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I'm not sure. Maybe it's because actually having my hands on the thing is still a new experience to me, but I love it. One of the things I noticed about the 360 was that I didn't get the rush that a new piece of gaming hardware normally gives me - when I'm most excited about having a new bit of kit, I'll find myself picking up every game going, just to see what they're like, and that never happened with the 360. It is happening with this, though.
And that's mainly because of the controller. I'd probably not even consider buying something like Excite Truck if it came out on any other console, but each time I see it sitting on a shop shelf, I have to fight the urge. I want to know how it feels to play a game like that with this controller, find out how well the developers have used it.
Even divorcing myself from that thrill of the new, I'm enjoying the games a great deal.
Elijah: The Wii Play games only got played once, right after I opened the thing.
Oh, I quite like Wii Play. It gets better the more time you put into it. The pool game is wonderful and easily the one of the bunch that makes best use of the controller - it took me a couple of attempts to get to grips with it, but once I did the sensation of actually cueing was entirely natural. Alright, so games that use the forwards/bakwards motion are always going to suffer a little, because it's impossible to marry your real world depth perception to an image on a flat screen, but that's unlikely to ever mean anything worse than having to spend a few minutes acclimatising to the way your motion is translated in-game each time you boot up.
The rest of the content in Wii play is super-lightweight, of course, but that's part of its appeal. I will keep returning to it in order to try and get all platinums. It's a missed opportunity in an awful lot of areas, but it's a nice thing to have for when I find myself tired or bored - brain-free gaming.
I picked up the SSX snowboarding game which is fun if you don't care about doing any of the good tricks, because the controls are terrible.
I couldn't get the hang of the controls at all for over a week, but they just clicked a couple of hours ago and I found myself hammering the high scores. A lot of the ubertricks are impossibly difficult to pull off consistently - gesture recognition is always going to be hit and miss, so making those gestures really complex was a stupid move on EA's part - but there are enough that have more simple patterns (the heart, the loop) that you can ignore the others and not have your game suffer as a result.
It's almost the exact opposite of the more common Wii strategy, though - possibly a more complex set of controls than you'd ever be faced with on a regular controller. That makes for a real mountain of difficulty as you get used to the controls, but once you climb it the game comes together as something dead nice. I can see myself spending a lot of time with it, once I become totally comfortable with how to play it - the basic directional control (tilting the nunchuk left and right to turn, using the stick on top of it to make those turns tighter) feels lovely, it's got a superb soundtrack (a first for a recent EA game) and it's just fun. Once you know how to play it and if you can be bothered putting up with some serious annoyance while you don't, that is.
Suedey: Most of the shops I frequent have huge Playstation 3 spaces and treat the Wii as if they expected it to perform exactly like the Cube. Or as if it's treated like an entirely separate novelty compared to the proper consoles.
It's a difficult one for the shops, I suspect. I'd imagine that none of them really trust Nintendo Europe - this branch of the company gets by more on good will and lucky accidents than anybody else in the industry, and always has done - but there's also the fact that it's probably not worth shops putting big Wii displays out or giving over a large amount of shelf space to the console's games, because it's not like they're stocking the console for people to buy anyway. Why give space over to games for a console that you can't buy because of stock shortages?
I read a lot about how the machine's suffering from a drought of decent software, how there's been Zelda then nothing else, but that's doing a disservice to some smart little games. Super Monkey Ball is still great, even if I am a bit disappointed by the limitations that Sega have put on the range of the remote (the game only registers tilt up to a certain, fairly shallow degree, which makes things a bit more difficult than they need to be). The sensitivity and responsiveness of the controls (outside of that one issue) are amazing - I was totally expecting a large amount of delay between me tilting the remote and the game responding, but it's as good as instant.
Kororinpa (renamed something boring and literal like 'Marble Maze Meh' in the US - good old US gaming marketing people and their need to be videogaming world's Cuprinol) treads similar ground, but arguably does the same thing much better - it feels like a real world ball/maze game, with a physical sense of reality that SMB doesn't have (although, to be fair, SMB has never particularly aimed for reality in its physics or gravity). It also uses more of the remote's range, asking you to turn it at 90 degree angles to spin the maze around and roll the marble over what were previously walls, then back around again.
I just picked up Elebits (or Eledees as it's been renamed in Europe - licensing issues again?) and that's a game that really does show how much potential there is in the the remote and nunchuk. It's like an entire game built around Half-Life 2's gravity gun, only with you actually holding the gravity gun IRL. Lift things up with the remote, pull them towards you or push them away from you *by pulling them towards you or pushing them away from you*, chuck things around, open doors and drawers by actually opening them - it's brilliant, brilliant, brilliant stuff. And all this while using the stick on the top of the nunchuk to walk around the environments as and how you please. If anything, this is the game that finally takes the 3D first-person viewpoint and turns it into honest-to-god virtual reality - all that's missing is the physical sensation.
Got a wonderful art style to it, too - story told in painted bits of work that look like the cutscenes from Christmas NiGHTS, and has an appealing ugliness to the Elebits/Eledees themselves.
The other thing that the machine really has going for it - as long as you're not using a European one - is the Virtual Console. I'm limited to the PC Engine/TurboGrafx games now, because I'll be fucked if I'm giving Nintedo Europe another penny for dodgy, half-arsed 50Hz versions of classic games when there's no reason why they couldn't have had 60Hz options in them (this would have taken about three minutes to sort out for each game, if that), but the range of titles available andf the promise of more to come should mean it's an invaluable service to people with NTSC versions of the console and, again, makes a mockery of the complaints about a lack of software, imo. |
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