Nintendo threw the Wii into eager hands Wednesday at E3, and with 27 playable Wii titles it was clear they were raising the flag high. But would the thousands of people waiting to play Wii accept and join the cause? Is what they have really a revolution? In our opinion no, it’s an innovation only, albeit a creative one, and just how successful it will be really depends on its application in their current stable of games.
The first question is how does it all work, which is followed immediately by the more important question “does it work”? In answer to the second, it most definitely does, as the wand is surprisingly accurate in tracking your movements. The onus is actually more on the player about how to deal with using the Z axis, although the wand is still not without its kinks. Hopefully the sensitivity will be adjustable title by title, because as it stands, it’s far too twitchy in certain games.
There was a serious mix of games shown on the Wii, from the obvious to the obscure. Wii Sports gives us a combined package of tennis, golf and baseball, all of which are naturals to this controller scheme. But as much as Nintendo wants to downplay graphics in next-generation console, the imagery in this game take a back seat even to something like Hot Shots Golf. The character models are basic by nature, and they could hardly be described as taking even the “big head” approach. Instead, they more closely resemble simple MSN Messenger icons with hands and legs.
Red Steel, Ubisoft’s first-person shooter/sword-fighter, comes across with an almost Time Crisis-like take on the genre. Make no mistake: this isn’t a Metroid or Halo type of FPS, it’s more of shoot pop-up targets type of game. The game uses the nunchuck configuration, with the wand used to aim your weapons and the controller used to move the player (think mouse-and-keyboard combination on the PC, and you get the picture). Graphically, Red Steel looked like an early-years PS2 game, and it seemed as though some of the jaggies might look better through RCA jacks. The environments are destructible to a degree, but haven’t we all shot enough in-game bottles already?
Nintendo showed its faith in the Wii’s future by unveiling a few new franchises, one of which was Project H.A.M.M.E.R. This game is your standard third-person action game and has you wielding a hammer that’s three to four times the size of your character. Swinging the hammer and attacking enemies is done by using the nunchuk-and-wand combination, with the nunchuk moving your character, while the wand, when swung around in the air, wields the hammer in the corresponding direction. This is fun for the first five to ten minutes, but it’s tempting to wonder whether that fun will last for an hour or more, or how much swinging your carpal muscles are going to take.
Fortunately, as much as Nintendo is hoping to innovate with its motion-sensing controller, it realizes that some people are going to want a more traditional approach, which is why they had on display a Classic controller. This variation is excellent, as it takes the best of the SNES and DualShock controllers and puts them into something roughly the size of a PSP, but with the familiar layout of the SNES controller (plus twin sticks at the bottom). This felt comfortable and functioned perfectly and was demonstrated wirelessly on some of the Virtual Console games like Super Mario Bros, Mario 64, Bonk (from the TurboGrafix 16) and Sonic The Hedgehog. For many gamers, these old-school downloadable titles will be the one reason to join the revolution. It will be for me, anyway.
On the whole, none of the Wii titles sported nothing more than passable graphics, but really, the system doesn’t have the horsepower to do much more. Innovation can be a tricky business, and Nintendo is looking to push the envelope in the control, not graphical, arena. What we’ve seen so far at the Wii booth seems to showcase the technology of the controller rather than anything else. That’s exactly what Nintendo needs to do, though.
For an exclusive video wrapup of the Wii games and Nintendo’s E3 booth, click the link below.
Nintendo Wii Wednesday Wrapup
