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Thursday 21 February, 2008
GAMEPLAY
This round of playing, I tried two more of the games: baseball and bowling.
I don’t think baseball was as well designed as it could’ve been. Even though there were two players, only the one playing the batter really had any impact on the score. The pitcher just had to press buttons, and neither of the players had any impact on catching the ball once it entered the field. Each player would then bat until his or her team was out. I felt like the turns were too long and the game felt too slow overall. There wasn’t enough direct player interaction such as their was in tennis. In this way, I felt that the inherited rules of the game were a limitation. But my bias might also come from the fact that I have never been a big baseball fan in general.
Bowling was a little more fun than baseball for me. It took me a while to get the hang of it, but once I did, I was almost flawless. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten such a high score in actual bowling! At first I thought it was too slow, but after a while I had fun working with the precision I needed to get a good turn.
Overall, I think the game is easy to pick up and fun to play, especially with other people, but it is not a game I would get really hooked into. For the Nintendo Wii, it’s a good, simple starter game.
DESIGN
Compared to other modern games, their seems to be somewhat minimal effort put into the design of the game. It has a very bubbly, cartoonish feel which I neither liked nor disliked. It fit the light mood of the game. The characters are incredibly unrealistic, but their meager design proves that what matters is the gameplay itself. The best part of the character design in my opinion is that the player has a lot of control in their individual design. Therefore I could make a character that looked like me (or whatever I wanted to) and become attached to it.
The best part of the graphic desing of the game was the playing fields. Bowling felt like a real bowling alley, especially with other games going on in the background, and the reacting crowds in tennis and baseball were entertaining.
I felt that the transition from real life sport to video game was done pretty well. Their was just enough player control to make the game interesting to play without giving the player so much control that it became difficult.
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