World of Goo and Mega Man 9 (Wii)

These games are awesome.

I was not expecting this sort of fun and quality from a WiiWare game, since everything but "My Life as a King" is pretty horrible. Both these games are really worth the price of admission though.

World of Goo has you building bridges and towers out of goo balls. It's like the West Point Bridge Designer with cartoon faces, awesome music, and brilliant art styling that remind me of a Tim Burton movie (Edward Goohands?)

The levels go from "heh that was a bit tricky" to "holy crap this is impossible" to "I have an engineering degree and I can't get more than halfway through this game." As you progress through the game, you're given all sorts of different goo balls, with different properties for each. For every goo you collect over the minimum for beating the level, a goo is added to a free building level, where you build a tower that is ranked against the world over the Nintendo WFC.

Mega Man 9 follows a similar difficulty scale, though I don't think it even gives you the benefit of a few training levels. Right from the start (if you're following the boss order) this game is just brutal. The game is compeltely retro styled, to the point that you might not even realize that this isn't a virtual console game. The only thing that gives it away is the item shop, a feature clearly not available in Mega Man 1, 2, or 3. Truly an old school difficult game.

So with this much needed quality boost in WiiWare games, we are given two amazing games that will make you pull your hair straight out of your head. Both games are available on the Wii Shop Channel. For those who can't find a Wii, Mega Man can be found on Xbox Live Arcade and the Playstation Network, while World of Goo can be downloaded from Steam. I highly suggest you get both, on whatever system you can.

Mega Man 9 has achievements, which are obviously mostly meant for the 360 version, but are listed in the WiiWare version as well. As if the game wasn't hard enough, try beating it three times in a day, or once every day for three days. It's really just hilarious how difficult things get. DLC is also rumored to be on its way, in the form of two HARDER difficulty levels. I can't wait to see how absurd they are.