A Practical Look at Diary Of A Wimpy Kid Wrecking Ball
I spent an afternoon last month going back through Diary Of A Wimpy Kid Wrecking Ball after not touching it in years. It is a side-scrolling platformer where you basically wreck Greg Heffley's neighborhood while trying to collect items and complete missions. The game came out in 2010 across Wii, DS, PS3, and Xbox 360, published by THQ. Nothing groundbreaking, but there are some mechanics that trip people up if they have not played it before. The core loop involves moving through levels, smashing objects for points and collectibles, and occasionally switching between characters. Greg is your main guy, but you also play as Rodrick and Manny depending on the level. Each character has slightly different abilities. Rodrick hits harder and can break certain obstacles that Greg cannot. Manny is basically useless in combat but can fit into small spaces. The game tells you which character to use as you enter each section, so you do not have to guess.
How to Get Diary Of A Wimpy Kid Wrecking Ball Working Properly
If you are running this on an original console, it plays fine out of the box. The issues come up if you are using emulators or backward compatibility. I hit a specific problem on the PS3 version when playing through the "School Daze" level. The game would freeze for about five seconds every time Greg entered the cafeteria area. It happened consistently. After some troubleshooting, I found it was tied to the PS3's dynamic resolution scaling feature, not the game itself. Turning that off in the display settings eliminated the stutters completely. The game locked into a steady frame rate after that. On the Xbox 360 version, there is a known issue where the save file can get corrupted if you power off the console during a loading screen. This usually happens when you are between sections of a level. The game does not auto-save between individual rooms, so losing progress can mean going back to the last checkpoint, which is sometimes two or three minutes away. I just started making a habit of waiting for the loading bar to finish before turning anything off. It sounds obvious, but I did not think about it at first and lost maybe twenty minutes of progress across two attempts. Download availability is basically nil at this point. THQ went under, and the game has not been re-released digitally on any major storefront. Your options are buying a physical copy on eBay or sites, or using original hardware. There are no fan patches or unofficial distribution channels worth mentioning because the game is simple enough that no one needs to fix it. The disc versions work as intended on the original systems.
One thing beginners miss is that the collectible comic pages are not spread evenly across levels. Some levels have five or six pages while others only have one or two. If you are going for 100% completion, you should check the pause menu map before starting a level to see how many icons are visible. It saves you from replaying sections blind. Another counter-intuitive detail is that smashing everything in a level does not guarantee the highest score. The game rewards efficiency more than destruction. Finishing a level quickly with most objects intact actually scores higher than taking your time and breaking everything. I learned this the hard way on the "Back to School" stage, where I deliberately smashed every desk and chair and still placed lower than a friend who breezed through untouched. The main weakness of the game is the camera. It is locked to a fixed side-scrolling perspective, and in several levels the camera angle makes it difficult to tell how far a gap is or whether an enemy is about to drop from above. The "Parkour Party" level is the worst offender. You jump across rooftops while the camera slowly pans, and there are moments where you cannot see the landing zone until you are already mid-air. This caused me to fall and lose health more times than I care to admit. There is no real alternative if you want to play this exact game. The other Wimpy Kid titles, like Rodrick Rules and Dog Days, are different games entirely with different mechanics. If the camera issues make this unplayable for you, your best move is probably just watching a full playthrough on YouTube instead of forcing yourself through it. The game is charming in a cheap way, but it is not deep, and the technical hiccups are real. Play it once for nostalgia, but do not expect it to hold your attention for long.
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