Wii Sports? Again? Personally I place the success of the Wii squarely on the shoulders of Wii Sports, so it isn’t really a surprise that Nintendo would want to capitalise on the now universally applauded brand name of WiiSports. So it was, that when the Wii MotionPlus was announced to be released alongside WiiSports Resort no one really felt surprised.

The MotionPlus plugs into the base of the Wii-Mote where you would typically place your Nunchuck cord, and allows for the Nunchuck to be plugged into the other side of the MotionPlus. Nintendo’s claim is that the addition of the MotionPlus gives the Wii-mote 1:1 tracking capabilities.

To showcase the MotionPlus I was able to play WiiSports Resort and as you do when you go on holiday at a resort you want to chop up wood with a sword or duel with a Mii. The first thing I noticed is that the actions I thought I was making were not the actions that I was making. This wasn’t the fault of the Wii or the new controller but can instead be chalked up to my brains inability to distinguish when I am less than awesome, it happens so infrequently that it just isn’t a priority. Once I realised that I was going to have to adjust my grip and the way I swung the Wii-mote around I was off laughing.

The accuracy was very satisfying, the first game I tried was fencing. Chopping the pieces of wood and the sharpening pencils was a good break in for what was ahead. The person I was paired against for the duel had decided that instead of actually trying to have a duel he would swing the Wii-mote around like a lunatic and hope for the best. I managed to block a good majority of his random swipes and a few well placed hits allowed me to push him off the podium into the water. There is no damage meter (cause we don’t want to suggest violence) so the only way to win is to push your opponent of the circular ring which decreases in size with each victory.

Blocking was performed by holding down B and appropriately placing the controller. I am not sure why they did this, perhaps there are still a few limitations in the software recognising the placement of the Wii-mote and making sense of some of what is trying to be achieved by a specific motion.

After trying out the fencing I was interested to see how frisbee toss would work. I was a little surprised to find out that they hadn’t incorporated any kind of grip/release mechanism and that the game decides the point of release. Think of bowling in WiiSports but without the ability to let go when you want. Other than that problem the frisbee did respond well to the motions I made.

There is no question that the MotionPlus add-on gives a far better motion sensing experience, in fact the problem is not with the hardware, it is with the software. The software seems to want to react at some times as it would to a waggle motion from the Wii-mote. The good news is that this is definitely the advance in responsiveness that I have been waiting for, give me some games that use it well and my Wii will get a lot more game time, I just hope we don’t see hundreds of Sword fighting games in the next 18 months.

Tags: E3 2008

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008 at 8:37 am and is filed under Games, Wii. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.