Initially pitched as the next main platformer in the Rayman series, Ubisoft Montpellier's Rayman Raving Rabbids underwent a drastic design change when series creator Michel Ancel first got his hands on the Wii's motion-sensitive controller. Repositioned as a Wii timed exclusive composed of dozens of impressively unique mini-games, Raving Rabbids ended up being one of the system's most successful launch titles. For the sequel, developer Ubisoft Paris is sticking to Nintendo platforms exclusively, and honing in on areas that got strong gamer feedback the first time around.

Most crucially, Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 is being designed from square one as a multiplayer game, not a single-player game with various levels of multiplayer support. Raving Rabbids made a firm identity for itself as a party game, so the team at Ubisoft Paris is putting a significantly stronger focus on four-player simultaneous minigames. According to an Ubisoft representative at a recent press event, fully 90% of the minigames support simultaneous multiplayer, a dramatic increase. Each game also comes in two difficulty modes, "fun" and "challenge."

In keeping with the party game goal, Raving Rabbids 2 features a mini-game playlist editor, which should be a marked improvement over the stilted manual game selection seen in the original title. Players will also be able to choose from a wide variety of bunny avatars, with Rabbids modeled after pirates, office workers, and cowboys, as well as on pop culture fixtures such as Darth Vader, Spider-Man, and Naruto--not coincidentally, Ubisoft Montreal is developing the upcoming Naruto: Rise of a Ninja. The upper and lower bodies of these premade avatars can be switched around to create more combinations.

While Rayman Raving Rabbids saw the comically insane titular bunnies invade Rayman's home turf, the sequel plunges the psychopathic lagomorths into the human realm. This has some aesthetic effect on the game's style and setting, as well as its familiar avatars, but its main gameplay implication is that the bunnies often find themselves taking their characteristically demented approach to quintessentially human activities--baseball, table waiting, spitting into jugs, that kind of thing.

I was able to get hands-on time with several games. Baseball has the player run from base to base as quickly as possible by alternately shaking the remote and nunchuk as if sprinting, after which comes the baffling task of swinging and hitting a bunny as hard as possible--with enough power, the bunny will smash through the scoreboard and out of the park.

Shaking also comes into play when frantically eating carrots in another game. After consuming a certain amount, you spit out the resultant carrot mulch into conveyor belt-mounted jugs down below, using the motion-sensitive Wii remote to aim.

The most enjoyable game I was able to play is one that puts the bunnies into the role of waiters carrying a constant stream of ridiculously overladen sandwiches to an enthusiastic diner. The bunnies are entirely controlled by tilting the Wii remote; as your several-foot-high sandwich begins to tip over, you must compensate by tilting in the opposite direction, while also guiding the bunny to his destination without sending him plunging over the edge of the restaurant's terrace. The rougher the bunny's trip over, the more meat, cheese, and condiments will fall out of the sandwich, decreasing your points earned for that trip. Other bunnies performing the same task simultaneously add to the scene's insanity.

Though I was unable to try them out, I was promised that the much-loved dancing mini-games and light gun-esque sequences will return in improved form. "They're different in a really new and big way," said the Ubisoft rep.

Rayman Raving Rabbids 2 is being developed exclusively for Wii among the home consoles, but a Nintendo DS version is also in the works. No fine details were available regarding the DS iteration, but it will be a mini-game-driven affair in the vein of its home console sibling. There are no plans to bring the game to other platforms. Ubisoft plans to ship both games, developed by Ubisoft Paris, this fall.