Bowling for Wii
Last Saturday, I got my first chance to handle a Wii, the new game console, and my first impression was just like everyone else’s: “Boy, this is fun!”
Let me elaborate. The big selling point of the Wii is its motion-sensitive controls. More is promised in the future, especially a robust online community, but that remains to be seen. Right now, Wii has a radically new hand control. It comes in two plastic grips, each about the size of a Mars bar, with a few buttons attached here and there. When you tilt the controls or wave them through the air, the system senses it and reacts appropriately. This gives an immediacy to sports games you just can’t get through pushing buttons alone. You can punch the controls through the air to simulate boxing, swing them to mimic a tennis stroke, whatever the designers can think for you to do. Perhaps more importantly, you don’t need to learn complicated button combinations to perform useful maneuvers, you just do them.
Sort of. I noticed that the sports simulations, while easy to pick up, weren’t very good at simulating the sport. For example, the golf game measured the power of your swing not by how quickly you waved the control through the air, but by how high you lift it on the upswing. Lift it too far, and the game treated your power swing as a manic chop resulting in a hook or slice. Actual golf technique places a huge emphasis on “following through,” that is, letting your club continue to swing freely through the entire stroke, so players who actually golf will have some heavy unlearning ahead of them, and anyone practicing golf on the Wii will learn some terrible habits for real golf. We had similar problems with bowling and tennis. But I am confident such problems will be overcome in future games that emphasize realistic technique.
As a gaming geek, and one not especially into video games, I found myself paying more attention to design than to the actual experience, taking note of what worked and what didn’t—because some things didn’t. In particular, when we tinkered with the latest installment of Legend of Zelda (MMDCLXXXVII, I think), the Wii was clearly out of its element. Apart from swinging your virtual sword, you interact with people and things by walking up nice and close and clicking the cursor over them, and not by mimicking Link’s actions. It was boring: Nintendo had simply ported an old game design into a new system without really thinking about how to take advantage of all the new system’s potential, and play suffered for it.
As things stand, Wii is a marketing smash. The games are shallow but definitely engaging and fun, with no learning curve to speak of. And like Dance Dance Revolution, it can provide honest-to-goodness exercise, if you play the right games. Real enough to leave me sore the next day.
But also as things stand, Wii won’t have any staying power; those oversimplified sports games and uninspired adaptations of older franchises won’t keep interest up. If Wii is really to become successful, it needs a handful of really smart guys in the game design department to match the really smart guys who have just scored a big success in the hardware department. Those designers need free reign to launch into risky new territory, and they need to do it quickly, before interest fades. I’m not clever enough to imagine where they might go, but I do know there’s huge potential here to do really fun things that nobody thought to do before, just because the tools to do them weren’t available before.
I look forward to seeing them.