| | | A pack-in with the Wii launch system in the US--or was that in Japan? anyway--Wii sports serves five sports, sorta minigame-style: Tennis, Bowling, Boxing, Baseball, and Golf. They all feature control via simple movements of the "Wiimote," and simplistic Playmobil-style graphics, no doubt intended to delight and amuse a playful audience.
I didn't see Tennis, but the thought of two people playing it head-to-head, swinging their Wiimotes around the room, scares me.
In Bowling, you flick the controller in a sort of bowling motion, and the ball supposedly follows what you did, including twist to give it a roll to one side or another. It would have felt more like the real thing if maybe the Wiimote weighed ten pounds; as it was, I wasn't really feeling it. However, I suck at real bowling, and I suck at Wii Sports bowling, so maybe they did get something right (or I'm just all wrong).
Boxing is a horror-show. It's set up kind of like Punch Out (see entry 792), with your transparent fighter in the foreground, facing the enemy. You hold the Wiimote in one hand, and the "nunchuck" attachment in the other, and make various vaguely punching motions with them to make your fighter block, throw body shots, strikes to the head, and so forth. You'd think body vs head shot would be a difference in how high you hold the controllers, but actually it's determined by what angle you're holding them at, which I couldn't quite get my head around. Fortunately, there's no need, since, as my friend demonstrated, you can KO the AI by simply shaking the controllers over your head. How awesome is that.
Baseball has two modes, batting and pitching, and again you wank the Wiimote in various ways to get it to do stuff, and again it's pretty obliging. Some of the AI players have glasses and weird hair and stuff, but none of them have any personality.
I had trouble getting the touch of Golf. For the most part, you can just kind of flick your wrist to hit the ball pretty solidly down the course. But sometimes flicking your wrist does nothing; and sometimes flicking it hits "too hard" and causes a bad shot. As a light amusement game I guess maybe you could excuse these control issues, but there's just no way to take this as any real type of golf game--it's too much about the vicissitudes of the controller. |
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