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Thursday 6 March, 2008
Entry 2:
Gameplay:
By the time the second game began everyone from experienced to beginner was on the same page. Everyone had a firm grasp on how to play the game and so the competition heated up. I found it particularly interesting that after playing for a while, people had figured out how the Wii responds to their motion and had therefore decided where they need to throw the bowling ball from on the screen. The game gives the player the ability to move his or her stance from the left to the right, shoot from an angle and even move in closer. Now that everyone seemed to be playing with a degree of skill the room got much, much louder. Friendly taunts were passed from person to person and someone from upstairs even came to let us know we were being “a little too loud.” We were having a great time.
A couple of frames into the second game I figured out how to throw a consistent strike. One after another I was knocking down every single pin with a small flick of the wrist. One strike, two, three, four strikes all the way up to seven in a row. The feeling I got from this accomplishment was amazing. My friends were cheering me on and exclaiming how they had only seen a performance like this once before. The room was dead silent every time I stepped up to the Wii. I am confident that even if I hadn’t done as well as I did, this game would still have been extremely fun. The fact that one can have their own bowling ally right there in their room is really cool, in fact I have already made plans to play again tomorrow.
Design:
I found the design of Wii bowling to be a bit funny, but not in a way that had a negative effect on the game. The avatars that represented each character were people with rounded cartoony features; they looked almost as if they could be balloons filled with air. The graphics of the Wii do not allow for extreme realism in its games but once again this does not have a negative effect on the game. The emphasis for the Wii is not on its look but the social interaction it creates between its players.
I felt that the controls were very well designed. In my experience, there were no problems with the Wii reading our hand motions with the remote (if there were any, they were minimal). Players can really throw the ball how they would in reality, adding spin or even lofting the ball. The simplicity of the controls allowed the player to focus on the motion of their throw without getting caught up with what buttons they needed to push. I really loved the dynamic of playing with four people and had a great time for the duration of the time we played.
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