What's the target audience of this game?

I'd say that our target market is eight plus but if the child is using the Wii, it's hard to imagine any child who wouldn't enjoy BOOM BLOX because it doesn't require that you have to read and it's very simple to learn. I mean, if they're very young, they would have a difficult time finishing every puzzle in the game because some of them are brain-twisting challenges. They take a bit of thought, especially to get them perfect and get the gold medal, but that wouldn't stop a young child from having a wonderful time with it. In fact, my nephew who is only six, does a wonderful job of painting and putting a bunch of animals out into the world and have them interacting with each other and building stuff that topples over and ends up squealing in delight. It's a very wide range of people who will be entertained by this game.

Click to see images from the game.

Well there are three ways to play the game, actually four ways if you add the Creating side of the game. The two ways to play by yourself, one of them is Explore Mode where you go through each of the different types of materials that you can use, different kinds of blocks that you can in the world. And then you can use those with different tools that we give you -- basically you have things you can throw, you have the ability to grab, pick up or stack things like a hand and you also have a blast that you can use. So anything that you could imagine that you could create using those tools we've put into the product in one way or another or one level or another. Timers, color spinners for picking out colors for pulling out blocks and things like that are also part of the ruleset.

So the answer to your question is sort of, yes in a big way. There's many different ways of scoring and many different ways of winning each of the different levels. In fact, that's always been a focus of ours is to keep, although the activities are very simple in the sense where you're either grabbing, throwing or blasting, we keep the complexity of the game interesting by always changing a little bit of the game here or there. Some levels, you have to complete a task in a certain amount of time, other levels you'd try getting point blocks on the ground by avoiding the negative point blocks so it changes all the time. That's really what makes the game so enchanting, you'd never get bored as there's always something new and exciting.

So BOOM BLOX how does make use of online connections? Does that mean that players can play head to head, download new puzzles or what?

It's sharing though Wii Connect. Like I said, there are four parts of the game that you can play, there's one mode that I mentioned was Exploring, and there's one that's very scripted or a very contextual series of levels that Spielberg helped to create and imagine where there's four different themes. There's a multiplayer mode that we call "Party" because there's all different ways to party -- collectively, collaboratively or competitively -- and you can do the same kinds of activities (the throwing, the grabbing and the blasting). And finally there's the Create mode, so the Create mode is where the online stuff comes in. Whenever you create a level or a game, you can actually grab any game level from the product and bring it into the create mode and play with the geometry of the world by adding new stuff or taking stuff out, mix and match characters and sets, change tools, and even play with some of the rule variations. Once you've made your own level, your own game really, using Wii Connect, you can send that to a friend from your friends list. So there is no multiplayer simultaneous play over the Internet but you are able to share your creation.

Any chance we'll see some of Spielberg's movie properties popping up at themes in this game?

I think that when you're creating an intellectual property like we are here, I would say that our conversations with Steven are definitely echoing this. We wanted this game to have its own look and feel, it's own sense of being and identity, I think that's a wonderful thing to do when you've established a franchise really solidly and you have a sort of set of characters that are with it that you can mix or mashup. Star Wars with Mario or whatever, for the first one out of the box, we definitely want to have everything be in the Blox world and have that really consistent "theming." So, a really simple answer to your question is, "no, we're not pulling from any of Steven's previous work." This is really a game that he's made to play with his kids and hopefully everyone will feel like they can play with their friends in a party mode or with their family or their children. It's really important to us that it stands on its own.

Why is there no DS version?

[Laughs] Well, we have not announced the DS version. There's a couple of good answers to that. First of all, we are doing a lot of work with Steven so I'll preface everything with that. The reason this particular title conceived of, initially as a Wii-only title, is that we really wanted to lean into the use of the Wii Mote. A lot of games, almost tangentially use the Wii Mote where you shake it at the right time and something happens, that's not the way that Boom Blox works. What makes Blox really different is that a lot of effort has gone into the actual manipulation of the world. When you throw, you can throw with varying degrees of strength with your throw which really varies how the physical simulations is going to be modeled. With that being said, it's a full physics simulation that's using a full physics engine with lots of attributes to it. So you can stack things up and the weight of those objects really do press down on the lower objects so it makes for a very different kind of experience then other games that don't have that level of sophistication. It would be a very different kind of product if it were brought to a different platform. This game is uniquely Wii.