Wii Sports Resort

18 Jun 2009 at 11:43:08 by Tim McDonald

It's all about the MotionPlus, isn't it? You don't honestly care that much about about the games in Wii Sports Resort. You want to know how the MotionPlus handles them, and whether or not it actually works. Short answer: Yes. Slightly longer answer: Yes, brilliantly. For the really long answer, keep reading.

This is most easily noticed when you play one of the old games that's included, and see how they change with MotionPlus. So we have Bowling and Golf – probably the two best games that were in the original Wii Sports package. Bowling was something I always had trouble with in Wii Sports, and to the best of my knowledge, it wasn't my fault. No matter how straight I bowled, the ball always curved to the left. Perhaps it was down to my stance, or perhaps it was way I swung the Wiimote – either way, I had to adjust the position of my Mii to make shots go where I wanted them to. In MotionPlus, though, it works. Tentative first shots went as straight as I thought I'd bowled them. Curving the ball seemed to work, too, so I deliberately set up a hard shot for myself: one pin left standing, and I'd bowl from the opposite corner and try to curve into it.

The shot worked perfectly.

Golf, I didn't fare so well at. To be fair, I'm an utterly atrocious golfer anyway, so the fact that I found making a straight shot difficult is probably just testament to how well the MotionPlus was picking up my awful, awful swings. As such, I will not be playing Golf when Wii Sports Resort launches, because I'm bloody awful at it.

I will, however, be picking up Wii Sports Resort, because if my time with it is anything to go by, it's ace. I'm vaguely embarrassed at how much I thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent with the title, because there's that nagging elitist in the back of my head telling me that it's not a real game. Hurray for the inner child telling him not to be such a dick.

There are twelve game types in total, and I use the phrase “game types” for a reason. All of the games fall into the categories of Air Sports, Archery, Basketball, Bowling, Canoeing, Cycling, Frisbee, Golf, Power Cruising, Swordplay, Table Tennis and Wakeboarding. Each of these categories isn't a game unto itself, exactly, as each has different games within.

Sometimes, there's little variation. Bowling has normal bowling, for instance, as well as 100-pin bowling, which is, surprisingly, bowling with 100 pins instead of 10. Basketball has a three-on-three mode, as well as a mode in which you take shots from various different positions and try to score as many baskets as you can while staying within a strict time limit. Other times, things vary wildly – Frisbee features both Frisbee Dog, which is the thing Cammie Dunaway grinned blithely at during Nintendo's E3 conference in 2008, and Frisbee Golf. Frisbee Golf is exactly what it sounds like: rather than hit a ball with a club, you throw one of three Frisbees, all of which have different weights and thus travel different distances. They curve like the Frisbees do, and your aim is to get them into the hole “area” on the green, rather than trying to get them onto a precise spot. I was also pretty terrible at this, but a damn sight better at this than at Wii Sports Resort Golf, and towards the end I actually got pretty good with how the Frisbee handles.

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