Wii Play Game Review

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.