Although Rayman and I may have our names in common, I can't say I've been a real fan of the character. I played his game on the Dreamcast and found it a refreshing take on the platformer genre, but the character himself has kind of wandered through video game land trying to find his place in everyone's collection. Ubisoft has decided to take the series in a whole new direction by releasing the rabbits - which help make a fairly mediocre game a memorable one.

The rabbits are introduced through a terrible cinematic introduction of the game in which a couple of them sort of pop out of the ground, and a big mean one picks up Rayman and tosses him a cell. I'm not sure why they spent such little time on introducing the main characters to the game with such a poorly made introduction - especially since some trailers on the web show some funny scenes of them basically taking over the world.

Once imprisoned, they force Rayman into their colosseum, where he must take on daily tests (a.k.a. minigames) in the hopes that he might be able to leave. That's pretty much it. It's basically Mario Party without the board game. The minigames have all been created to make use of the Wii Remote and Nunchuk attachment in fun and silly ways. A couple examples:

• Swing your remote in the air and let go to hurl a cow as far as you can.
• Spray carrot juice into the Bunnies' snorkels with the remote as you pump the liquid with the nunchuk.
• Run from start to finish by violently shaking your Remote and Nunchuk as though you're running.
• Make the bunnies dance by shaking the required controller to the rhythm of the music.
• Do some bowling by slamming a barrel into ten neatly arranged bunnies.
• Lay down some discipline by slapping the specific bunny who is singing out of tune in the choir.

Then there's also the soon to be generic:
• Jump rope
• Whack-a-mole
• Simon Says

I'd say there's a good 50 minigames or more. Many of which have a much larger play priority over the others. For example, there's only one cow swinging minigame, but there are around six different songs for the dancing game - each with two levels of difficulty. So there's definitely plenty to play. This also means there are plenty you won't really care much for. This isn't to say they are difficult to control - I am happy to say most all of the minigames have the various control styles done correctly, so you should never throw your controller out of frustration of it not responding correctly.

The minigame with the most focus in the game is the plunger shooting minigame and for good reason too - it's a lot of fun. The level is on rails, so your character walks automatically, all you have to do (pictured below) is aim your remote at the screen and fire the plungers at the army of bunnies coming at you. There's a large number of levels, in areas such as the beach, Wild West, and the graveyards. This is one of the best minigames since they're rather long and the developers have the bunnies come at you in very humorous ways. Pictured below, they're in some Splinter Cell gear, and they also wear some bizarre cowboy and maid outfits. I don't want to ruin all the surprises, but Ubisoft did a great job at making this game funny.

It's because the mini-games are pretty solid, and the bunnies are hilarious that you stay interested. Unfortunately, Ubisoft did not make a completely solid package. I like to describe this game as being "rough around the edges" because of strange presentation issues. When a minigame is over, they abruptly cut to a close-up of Rayman dancing while it displays a win or lose message. This may not seem like that big of a deal, but when every single game always finishes by quickly snapping to the same victory/failure screen, you start to get the impression they spent a lot of time building the minigames, but not connecting them. Which leads to a pretty poor presentation. The shell which presents all the minigames you play just feels a little weak and rushed.

The dancing game is a lot of fun (you know how much I love my music games) but they could have done it better. I like my music games to be totally in time with the music, and when the dancing isn't always on beat, and when the stereos pump out of time (even when there isn't even any music coming out) it lowers the quality of the experience. There's a lot of moments in this game where I wonder how they development team never noticed such huge presentation flaws - and the fact that the music in the dancing game is unbelievably quiet is one of them. I had to drop the volume of the SFX way down to hear the music at a reasonable level. But I must say, hearing the bunny version of "Girls Just Want to Have Fun" is pretty funny.