IGN Hands On With The Squad

A few months back, Fruit and I had some fun with the Namco Bandai folks playing a variety of their games, but one turned out to be Fruit's 'guilty pleasure' of 2008, We Cheer. The game was fun to play, had cartoony (female) avatars, and had the general 'party game' appeal; however, it did not have any male cheerleaders; however a new game is in the works at THQ, as Wootini mentioned previously that should be all gender inclusive, All-Star Cheer Squad.

Unfortunately, the fine folks over at THQ didn't give the more than enthusiastic crew here at GayGamer a hands-on demo of the game to let us tell you just how it is, but IGN did get to spend some time with it and have placed a fairly glowing preview up over on their site. The game incorporates the Wii remote and nunchuk motions for the hand actions and also uses the Wii Fit Board for some footwork action. They had this to say about the controls:

In fact, the motion controls were recognizing motion at a pretty startling level of accuracy; even with the nunchuk controller. Poses worked, and actually scored us based on when we locked them in, with more points added to "perfect" poses. There were also motion combinations that scrolled by, which would have us doing a left-to-right arm wave or up/down lift, and again they worked more often than we'd expect in the game's early state.

The Wii Board + Remote combo is currently only usable by one player, but the game does support up to 4 players for some hot synchronized co-op cheer action. You can also play the main competition mode with one other player, which definitely lends itself to decent quality time with the significant other working together to get to the top of that pyramid. Some other features mentioned in the preview were:

As a few quick notes on the game, there are also a few other interesting design aspects that Gorilla Games is gong for with All-Star Cheer Squad. For starters, there's a full cheer editor, which lets you create your own routine and save it for single or multiplayer play. In addition to making your own routines though, you can also save them to your Wii-mote and bring them over to a friend's house and import them on their Wii; a nice touch for casual gamers that want to do some simple user-generated content.

Overall, it sounds like an interesting and ambitious game. Let's just hope they realize early enough that they can market the game to more than just 'teen girls' (and send us a preview copy).

Pre-E3 2008: Hands-on All-Star Cheer Squad [IGN]
[via: GoNintendo]