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Wednesday 20 February, 2008
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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