The bugs are coming!  Are you ready to do some squashing?  AMN has just published my preview of the upcoming Nintendo Wii game Escape From Bug Island, a would-be survival horror clone packed with campy B-movie traits, giant bugs, and not much else.

Taking hold of the Wii remote and nunchuk, players move the main character around the island in search of his missing companions while avoiding and engaging the insects. Attacking a giant bug with a whacking stick is as easy as whipping the remote, while giving the nunchuk a jiggle allows the character to roll safely away from danger. Sometimes smaller bugs will swarm, and all it takes to knock them away are vigorous shakes of the remote and nunchuk. Various combinations of control stick movement timed with proper attacks allows for a range of various effects, plus it's possible to zoom into a first person perspective in which the remote's pointer abilities act as a camera control. Along the way players will find clues that lead to new locations and point the way to specific places, but all of that supposedly takes a backseat to killing bugs. Early reports would have us believe that this game is all about the squashing.

So, yeah, bugs.  From what I've seen so far, Bug Island wants to pass itself off as intentionally bad in the spirit of cinematic Mystery Science Theater 3000 fodder, but the early word is that the game is just plain bad, and that no amount of thematic retconning can help it.  We'll find out for sure when the game is released at the end of the month.