Grease: The Game: Impressions

Grease: The Official Video Game is a party-friendly minigame collection of the sort that abounds for the Wii. It is themed on the settings and story of the perennially popular movie and set to a soundtrack of 16 licensed songs from the same. The game includes a party mode for up to eight players (four-versus-four) and a story mode that loosely follows the events of the film.

Winning minigames nets you points, naturally, which are tallied up as you go. The minigames, all set to songs from the soundtrack, include American high school sports circa 1957, such as wrestling and baseball. The former challenges you to shake your Wii Remote harder than your opponent to get the better of him or her in the onscreen grappling. The latter requires you to time the swing of your Wii Remote/baseball bat to get a good hit. Drag racing is also an option: There is an arcadelike racing segment down an abandoned waterway in which you ram each other, dodge obstacles, and shift up through your gears to pick up more points played with the Wii Remote held horizontally. Other games, such as the dancing, are optionally compatible with the Wii Balance Board. Without the balance board, the dancing involves simple flicks of the remote as directed by a stream of prompts, with the odd bit of shaking maracas. While two players go head-to-head in one of the minigames, two more can participate by singing along with the microphone controllers in a basic karaoke offering.

The playable characters are simple, cartoony likenesses of the cast of the film. In the story mode, though, it's just Danny and Sandy on offer as you work through minigames in a sequence that resembles the movie's plot. Persistent scores can be tracked for individual characters to let family members, say, permanently adopt a character each and maintain a long-term competition.

Grease: The Official Video Game comes out in September 2010.