|
Thursday 21 February, 2008
Gamelog #2
GAMEPLAY
After playing Wii Sports some more, I was still very interested in it. The game isn’t merely a simple simulation of real life sports – there are a number of additional modes that players can partake in, such as a fitness test ( where you play a series of games in order to have your fitness age calculated by a number of factors such as performance, speed, and balance), a challenge mode ( where players strive to beat a particularly hard goal), a single player mode with increasing difficulty, a basic training mode, and a multiplayer mode. The different types of modes made the game even more fun. You don’t have to simply play a normal, standard simulated sport match against your opponents, but you can also alter fundamental aspects of the game itself to create a new, interesting situation.
Another aspect of Wii Sports that I very much enjoyed are the characters that you can model after yourself. In the game, the characters engaged in sports can be modeled to represent you. You can alter almost everything – hair, eye, lines on the face, height, body weight, skin tone, and basically almost everything you can think of to make a character that looks almost just look you in real life. This gives you a “personal” attachment with the character because, well, it’s you out there in the baseball field or the bowling lane!
Design
Space within the game is extremely limited, despite a large sense of your surroundings. In a tennis match, the player can see the whole tennis court along with a number of spectators. However, the player only has one actual method of action to interact with the game – swinging the tennis racket. The player cannot actually move; movement in a Wii Sports tennis match is handled by the system itself, and not the player. In a bowling match, the player can see his bowling lane along with a few surrounding lanes. However, the player also can never physically move his or her location in the game; the player is confined to simply throwing the bowling ball.
The game awards rewards in a number of ways, most of forms that I did like. As the player increases his or her points earned, the size of the crowd cheering for the player increases, when applicable. As a beginner tennis player, you might only have one or two people cheering for you from the stands. When a player eventually becomes a “pro” through gaining a large amount of points, the size of the crowd increases tremendously – a player might have over twenty people cheering for them on the stands.
If a player demonstrates mastery of sports when playing the fitness test, the game will reward the player by giving them a low fitness age, somewhere in the range of the 20s. If a player plays poorly on the fitness tests, the game might give them an old fitness age, perhaps 50 years old.
|
