-received, and we here at NWR would most definitely like to get a sequel. The Wii's Classic Controller is tailor-made for games like these, and we want another chance to use it for the kind of game that seems to be its birthright. For all of these reasons (and the fact that we'd love to see them add online multiplayer), Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is NWR's 2008 pick as the Non-WiiWare Game We'd Like to See on WiiWare.

Runner-up: Braid