TGS Report 2: Let's Tap

13 Oct 2008 at 10:50:40 by Jake Kawaguchi

This fascinating Wii game is the first product out of Yuji Naka’s Prope studio. SEGA’s former Sonic Team chief claimed Let’s Tap! was so simple that it could be played by penguins, and now I kind of get the joke: literally, all you have to do is tap yours hands (or flippers or wings or whatever).

The great innovation presented by Let’s Tap! is how it dispenses with standard uses of the Wii Remote and instead diverts the player’s attention to a cardboard box on which the Remote flatly rests, face-down and horizontal. At TGS the game is set up with bright orange Let’s Tap! logo-branded boxes about the size of old PC game packaging, but I think you could in theory use any old cardboard box.

Anyway, the idea is to tap at the correct rhythm and in the right pattern – using both your left and right hand to input directions – as you work through all sorts of single- and multiplayer challenges. There doesn’t seem to be a constant theme to the style of the game’s levels, apart from the obvious need to tap your fingers like a nervous stockbroker.

Let’s Tap!’s first multiplayer stage is a race from left to right along a neon brick path through outer space. This part of the game is a 2.5D platformer, really, but the tapping control method makes it more interesting than that sounds. There’s also a Visualiser mode, which offers a non-competitive style of play where you can just relax and mess around with fireworks, paintbrushes and other tools to create pretty images by tapping on cardboard.

It’s all pretty novel and funky; just the kind of thing I expect from Yuji Naka and his new team. Let’s Tap! will be released in Japan this December, and a UK release should follow early next year.