Here's how this game happened, by the way. Rhonda and Clark were at one of those junk thrift stores that deal in truckloads of old overstock merchandise. The shelves are seemingly completely random and as much as I despise entering such an establishment, I always always always walk out with something bizarre that caught my eye. The last time I was in one, I left with a starter box of the Pirates of the Carribbean TCG and a Beagle Boys toy car.

Anyway, at this one Rhonda found an unnamed Ben 10 game and some nearby Ben 10 cards. Turns out the cards and game were for Mattel's aborted Hyper Scan "game console." This console's gimmick being that you scan cards in as you play for powerups and whatnot... not unlike some of Nintendo's efforts with the eReader. The game was maybe $5, the card packs were a buck apiece... and the Hyper Scan itself was going for $10. I think the console alone was originally priced around $70.

Even at that fire sale discount, I could not give this a thumbs up. The Hyper Scan is junk. We know this. Although it would have been a lot of fun weblog entries for under $20.

Before they called me, Rhonda and Clark were debating the worth of the Ben 10 Hyper Scan game, and Clark said "Daddy will know." When I told him we would get a better Ben 10 game, he instantly took me at my word. I did say they could buy some of the cards though... because, hey, cards.

I recalled seeing the Ben 10 PS2 and DS games in the bargain endcaps at Target... $20 each. So I did the due diligence and found the PS2 game was also ported to Wii last fall... and although I was debating PS2 vs. Wii for a bit (by all accounts, they look identical), one Wii feature sold me: you activate Ben's wristwatch Omnitrix by smacking the Remote against your Nunchuk arm.

Gamestop had the Wii version brand new for $20. Clark was very excited.

The game is a walk-and-punch brawler, mixed up with some basic platforming, puzzle areas where you need character X to proceed, and boss fights ripped from God of War. It has drop-in, drop-out 2-player co-op... which simply results in the unexplained paradox of two onscreen Bens. When you're playing with a three-year-old, the drop-out becomes absolutely necessary. As we get further and further in the game, I find I have to drop Clark out about two or three times a level, so I can make it through a jumping area that is too difficult for him.

There's glitches. Every now and then, Clark and I will get too far apart - usually because I'm trying to climb to the next part and Clark is not - and the game will let one of us fall behind the level. Then the camera refocuses on whoever is invisible, which is a mess. The solution is to drop-out, and I can deal with that... but this screen drives me batshit:

We get this every time we start a game, or drop a player back in. It's the game freaking out because it thinks the Remote is too far away. Which is stupid. I've seen this before... I want to say in Metroid Prime 3, but I could be wrong on that. It's especially obnoxious for Ben 10 because you rarely use the Remote as a pointer. Our couch is a fairly normal distance from the TV, nine feet. So we have to hold our arms out as far as we can (which, for Clark, doesn't amount to much) to get past this screen, and then we can play normally.

That's some hilarious wording too, considering we're talking about the dangerous, TV-killing Wii Remotes here. "Not a safe distance?" If anything, we're safer.

Clark is still working on his eye-hand coordination. He's great at punching, and he has memorized a couple of the special moves. Walking largely eludes him, however. The Nunchuk is actually worse for his little hand than the PS3 DualShock, because he wants to hold it in a natural cradling position... and that means his thumb can't quite maneuver the analog stick, whereas the DualShock he can hold a little easier because the object is already braced by two hands. So he ends up jamming the Nunchuk's stick in a permanent lower-left lock unless he's really concentrating on what he's doing. I often look over and see him with the Nunchuk thrust out to his right, as if that will make Ben 10 move to the right.

He is, however, aces at activating the Omnitrix. And this requires quite a few complicated actions! First you tap left and right on the Remote d-pad to choose which alien you want - and you select based on the character's silhouette, so you need to be a Ben 10 insider here. Then you hold the C button on the Nunchuk and slam the Remote onto your left wrist. Now that's immersion! His favorite character is Heatblast. His favorite move is d-pad-down + A, which makes Heatblast exhale a plume of fire.

This is one of those Let's Zoom In on the Character and Pretend That's Actually What Happens in the Game screenshots.

The game looks like a PS2 game, albeit a late-period PS2 game. The cel-shading and bright environments certainly help. As far as licensed kids games go, it's one of the good ones. There's enough combo moves and interesting character powers to keep me interested in otherwise mindless battle scenes, and a couple of the boss fights we've seen are suitably epic (thanks to the God of War theft I mentioned earlier... it's the bits where the game animates a crazy boss takedown and you have to hit the correct button sequence shown or else the entire scene fails. In Ben 10 Wii's case, you instead have to direct a Remote cursor to certain onscreen icons... yes, this is the only part where you need to be pointing at the TV.)

And I was pleased to note that the game supported an HD display.

For Clark's part, he likes that he gets to choose which alien he wants to be, and he enjoys the overall suspense of things. "How we going to get this guy, Daddy!" He has to watch all the cutscenes, even the ones he has already seen. He is truly my son.

The entire cartoon voice cast is present. Tonight we figured out that Grandpa Max is Metal Gear's Colonel Campbell. And he's doing more or less the same voice. I can't believe I didn't notice this earlier, because is it now completely stunning.

I do have to wonder about the game's huge list of unlockables. We have barely unlocked a thing, and not a single item on the Enemy Viewer menu. Which, in other games, is usually the kind of junk you get just by seeing an enemy. So I don't know what fabulous arcane unlocking key we're missing there. Maybe it's because we're only playing on Easy.

All in all, a fine purchase. Quite a bit better than the last few $20 games I've been through, I'll say that.