Snowpack park impressions:
A blizzard has hit Snowpack Park and only 3 penguins are left, your goal is to get 100 penguins into the park. You do this by taking on missions on different islands. Each mission has a set penguin goal and a time limit. Your goal is to herd as many penguins as you can into a goal before time expires.
When you're not taking on missions, you're taking care of the penguins at the park. Each penguin has a mood (and more trivially a name, gender, and weight) which you need to take care of. If a penguin's mood is down for too long, they will leave the park. You raise their mood by paying attention to them. You can do this by petting them, feeding them, or playing minigames with them. You also greet them by pressing Z in time with their calls, but the timing is very precise and its easier to raise their spirits doing other stuff.
Penguins who are down will not let you near them, and you have to raise their spirits by feeding them fish. You get a pair of fishsticks that act as a dowsing rod and let you acquire more fish in a small fishing minigame (just shake the remote after the rod is tugged a few times to get 3-6 fish). When a penguin likes you, they'll follow you around. When you play games with your penguins or raise their spirits, you gain friendship points. You need these to access missions and the farther the mission is from your park the more points it will cost. Annoyingly you have no way of seeing how many friendship points you've gained until you end the day.
You can also find coats for yourself and hats for your penguins. The best hat so far is a cardboard box you can find inside your tent. In your tent you can save your game and end the day by going to sleep. There is also a photoboard presumably for saving pictures you can take with your penguins, which I haven't figured out how to do yet. I think its at a designated spot that I havent opened up yet since it seems with each mission your beat you open up more of the park. Theres also a time system, so you can only do so much in each day. I don't know if you have to beat the game in a set number of days since the game hasn't made any allusions to that.
The game seems like its pretty short, I got 9 penguins in the first mission and the goal is to get 100. You also get 500 friendship points to start with, and AFAIK its totally possible to go back and redo earlier missions (I havent checked if this is possible or not yet, but the transport point for the first one is still on my map). I assume the game just continues indefinitely after you get all 100. Overall its quirky fun and I'm enjoying it, but I don't know if it has enough meat to warrant 8 bucks.
The only control scheme is wiiremote and nunchuck.
EDIT- Also you have a comic relief anthropomorphic penguin sidekick who explains the rules to you and plotwise is tidying up the park while you go out saving penguins who looks like this:
