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Trinity Dragon's Wii Sports (Wii)
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| [February 20, 2008 04:46:45 AM]
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Gameplay
The degree of interactivity within the gameworld is severely limited by the parameters of the sport in question and by the minimal functional space of the playing field. Baseball only has the pitcher’s position and the batter’s position that the player has any control over. Similarly all other sports are interactively limited to what a person in the real sport would be allowed to do.
Social interactions are all but absent in this game. The most reaction you get from the opposing team (baseball, tennis)/computer player (boxing, golf)/inanimate objects (bowling) is a retaliatory punch or strike of the ball. The only verbal interaction is the announcer calling score at every logical opportunity. Beyond the announcer everyone else (with the exception of the player if they choose to yell at glitches) remains adamantly mute throughout the game.
The only way to keep the player actively using the game is to hook them in an inescapable fascination with at least one sport. This means that on average (accounting for people with 2 attachments and people with no attachments) only one sport of the five is going to be in regular use. The initial problem with maintaining player interest in the game is that the time required to acquire a decent degree of skill with any sport is above the attention span of many gamers. This is made crippling when the game fails to deliver on any means of extending its shelf life beyond the release of the first few real Wii games.
Ultimately Wii Sports was made to buy time for developers to install a stronger lineup of well-built, deeper, and more extensive games. While the game comes as standard for the starting package it fails to live beyond about this point in time, when the other Wii games are coming out in droves. In the end it only serves to familiarize players with the Wii-mote, which is also the point of the Wii Play game except to a higher degree and focusing more on the player’s reflexes and cognition than ability to swing a baton around.
Design
Everything in the gameworld revolves round the use of the Mii avatars and subsequently the driver that can run the beautiful graphics of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption ends up looking like the graphics of the N-64 where everything can be traced to a lego-esc brick design. Despite the refined look of the avatars over the N-64 it nonetheless drives that image of old graphics for older systems.
At the end of each game (regardless of win, loss, or draw) the game will make a poor attempt at a reward by evaluating the player against a scale that ranks with professional players. The problem with this is that, while most players are competent with their own bodies, any first time player will not try to accommodate for the imperfect motion-detection system. When comparing the player to a professional on a scale to 1000 an average person scores along the black line that denotes the bottom most of the time. This is not an encouraging way to keep the player interested unless they have an obsessive reason to drive onwards.
The motion detection system of the Wii shows every possible fault through this one game. While it takes everything you have to move a bowling ball it only takes a flick of the wrist to make the avatar swing the bat or whack the golf ball outside of the green for the fifth time. The sensitivity issues point out every flaw in the player’s form then exaggerate them to a ridiculous degree. The inability to control stance an foot movement through the Wii-mote also adds a degree of frustration to tennis and baseball because the computer automatically moves the legs (or in most cases semi-spherical lower body) in the direction of the ball.
There is no real drive to compete with any of the other players and conflict only seems to exist in the form of friendly competition. This is the problem I would anticipate with future game systems that utilize a full body movement system when martial arts games try to expand to non-violent arts like Aikido. The main form of competition within this game is between the player and the computer and secondarily between multiple players. The real problem is that a player who takes the game too seriously will suffer a competition with their own body, which climaxes when the player can’t continue playing for more than half an hour because of the strain of pitching an batting excessively.
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| [February 20, 2008 04:46:03 AM]
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Summary
Wii Sports is almost entirely based around the premise of testing the motion sensitive controller and familiarizing the player with the functions of the Wii remote. The entire game revolves around a series of minigames that utilize the motion sensitive controller to mimic existing sports, namely: Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf and Boxing. While these games imitate the movements of the real sport the entire range of movement can be limited to the player’s upper body.
Gameplay
As far as story goes for this game it is practically nonexistent. Ultimately the only story that one could glean from the game is one that the player made up with regards to their Mii character. The game is entirely centered on the five sporting events and as such has no need for a story arc or even a goal beyond what the real sport sets out.
The gameworld consists of 5 or 6 level screens, one for each of the sports and a menu screen. The gameworld only changes when the player orders the game to change to a different sport. The limited gameworld stays true to the game’s two objectives: show off the fancy tricks for the motion sensitive controller and get the player to use some of those tricks.
The player’s role in this game puts him/her in the position of a player in the various sports that the game allows for. In most cases that means that the player is distinctly represented by a Mii avatar and, in the case of tennis, two at once. While the ability to create and play as a Mii is entertaining and provides a certain degree of customization it doesn’t substitute a story arc. The Mii avatar makes the same movements as the player (more or less) and will move at roughly the same time and speed as the player.
Some of the sports put an emphasis on how fast the player moves the remote to correspond to the force of an impact. There seems to be a severe problem with gameplay when the computer players can hit a tennis ball just outside of their racquet’s bounding box and the ball passes through the box for the player’s racquet. There also exists the inherent flaw with gaming over actual sports is that the reaction time for the avatar is slower than the reaction time of the player and often the avatar won’t move fast enough or will react to a flick of the wrist. There is no combat in this game per-say, only competition between the players and the computer or among players
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Trinity Dragon's Wii Sports (Wii)
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Current Status: Playing
GameLog started on: Wednesday 28 November, 2007
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Trinity Dragon's opinion and rating for this game |
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Logged. An outdated (yes already) training seminar for the Wii-mote.
Rating (out of 5): |
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