Nintendo has finally gotten into the downloadable content business with WiiWare, which made its debut in Japan a few weeks ago and will be hitting consoles in America today. That first Japanese wave included all Japanese games... except one: Epicenter Studio's Saku Saku Animal Panic, now known in the US as Critter Round-Up. Being the only American game in the Japanese launch was a pretty great honor, but even better is being called the best game in the launch by numerous gaming journalists.

A moment of disclosure here: I have known Nathaniel McClure, the co-founder of Epicenter Studios, for years. I first met him when he was in college and was friends with my brother; they moved out here to LA a bunch of years ago and fell into the world of video games. Than ended up working on the Call of Duty series for quite some time, gaining himself a serious reputation in the industry. As Call of Duty 4 was getting off the ground, though, he realized that he was busting his ass, working 80+ hour weeks for megabuck franchises where he saw almost none of the profits. He called up his friend Brian Jury, another long time video game insider who was working at Collision Studios, and convinced him that the time had come to jump ship and start working for themselves.

The two started off pitching a Wii game called Real Heroes: Firefighter, the told me when I visited their brand-new Sherman Oaks digs last week. While making the rounds pitching that game, they met with Konami and one thing led to another and they ended up being the developers of one of the WiiWare launch titles. The problem was that time was tight - the game needed to be delivered in a breakneck three months. A small studio, Epicenter stepped up to the challenge and delivered a game that's curiously addicting and surprisingly filled with many levels of game play.



After a lunch with Than, Brian and lead designer Tony Dormanesh, I sat down to play the game. The premise is simple - you're a guy who has a pen filled with animals. You have to build fences to keep the different animal types separated. This is fairly easy at first, as you're in a barn yard, but as the game progresses you move to more exotic locales with more aggressive animals. Trying to build a fence around a group of monkeys - who will throw their shit at you - while being chased by a hungry lion is not as easy as you might think.

The graphics of Critter Round-Up are simple and blocky, calling to mind woodcut puzzles for little kids. That cartoony aesthetic hides some complex gameplay, though. The predator animals will eat prey animals. Power ups - ranging from meat to entice carnivores to a clock to slow down time - can change the balance of power. Chickens can lay eggs, making more animals for you to round up. Elephants can charge through your fences and prairie dogs can slip out through holes in the ground. The good news about predators is that once they eat an animal they'll be temporarily sated, giving you a chance to get by them. The game is billed as 'action/puzzle' and I think that's a perfect description - you're constantly looking for the best ways to pen up the animals (the more animals you get into the same fence, the better your score), but there's so much randomization and so many deadly animals wandering around that you're just as often taking evasive action as you are planning ahead. And that random element means you'll never approach a level the same way twice.



I played single player for a little while, and was sort of annoyed when Than said it was time to try multiplayer - because I as having so much fun. There's a co-op mode, where four players can work together to fence in critters (although I would think that having four people in there, along with all of those animals, would get tight), but the game really sings in the versus modes, of which there are four. One hilarious mode will be familiar to fans of Tron, except instead of creating walls of light, you're leaving behind fences. There's a terrific soccer game played with snowballs, and there's a game where you're chasing chickens. But to me (and I'm a guy who opts for Deathmatch on Grand Theft Auto IV multiplayer) the crowning jewel of the versus modes is a game where you and your opponents are trapped in a pen with a bunch of predators. Whoever lasts longest wins, and you can trip each other up, hopefully delivering your friend into the mouth of a hungry crocodile.

The depth of gameplay in the game is sort of astonishing: there are 50 levels for single player, there are the four multiplayer versus modes, 25 levels of multiplayer co-op AND an infinite mode that randomly generates levels forever and forever - or as long as you can last. All for 1000 Wii Points, or about ten bucks. To me Critter Round-Up simply plays like a scaled down version of what would be a great Wii title on its own. If there's any game worth your Wii Points today, the WiiWare US launch date, it's got to be Critter Round-Up.



Meanwhile Epicenter Studios is looking to the future. They have Firefighter in development (just think about how a firefighting game can perfectly integrate the Wii controller. Brian explained to me that what they want to do is take advantage of the Wii's controller, not abuse it. In Critter Round-Up, for example, you use the controller like an old fashioned D-pad, except when you want to knock down a fence you created - you shake the controller to do that. Epicenter isn't into making waggle-fests), and they have another WiiWare title in the pipe, the rhythm game Crescendo. If these games are half as fun as Critter Round-Up, they could be the next video game success story.