Everybody, Stop Being Mean To Transformers Cybertron Adventures

Ports used to be a weird topic in games.

While these days, you mostly tend to see big AAA games skipping platforms that can’t handle it, hardware-wise (or, worse, releasing a cloud streaming version), this wasn’t always the case. Back during the Wii’s heyday, the system’s absolutely ridiculous install base led to a lot of developers trying their hand at making a less-demanding version of their biggest titles in an attempt to get Wii owners onboard with whatever their hot new franchises were, even if they weren’t quite as graphically demanding (or even too similar, gameplay-wise, due to the Wii’s unique controls.)

Sometimes this meant you just got a worse-looking version of something that existed on another platform, but this time with ‘waggle’ controls (frequently the case with yearly sports titles, or big-name first person shooter franchises). In some cases, however, you would get a unique experience, better tailored to what the Wii could offer. Dead Space, for example, would get an exclusive light gun/rail shooter released for the Wii that offered a side story to the first two Dead Space titles for other consoles. My favorite example, Ghostbusters: The Video Game, provided a campaign based on the ‘bigger’ title but with a fun, cartoony art style (that Dan Aykroyd himself likened to The Incredibles), as well as the inclusion of split-screen co-op multiplayer, which would be something that would be legally required to be part of every Ghostbusters game ever made, if I were king.

Unfortunately, as is often the case, a lot of HARDCORE GAMERZ would look at these ‘lesser’ titles with scorn, as though having lower-resolution graphics meant it was immediately not as good as the versions released for other consoles, not paying attention to how much work went into creating an all-new experience on a platform with drastically different requirements and expectations than something like an Xbox or a PlayStation.

Transformers Cybertron Adventures is one of those games, and I think people need to look upon it a little more fondly.

Read more: Everybody, Stop Being Mean To Transformers Cybertron Adventures

Transformers Cybertron Adventures is the Wii port of the (then-current) Transformers War For Cybertron titles available for consoles and PC, the first time Transformers had appeared in a big-budget 3D action game since the shockingly good PS2 game based on Transformers Armada. Fittingly, Cybertron Adventures is a visually scaled-back version that offers a different approach to gameplay, in order to deliver an experience that better fit the Wii’s hardware.

This is actually what makes it so interesting. Instead of being an over-the-shoulder third-person shooter like damn near everything else was that generation, Cybertron Adventures turned itself into a Sin and Punishment-style rail shooter, with a fairly Time Crisis-like cover mechanic, and the ability to play through the entire campaign in co-op mode with a friend.

Then, as now, the idea of a Transformers light gun game is something I’d wanted for a very long time (having not played the big-budget Sega arcade games based on the movie at that point), and Cybertron Adventures absolutely delivers. The game follows the same basic premise of showing you the final days of the initial Autobot-Decepticon war on Cybertron, split between an Autobot campaign and a Decepticon campaign. While the plot follows different paths between them, it still manages to hit a lot of the same important beats and setpieces, but this time without you having to know who Zeta Prime is. 

Most importantly, though, Cybertron Adventures is fun as heck. The levels are challenging without being frustrating, with the Wii Remote serving as a perfect stand-in for a ‘proper’ light gun, and frankly the fact that you don’t have to split your attention between moving and shooting allows for slightly more frantic gunfights than would perhaps be fair if the player had full control of their character. Sure, the driving could use a little work (especially thanks to the unfair deaths it leads to near the end of the Autobot campaign), and switching weapons is a bit clunkier than you’d like, but the basic framework is fun enough to make it worth going through, just to see old friends like Ironhide represented in those fantastic War for Cybertron aesthetics. (This especially goes for the co-op mode, since a lot of the encounters tend to go much more smoothly with a second Autobot at your side, even if they don’t have the same weapon options and aren’t, uh, actually represented on screen at all.)

And at the end of the day, what matters is that I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anything by just playing the Wii version. Sure, a lot of levels are missing (or just different), and the art style may have been simplified to help the standard-definition Wii maintain consistent performance, but it runs well, looks fine, and – most importantly – is fun as heck. On its face, the idea of a Transformers light gun game would be novel enough to keep my interest, but the experience is fun, engaging, and breezy enough to recommend to any Wii owner who’s already played through the various light gun games available for the platform, or even someone who just likes Transformers a lot and wanted to try something new. (Or both, like me!)

So maybe it’s my deep bias for Wii games talking, but I think as time goes by, we’re all going to be a little kinder to games like Cybertron Adventures. Removed from the vitriol of the console wars, and perhaps softened a bit by perspective and hindsight, we’re going to look at games like this as a product of a console generation where the most popular system among more casual players was the least-powerful, requiring teams to try new approaches, in order to deliver a fun experience to people that wanted to play the big-name titles but only owned a Wii or PlayStation 2. (And work they did – I briefly spoke to a developer of Transformers Cybertron Adventures on Reddit, who mentioned how much dang work it was to try and fit War for Cybertron on Wii, which stands as another great argument against crunch culture – but that’s a topic for another day.)

If you take anything away from this post, gentle reader, let it be this – the next time you see a game struggling to keep up with the graphics and performance of its peers, maybe give it a chance and let it into your heart. You just might be surprised.

(Imagine you read that last paragraph while Sarah Maclachlan’s “Angel” is playing.)