Thursday 21 February, 2008

Gameplay:
The next game I played was golf. The controls are pretty simple, and there's no way to deliberately slice or hook the ball. The courses are fairly interesting but the early courses are pretty simple, the truly compelling courses only show up near the end. There are only nine courses total, I wish there were more since I really enjoyed playing the last 3 holes.

Next up was tennis. Tennis was very similar to baseball in that it's pretty shallow. The player doesn't control anything but the tennis racket, so the gameplay simply consists of swinging the wiimote around at the appropriate time in order to hit the ball.

Design:
From a pure gameplay perspective the games present in Wii Sports range from simple to laughably simple. But the action taking place on screen is only part of the experience of Wii Sports. The most enjoyable part of the game is the social aspects of the game. Since the games are so simple they're easily graspable by non-gamers and so they can be easily enjoyed by a whole range of people.

The biggest problem I had with the game is that for a game that's supposed to show off how awesome the Wii is, some of the motion detection can be a bit dodgy at times. For most of the games I didn't find it to be a big problem since boxing, tennis, and baseball all rely on broad movements for the player control. But for golf, a game that requires a bit more precision, there were some major issues. When I was putting especially, occasionally I would make a small gesture with the wiimote that the game would interpret as a very strong swing sending my ball well beyond the hole and ruining my chances of doing well on that round. This happened to me at least twice, so I don't think it was simply a one time fluke. I don't know if these issues were due to poor programming or whether it's a matter of fundamental limitations of the hardware, either way it was very frustrating.

This is all right, and about what we're looking for, though some more thoughts on the social aspects of the design would make it even better. Still, good job.

Amy Leek (grader)