Platform: Nintendo Wii

Developer: Data Design Interactive

Publisher: Conspiracy Entertainment

Release Date: August 14, 2007

Genre: Racing

Rating: 1.5/10

Reviewed by ChronoSloth

Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing isn’t just a lazily coded, poorly designed attempt to cash in on the popularity of arcade racers like Mario Kart Wii with the aesthetics of the Harry Potter series. It was released before the holidays so uninformed grandmothers buy it as a gift; it’s hellspawn. Data Design Interactive may take responsibility for this abomination but I’m fairly sure Satan had a hand in it. I didn’t even buy my copy. I didn’t pirate it either. I summoned it. If you put five burning Harry Potter books in the form a pentagram with a Chinese knock-off Wiimote in the middle and scream the magic words, “shovelware,” your Wii and television will cut on, and you’ll be greeted by Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing.

Flying straight through the rings in the first tutorial is even a pain to get through. My apologies to Nike Halifax for the Superman 64 flashbacks.

The game has three modes, all of which control the same and involve flying on a broomstick. They consist of racing fellow wizards, rounding up runaway spellbooks, and battling a dragon by flinging spells at it. All three of these could be made awesome with some work, but unfortunately, absolutely zero work went into Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing. Even if fighting the dragon with spells was as well done and awesome as it sounds, the game’s crippling controls would ruin any other good design decisions in the game. You steer using the very last method you’d expect. It’s not the analog stick on the nunchuk, not the d-pad on the Wiimote, not by pointing the Wiimote at the screen, and not by holding the Wiimote horizontal like a wheel. It is done by moving the nunchuk itself left, right, up, and down. This method is so inaccurate that I though my nunchuk was actually faulty. I tried a second one. Then I even switched Wiimotes, in case there was some problem with the port at the bottom of the first one. All my equipment worked fine; the game just controls that damned bad.

At the character select screen I ditched the ugly kid from the cover and went with an ugly kid with no hat at the bottom right because his expression mirrored mine as I played this game. It was one of fear, frustration and bewilderment. Most of the other characters have this horrifying wide eyed excitement about them. But this one poor soul feels your pain. I tried one of the races after flailing through a few of the tutorials. The rings that I thought were only there for tutorial purposes returned. I had to stop. I was getting violently angry. My Skyward Sword Wiimote was already squeaking in my tightening grip, and my teeth could only take so much grinding.

Billy the Wizard: Rocket Broomstick Racing could have been a good game. Maybe it’d have even been a great game with the right direction, team, and budget. Fighting a dragon by slinging dark magic at it while flying at high speeds while trying to maintain your grip on your broomstick surely sounds like a challenging and exciting battle. But in this game, the most difficult battle is taking a right turn. Not to boast, but I’m great at video games, and the fact that I can barely make it through a race means all the children who received this as a gift or picked this out because of a love for a far superior boy wizard franchise likely couldn’t make it through the tutorial. The fact that anyone published this, or that Nintendo allowed it on their system is baffling. My favorite part about this game is that there’s a button that will take you straight to the credits from the main screen. Now I can send everyone who worked on this game a thank you card.