Wii Play Game Review

Wii Play is a series of nine games, each designed to show off the great ways to play with the Wii Remote. As of now, a Wii Remote comes packaged with the game. But that begs the question, is it a free remote I’m getting, or a 10 dollar game? While cute, the game really lacks the same luster that Wii Sports brings to the console.

Each minigame in Wii Play teaches players another aspect of the Wii Remote. The first time playing, a player must complete a game before the next game opens. Shooting Range is first, and the games unlock in the order listed above. Players also can earn medals (bronze, silver, gold and platinum) as they improve their scores. High scores and accomplishments are posted to the Wii Message Board (see below). In most two-player games, players compete for the highest score. However, in Laser Hockey and Tanks!, players compete directly against one another.

Players can use Miis they’ve created in the Mii Channel in each minigame. Their personal high scores will be recorded for each Mii, and those scores will be posted to the Wii Message Board as well. Wii Play comes packaged with a Wii Remote.

Starting with game one
When you first play, you are required to start with game one. After your initial session, you can then move on game two, then game three, etc. While this ensures everybody tries every game, it feels cheap in the sense that I HAVE to try every game.

The first on the list is the best: Target Practice. Imagine a souped-up version of the classic Duck Hunt. While the dog is missing, everything else brings you back to the NES title, from tall grass setting, clay pigeons, and even the very ducks you’ve been shooting since infancy. There are 4 stages of targets consisting of balloons, bulls-eyes, cans, and clay pigeons. You then get a final stage of alien abductors trying to capture little versions of your Mii.

Second up is Find Mii, which is “Where’s Waldo” for Wii. All you do is search for the Mii it asks for like, “find 2 alike!” or “Find the Mii you’re using!” There’s not much else to say about this one, except that it didn’t take up much of my time. Now, we’ll skip to stage four, another Mii stage. This one is a pose Mii stage that relies heavily on your skill to twist your Wii Remote to match the Mii poses in the bubbles falling down the screen. Again, this is a very simple game that didn’t grab my attention.

Back to stage three, Table Tennis.
This is a pretty stripped down, but still fun and sometimes frantic version of the sport. The point is to rally the ball back to your opponent as many times as possible. While there’s no need to hit the ball, finding the right spot to put your paddle quickly becomes a challenge as the game progresses. While I would have preferred an actual game of table tennis, I suppose I’ll have to wait for the Rockstar port.

Pose Mii The player moves his Mii on the screen, rotating it and changing its pose to match the silhouettes inside falling bubbles. The player must pop the bubble by matching its pose before the bubble hits the bottom of the screen. The Wii Remote’s pointer moves the Mii, and twisting the Wii Remote rotates the Mii on-screen. The A and B buttons change between three different poses.

Laser Hockey is the one game that’s truest to its namesake, and gives a bit more of a challenge. By pointing and twisting the remote, your objective is to get the puck past your opponent. The look of the game is pretty sleek with everything seemingly made out of neon bulbs. However, the fast pace of laser hockey works to its disadvantage. While trying to perfectly place the little paddle, the orientation of the Wiimote consistently got lost causing a lot of goals to fly into my net.

Billiards: The 9 ball (stage six) is fun, but entirely too easy for a billiards game. By aiming your cue against the cue ball, your goal is to finish a game of 9 ball (sink 9 balls in numerical order). It sounds simple, and it unfortunately is. By not allowing more control over aim, the game quickly becomes a task of moving the Wiimote back and forth.

Fishing is your seventh challenge. To properly envision this game, you need to think back to the little magnet fishing games you had when you were a kid. Remember taking the little magnet pole and putting it into the magnet mouths of the little fishies as the spun around, opening and closing their mouths? Well, this is just about as mind numbing. Move your pole around a tiny pond and pull up when your remote buzzes. While there are fish that take away points instead of give to add some twist, I had more fun grappling with the overly frustrating angling in Twilight Princess.

Charge! perhaps has the worst controls of all the games. Your Mii sits atop a cow as it trots down a dirt road. You are required to maneuver the bovine to knock over scarecrows and jump hurdles. The horizontal remote grip (a la Excite Truck) is required to play this one. Speed is controlled by tilting the remote forward and back, and steering is side to side. Every time you steer your cow, he slows down. This causes you to end up having the top of your remote facing the TV or at an even more ridiculous angle just to try to get the cow to go faster. This one is unnecessarily slow and has a poor objective that makes us wonder why Nintendo didn’t want us having a stampede of racing cows (now doesn’t THAT sound fun?).

Tanks! is the last game on Wii Play. Its objectives are seemingly inspired by the much loved Bomberman titles. Your mission is to destroy the other tanks on the board by shooting them and dropping mines, while avoiding the same attacks. This one has pretty basic controls, but requires quite a bit of concentration as you divide your time between avoiding and aiming.

Possibly the best feature in Wii Play is the game’s prominent and pervasive use of Miis, the simple, caricatured avatars native to the Wii. When you first boot up the game, you’re asked to choose a Mii to play as, and from that point on you’ll see a variety of Miis–those that reside in your console’s Mii Plaza and Mii Parade, along with more-generic Miis produced by the game–everywhere. Considering the paucity of games that employ the Miis, it’s a welcome bonus in Wii Play.

So, in the end, I’m pretty disappointed by this title. The only reason I’m not angry is that because of the free Wii Remote, this game definitely lives up to the 10 dollar price tag. When accessories are so hard to find, this is a definite buy just to get that much coveted controller that no retailer can keep in stock, but as soon as this game becomes a stand alone title, avoid it.

	REPORT CARD : Wii Play (Nintendo Wii) category rating comments Creativity 3 This is basically a technology demo for what the Wii controller can do, and Wii Sports does it just as well. Sound 4 Stereo sound, but definately Nintendo. Longevity 3 Nintendo knows if they didn’t force you to progress through the games, then you’d find the two interesting ones and ignore the rest. Graphics 3 Ok for the Wii… Zelda or Rayman this is not. Fun Factor 2 You’ll probably only pick this up again just to show your Wii-less friends. FINAL VERDICT: 3 out of 5 stars