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Thursday 21 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
Wii baseball was too tricky for my tastes. The timing for batting was much harder than in tennis. It was rare that I would hit the ball, let alone hit a fair ball. Pitching, on the other hand, was much easier (although I suspect is one of the prime suspects for all of those wii remotes that end up going through the TV screen). Unfortunately, you don't score anything in baseball by pitching, so most of my games ended as 0 - 0 draws. Wii golf was just plain boring. After the mindless fun from all of the other games, having to calculate club power and angles and wind speed at a slow pace was kind of a drag.
Just when I was about to get fed up with the trickiness of baseball and the boringness of golf, I was saved by the supreme glory that is Wii Boxing. The controls were amazingly intuitive. Instead of using buttons like in baseball and golf, everything was done with the motion sensors. And even though there was only one sensor in each hand, the game could tell when and where I was leaning and ducking along with punching. Not only were the controls easy and all around awesome, the game itself was really fun too! I was on a mission to beat the daylights out of any and all Mii's that the game could come up with and rise to the ranks of PRO. Unfortunately this mission I decided to put myself on was a rather distracting one and I Wii boxed my way into the sunset, and then the following sunrise. that might explain why I'm writing this entry so much later after the last one. Needless to say, my arms are killing me (and so is my roommate for keeping him up). Sadly, I never reached pro status. As with tennis, I had to start boxing pros before I could become one, and these guys were relentless.
DESIGN
Wii Sports' simplicity, from art designs and gameplay designs, is what I think is its key to success. Visually, Wii Sports is somewhat minimalist. The levels are only the most basic professional sports arenas and don't have very much detail to them compared to modern sports games. This is just perfect, however, because it let's the player naturally and easily focus on the actual game itself. The characters themselves are possibly even more simple than the levels. In many cases, the characters were just a head and torso with floating arms. This design also helps to focus the attention of the player, this time on the location of the hands and sports equipment. While the characters are anything but detailed, the equipment is actually fairly realistic looking, which helps deepen the connection in the player's mind between the wii remote and the actual equipment.
Anyone who knows about Nintendo's current strategy knows why there was a need to make Wii Sports so simplistic. Nintendo, rather than catering to hardcore gamers, decided to instead to market the Wii at casual gamers and people who have no idea how to play a video game. Since Wii sports came with the Wii for free, it is likely to assume that it would be the first thing on the Wii many people would play. With this in mind, Nintendo made it ridiculously easy to learn and even more ridiculously fun to play. Even if it is geared towards casual gamers and flat out non-gamers, hardcore gamers have something to do as well. Several training modes are available that function as score attack mini-games. Many of these require true mastery of the game for any decent score at all. If thats not enough of a challenge, then I suggest trying to go pro in something. I can assure you that will take lots of skill.
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