Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

Me, my buddy Mike, and Lois Griffin.

Wii Sports Resort was released this week, and at least two of the Aerostaff picked it up right away. So we thought we’d do a co-op First Thirty about the game. Although as it is probably impossible to play all of Wuhu Island’s activities inside of thirty minutes, we’re stretching the literal definition somewhat. And remember, these are our first impressions. Since we haven’t unlocked everything yet, we could be missing some subtleties.

To bring you up to speed, Wii Sports Resort takes the runaway word-of-mouth hit Wii Sports and ups the ante from five to twelve activities (and plenty of unlockable alternate modes for each). Using the secondary Remote attachment of Wii Motion Plus, the sequel claims to offer unprecedented control… and the game hits you with the 1:1 motion as soon as it starts up and makes you guide a skydiving Mii to the island resort. Which is a pretty damn classy entry.

SWORDFIGHTING

JOE FOURHMAN: I think for a lot of gamers, this is the Motion Plus’s killer app. I’ve never understood why we all go crazy over the concept of 1:1 swordfighting and lightsabering, because it’s just going to make our arms fall off and not be very much fun. But whatever.

The swordfighting suite, happily, is one of the better WSR games. The multiplayer Duel has you fighting one opponent and you can do as much posing and slashing as you like. I quite liked Speed Slice because you have to think: a judge tosses a ridiculous item in front of you and your opponent, and you have to quickly slash in the randomized direction indicated.

The star of the show is Showdown, which is the “horde mode” where you have to cut through dozens of oncoming Miis. There are ten stages that take place all across the island and with day/night variants, so there is a very nice polish here. That’s the kind of unnecessary detailing I like from Nintendo.

However, unless I have yet to unlock something, you only fight against pre-built generic Miis in Showdown mode. Which is not nearly as fun as promised. Is it because these Miis sort of die onscreen (they fall over and vanish) that Nintendo would not allow you to pull in your high school gym teacher, Zombie Michael Jackson, Family Guy cast, and Lamb of God Miis?

STEPHEN MUNN: I also had a lot of fun with the swordfighting minigame that I played. The multiplayer match was very “American Gladiators,” with my wife and I bludgeoning the crap out of each other and occasionally pretending we were applying some amount of strategy using the blocking system. It’s all an illusion so far… you really just swing wildly. The every-round recalibration is reasonably well hidden: the game makes you point at the middle of the screen and tap the A button to confirm you’re ready to go, which looks like it’s the “IR Assist” option mentioned during setup. Using the sensor bar to help keep the MotionPlus calibrated is a good idea.

WAKEBOARDING
JOE: I like this one a lot. Holding the Remote horizontally, you cut across waves and perform jumping stunts. You have to stick your landing, Excitebike-style.

STEPHEN: This may be my favorite. Not only is it flashy to look at, but the jumps and tricks are satisfying, even if they are largely automatic. I was confused at first about constantly being reminded to hold the Remote sideways, until I realized that, once again, it was recalibrating when it told me to do that.

FRISBEE
JOE: Here’s an example of Motion Plus being really accurate. I suck at Frisbee in real life, and I suck at it in Wii Sports Resort.

STEPHEN: You’re right on in your assessment, at least. My wife has never been good at throwing… well, anything. Thankfully (ducks a dish). She had a lot of trouble hitting the target zone, and even managed to evade the dog completely more than once. I did a lot better, but as soon as the calibration went, I was throwing very wide until I manually recalibrated.

ARCHERY
JOE: I like Archery, but it suffers from the same Bowling problem: it takes too long to play. If you have a party and do a couple rounds of Archery and Bowling, you’re going to be out of snacks before you know it.

STEPHEN: I also really liked this game. I don’t think it’s terribly long (unlike Golf). I really enjoy the bow mechanic they’ve improvised between the Wii Remote and the Nunchuk. I usually think of the Nunchuk as a kind of useless device in terms of motion sensitivity, since it’s far less versatile than the Remote, and as a result, I was surprised to see how well it works for stretching back the bow. I also like how the aiming is centered when you hit A, so if you prefer to point with the Wii Remote rather than holding it vertically, you have that choice. Even if it almost feels like “cheating.”

BASKETBALL
JOE: Basketball surprised me. The Three Point Contest mode is just a quick series of tosses with the Remote, but the Pickup Game is actually a very cute approximation of real basketball. You pass with two buttons, dribble by bouncing the Remote, and shoot by holding the B button and pantomiming the shot. On defense, you flick the Remote to steal or block. Very playable.

STEPHEN: I didn’t try Pickup, but I was awful at Three Point Contest. Holding and flicking the Remote properly eluded me completely, and I think three baskets was my record. My wife, on the other hand, did very well. I tried watching what she was doing, but couldn’t figure it out.

TABLE TENNIS
JOE: This is a vastly improved version of the original Wii Sports Tennis. I suppose this (along with Swordfighting) is one area where Motion Plus might actually be turned on. Table Tennis marks one of the very few times where motion controls in anything actually made me feel like I was doing something real.

STEPHEN: It felt scaled down to me, more than it felt improved. The mechanic feels pretty different. I like it a lot, and it’s exciting and fun, but the timing is a little challenging. I had no problem with it, but I still felt like I didn’t have control over trajectory. When I expected to hit it hard, nothing happened, and when I did a normal swing, I would get a hard hit. Still, my expectations weren’t way out there. How accurate can table tennis actually be?

GOLF
JOE: I found the original Golf monstrously tedious, so I did not have the patience to complete a round of the “new” Golf.

STEPHEN: I had the same experience. I was shocked at the detail in the game, both in the presentation and the controls, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, swing my club without way too much curve. I’m not a Golf fan in real life, and I don’t expect I’ll go back to this. I also quit before sinking the second hole, because I saw myself struggling through and wasn’t enjoying it.

BOWLING
JOE: Right away, I do not see any improvement at all. It was really easy to game the original Bowling by tapping to the right, aiming between pins 1 and 3, and throwing a very straight shot. You’ll strike or spare every time. Same deal in this version.

Since Bowling was far and away the most popular Wii Sport, including it in this package is a gimme. It ensures we’ll never pull out the original disc ever again. What, are you going to play Baseball?

STEPHEN: Well, there’s Tennis, right? But you’re right, Bowling is about the same. I think there is some MotionPlus involved, because I did very differently in terms of score than I do in the original. At one point it seemed to slip out of calibration, and a ball I threw went way off to the side, even though it was aimed properly in the interface.

POWER CRUISING
JOE: Now things start falling off. This one is supposed to be like you’re driving a jetski, but the controls are too touchy (maybe jetskis are really touchy in real life?) You’d think this would be a fun one, but it’s not.

STEPHEN: This was another one where I was surprised at the use of the Nunchuk. It told me to tilt to turn, and I didn’t want to tilt the Nunchuk because it’s generally “dumb” in motion sensing. The problem I had was executing a boost. You need to twist the Remote, which you’re already tilting to steer. Most of the time when I went to boost, I would also tilt, sending myself in the wrong direction. I liked jetting through the big hoops, but it was so reminiscent of Star Fox I found myself quoting it. At least, the easy quotes. Do a barrel roll!

CANOEING
JOE: Suckass. Actual canoeing is flippin’ hard. The WSR version is harder. Easily the worst game in the lot. I’ll never play this one again.

STEPHEN: Wow! I actually thought the game was well executed, but poorly conceived. I found multiplayer a challenge because of the great difference between my rowing and my wife’s. I had to row my side and supplement hers. I’ve never tried canoeing in real life, though.

CYCLING
JOE: Here’s your rule: Anything involving the Nunchuk sucks. Cycling is one of those shake-your-arms-forever games. And it doesn’t even make any sense to have your arms doing the pedaling! To make matters worse, while you’re pumping your arms to an early grave, you have to tilt the controller to steer. Be prepared to weave like an idiot all over the track.

STEPHEN: What drove me crazy about this one was the steering as well. The game seems to steer for you if you don’t bother steering or even if you steer too far to the side, so I didn’t bother. The warnings to save my energy seemed strange until I was pedaling into a headwind. I had read some bad things about this game but I didn’t really see them. I did do a lot of weaving, probably by accident while pedaling.

AIR SPORTS
JOE: This whole last group really bites, but Air Sports saves it from being a total wash. Here you can do the skydiving game again, which is fun once you get the hang of controlling your Mii in freefall. I am very disappointed that the point of this one is to hook up with other skydivers and pose for pictures… and then the game does not offer the ability to save those pics to the Wii Message Board. WTF. WTF!

The second mode, Island Flyover, is very nice. You just fly around the island, holding the Remote like a paper airplane. You have to seek out over 80 hidden (and not-so-hidden) locations across the island. It is very relaxing. This is my cool down game. There is also a Dogfight mode, which controls the same as Flyover but gives you guns to peg an opponent’s plane.

STEPHEN: The only one of these I tried was the skydiving, and it was fun. What? It doesn’t save those pictures?? I assumed I could go grab them later and show everyone how I went skydiving with the Hideo Kojima Mii my brother made and the They Might Be Giants Miis that my friend made.

OVERALL

JOE FOURHMAN: After being through all of the games’ activities, I don’t really have much to rave about. I was never a big fan of the original Wii Sports, and this is simply Wii Sports 2: The One You Pay For. It will be fun at parties – assuming you pony up for Motion Plus attachments for all four Remotes, blah – but this is far from a Wii must-have like Smash Bros, Mario Kart or No More Heroes.

At the end of the day, it’s a minigame collection. I guess if you’re to buy a minigame collection, you might as well buy a first-party minigame collection, because WSR does provide that trademark Nintendo charm. It’s great to see the Miis in full action once again, and I like the notion of Wuhu Island being a location that Nintendo will revisit in the future. There are some fun sports but also some terrible clunkers, making for a very uneven experience. And while I’m sure the Motion Plus is doing something, its efficacy is not obvious. For most of the games, I was thinking “Really? The normal Remote couldn’t handle this?”

But once again, Nintendo’s classic myopia stops the game from greatness. Why not some optional Balance Board support? How about an app that turns a DS into a writable Golf scorecard (or anything to give other players something to do during turn-based multiplayer)? Where’s the ability to share achievements with Wii Friends? Why no screenshotting? How about sending score challenges to Friends? It’s not like I desperately need online play for something like Wii Sports Resort, but I remain continually surprised that the number one video game console, the one that cries over and over again about being for families and friends, continues to neglect community-building features that the PS3 and 360 have had years to fine-tune.

Finally, who started the rumors about the game having to constantly recalibrate? I just spent 90 minutes with it, and it happened maybe three times. There is definitely some calibration weirdness in a few of the tutorials, but, seriously, this is freaking Wii Sports. If you’re paying attention to a tutorial, you’re a yogurt.

STEPHEN MUNN: I found that, most of the time, the frequent recalibration was hidden in the game’s mechanics, and this is critical. You point at the screen and tap A to start a round of swordfighting. It’s like how some games hide load screens by making something happen in the game that hangs you up. Outside of those, yes, I’d say I was forced to recalibrate about a half dozen times across the 90 minutes total I spent with the game. It’s a limitation of the device, and I’m hoping they do even better about hiding these in the future. And speaking of tutorials, I was forced to sit through the three-minute tutorial video at boot TWICE now. If it happens a third time, my copy of Wii Sports Resort is going back to the store, or up on eBay.

JOE FOURHMAN: I guess I did not notice that all that pointing-and-clicking was hiding calibration. When I noticed the calibration was when the game told me in no uncertain terms to put the damn controller down and let it recalibrate. And also I suspected that it was calibrating during some tutorials – due to some odd forced pauses in the instructions – but, like I said, I stopped watching tutorials pretty early on.

Something is definitely flaky with you getting that horrid video multiple times. I got it once.

Although I’m sure Wii Sports Resort will sell like crazy, I would imagine there will be some backlash once people realize that you cannot play these games without Motion Plus. So all you party people who enjoyed the hell out of 4-person Bowling, be prepared to shell out another $60 for three more Motion Plus add-ons. If you try to key in a Remote that does not have the M+, the game yells at you.

Tags: first thirty, Nintendo, wii, wii motion plus, Wii Sports: Resort