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Wii Play Review - Wii

Introduction

Wii Play and WarioWare have the same aim – to get people familiar with the wicked Wii way of playing (I promise the rest of the review will be a lot lighter on the w’s). Despite my sneaking suspicion that WarioWare may, in the end, prove a more powerful teaching tool about the ethos of the Wii, Wii Play is the more straightforward concept.

Gameplay

The game is made up of nine stages, each of which school you in ever more complicated ways of using the Wiimote. Incidentally, the last stage lets you introduce the nunchuk if you so desire, though the ability remains to use your Wiimote. The idea is that this is a good entry point for non-gamers, or people lured to the system by its uniqueness. So, you work through the stages, unlocking each progressive technique and minigame, until after an hour or so you’re done. Yeah, it’s kind of short. Still, Wii Play and Wii Sports are a winning pair – and even share the same disc design. If you crank this out at your Christmas party, you’ll be the most popular person there. Maybe. No promises. Anyway, let’s work through the tasks in order.

The first is the Shooting Range. By moving the cursor on the screen and pressing either the A or B button, you shoot down balloons and clay pigeons, juggle tin cans and prevents aliens from abducting your Miis. It really is quite amazing how accurate the Wiimote is – you can pick off clay pigeons that are literally just specks in the distance if you have the hand control. Next comes Find Mii – Miis wander the screen at different speeds and doing different actions from round to round, and you’re tasked to find one doing something different, or a matching pair. Third is table tennis, where you move your ping-pong racquet by moving the controller around. Next comes Pose Mii, where you twist the controller and use the A and B buttons to choose the stance of the Mii outline you control with the remote. Then, you fit it into the shapes of falling bubbles – if one hits the bottom, it’s game over.

Laser Hockey, number five, is basically digital air hockey with you controlling the paddle with the remote (surprised?). Billiards is exactly as it sounds, Fishing introduces the concept of 3D space, and Charge! puts you on cowback and makes you jump over hurdles by tugging upwards with the controller. The ninth and final level is Tanks. You can plug in a nunchuk at this stage and use the control stick for tank movement, while pointing with the Wiimote to aim. As this is clearly the most natural way to play, I’m not entirely sure why you want to use the d-pad unless you had no nunchuk – you fire by pressing A and drop mines with B, so things get complicated if you’re moving with the same controller too.

For the most part all the games work fine, and (much like Wii Sports) clearly ... (continued next page)