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// Filed under: Video Games on Monday November 27th 2006, 8:03 pm I am playing a lot of video games lately. I will write about them soon. However, recently (tonight) I was lucky enough to get invited by my friend Jon to his friend’s house, who is also called Tim, to play his imported Wii. Of course, the Wii comes out here in just over a week. And it’s been out in everywhere else for over a week. So go figure. But there you are. I managed to have a go of Wii Sports, Zelda: Twilight Princess and get a good look at Red Steel being played, as well as flick through the Wii’s internal management system for channels, mail messages, calendar and so on. My initial thoughts are as follows. First of all, the Wii internal menu. Slick. Slick but a bit clunky. Very easy to use, very clean, very iPod aesthetic. But some definite problem areas. Like, for example, entering any text into the system. You have to use the Wiimote to point at letters on a qwerty-keyboard superimposed on screen. This is exceedingly slow. It was pointed out several times that somewhere on the internet it was proven to be quicker to grab a whiteboard marker, and scrawl your message on the side of the console. I believe this to be true. The other main problem is the Wii interfaces in general, both inside of games and out. Everything is controlled by pointing the Wiimote, at the moment. Now I could perhaps put this down to new-control-method-frenzy, where developers need to use the system’s new abilities for as much as possible, but the fact of the matter is, this is simply not intuitive. If they’d mapped it to the Nunchuk’s thumbstick, we could all be living in happy land. Up down left right. Navigate through a menu. It’s genius. As it stands, using the Wiimote to point and click your way through menus will probably become easier with practice, but it need not even be an issue if they’d left it alone. Moving onto Wii Sports. This game is genius. I was only able to play Wii Tennis and see Wii Boxing in action, but both were instantly playable and very intuitive. Wii Tennis in particular was smooth and delightful. No update lag at all - the timing’s not quite logical, but it works easily and I enjoyed it a lot. Wii Boxing, a lot weirder. Difficult from what I saw for people to get the timing and directions right for the swings they wanted. Still a lot of positive feedback. Twilight Princess. Having played the E3 demo at the stores recently I was already slightly familiar so I handed it off to Jon to play. He ran through the first twenty minutes or so of the introduction. It was fairly graphically chunky and had a definite “This was nothing that couldn’t be done on the GameCube” aesthetic, but it was still charming and very pleasing. Though there was no combat in the intro, as Link is still bereft of sword, I’ll talk about the combat I played in the stores - odd. Odd in that the motions of the Wiimote are used to determine the swinging of the sword. It works but it takes a little bit to wrap your head around. Once, I ended up stabbing a guy behind me. Somehow. Don’t ask me. Archery was a delight with the Wiimote. Difficult at first but easy to get used to - my first time around I was a festival of inaccuracy, but the second time I whipped out the bow I picked off five random enemies in quick succession. My final experience of the night was Red Steel. This one I have some severe reservations about. First of all, the menu system. Un. In. Tuitive. Secondly, the art style and “intro movie”, if you can call it that - just plain rubs me the wrong way. I can see the merit in what they’re trying to attempt - the replication of a Japanese comic book but it just doesn’t work and I didn’t like it at all. That, and the stilted introduction sequence with the horrible dialogue, and retarded controller calibration sequence, which forces you to point the Wiimote at fish in order that it can set the level of sensitivity based on your position. I was watching Anthony play. Later I would determine via the Wii’s internal systems that he had played for a mere nine minutes. This is a short amount of time. However I would like to add that after nine minutes, he spent the majority of his gunfights staring at the ceiling or spinning wildly in circles as the Wiimote exploded in confusion. The times when he did get it working it was really smooth and I can see how it could all work. But the one thing that I took away was that Red Steel would appear to have a very large learning curve. Much more than I would have expected for the Wii’s “pick up and play” ethos that they’re promoting, for sure. My overall impression of the Wii is very mixed at this point in time. I can see the potential. I can really see the potential. And I think if it’s exploited properly, Nintendo is onto a real winner. But at this point in time, if Simon hadn’t already pre-ordered a Wii, and hadn’t agreed to chip in, chances are I probably wouldn’t have bought one quite yet. Jon and I were discussing this on the drive back, and he said something that I really agree with - it took at least 6 months after Nintendo threw a stylus onto their GameBoy DS before developers really started to get the knack of using it properly. I think this will be very much the same. I think the launch games will be good - I can see myself enjoying them, with perhaps the exception of Red Steel. But I think it’ll be quite some months before games are released that really show us what the Wii can do. P.S. I also saw Gears of War being played for the first time. I can see what the hype is about - this is a really, really polished game. It’s not terribly innovative but it drips committment, love and hours of work by Epic going into it, not only graphically but in terms of sheer atmosphere. It wouldn’t surprise me if they hired a team of people to do camera work alone. It’s not hard to understand why Microsoft are so hot for turning this into a trilogy - if every game in this franchise could ooze this amount of polish, it’d basically be a license to print money. This is rapidly getting a reputation as the Halo 2 of the XBox 360 - the game you buy a console just to play and honestly, though it’s not for me, I’d be lying if I said a small part of me that was all too admiring of Microsoft’s approach to gaming wasn’t severely tempted. // 1 Comment
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Ash Ponders says:
December 27, 2006 at 11:57 pm