Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 Multiplayer Demo Hands-On

Currently scheduled for release toward the end of this year, Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 is a minigame collection that promises to be more insane and more multiplayer-friendly than its enjoyable predecessor. The previously unannounced game was shown for the first time at Ubisoft's recent Ubidays event in San Francisco, and we had a lot of fun competing with other attendees while checking it out.

The demo on show at Ubidays featured four of the 60 minigames that will appear in the finished game, titled Baseball, Beer, Burgers, and Rodeo. But this is much more than a game that some might consider a weekend well spent; this is a game about bunnies in training for their invasion of planet Earth. It seems that part of the training involves the Rabbids learning to act like humans, though it's fair to say that their understanding of some of our pastimes is occasionally way off the mark.

For example, in Baseball, one Rabbid clutches a ball and runs around the bases before launching itself toward a second Rabbid holding a bat. The object of the game is simply to hit the first Rabbid as far as possible by first shaking both the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk to make it run as fast as possible, and then by swinging the Wii Remote as you would the baseball bat. Baseball was the only one of the four games on display that required players to take turns, and we're told that the vast majority of the minigames will support simultaneous play.

Next up was Beer, which was undoubtedly a big favorite at the event. Bar-tending Rabbids at the bottom of the screen were lining up empty glasses so that the players at the top of the screen could fill them up with carrot juice. There wasn't a juicer in sight, of course, so the only way to get the vegetables in liquid form was for the players to chew on carrots (by shaking the Wii Remote) and then spit down into the glasses below. Spitting, it would seem, is considered something of an art form in Rabbid society because landing the saliva-tainted juice in a glass was worth a lot more points when it was done with style. Style, in this case, means that you've spent some time shaking your head from side to side (again with the Wii Remote) to get a really long and unwieldy droplet to hang from your mouth that requires some degree of skill to land on target.

The Burgers game was another favorite at the event. Perhaps this may have been because it was the only minigame on display in which it was possible to deliberately mess with opponents. The object of the game was to feed a number of increasingly tall burgers to a large Godfather-like Rabbid at one end of the screen. The only controls available during the demo were tilting the Wii Remote to move and pressing the A button to stop, which made getting the unstable skyscraper-like burger towers to their destination intact a real challenge. The fact that all four of us were attempting to feed the same supersized Rabbid simultaneously added to the chaos. It also wasn't uncommon to see players bumping into each other and toppling each other's fast food in the process.

Although it was by far the most insane-looking game on show, Rodeo was actually the least challenging one to play. Each Rabbid sat astride an unlikely-looking mechanical mount and had to do everything in its power to stay on it. The game would have been almost impossible except that at the bottom of the screen there was an animated picture of a Wii Remote that showed us exactly what we needed to do every time the required movement changed. Then when the picture disappeared, we simply had to maintain the same motion and rhythm until the next one popped up.

For now, we can only imagine what other crazy minigames the developers at Ubisoft Montpellier have in store for the finished game. You can rest assured that we'll bring you more information as soon it becomes available.