Wii Sports Resort Hands-On

Nintendo reserved a good portion of its booth exclusively for Wii Sports Resort, and we wound through the line a few times to try as many of its sports as we could. Based on the main menu, it appears that Sports Resort features 12 sports. Although most of them are new, a few have been lifted from the original Wii Sports, albeit now with new features and expanded controls due to Wii MotionPlus capability. Here's the full roster: sword dueling, wakeboarding, Frisbee, archery, basketball, table tennis, golf, bowling, power driving (jet skis), canoeing, cycling, and air sports.

We started off with a quick round of table tennis. The control subtleties enabled by Wii MotionPlus were immediately apparent, given that virtually every move we made was reflected by our Mii onscreen. We were able to rotate the racket and swap between forehand and backhand on the fly. Spin could be added by rotating the controller while swinging, which caused the ball to curve as it sailed past our opponent. As for the sport itself, it's a faithful re-creation of table tennis, with the controller even vibrating slightly with each return, offering a satisfying tactile response.

After table tennis, we decided to give something called "Air Sports" a spin. After selecting it, we were presented with three gametypes, one of which was a two-player dogfighting mode. Unfortunately, we were lacking a second player (despite our consistent use of "we" throughout the article), so we were stuck with something called "island tour." Like most of the games, it starts with a tutorial that details the unique controls and features of that particular sport. In this case, the Wii Remote is the airplane. If you hold it flat, your plane flies straight ahead; if you tilt it up with a slight twist, your plane will begin climbing upward while turning. It's very cool and very responsive.

Island tour, as the name implies, is more of a laid-back, relaxing experience, with no opponents and barely any objectives. Instead, it lets you fly leisurely around the resort's island, which itself is a modified version of the island last seen in Wii Fit (and ironically before that, in an unreleased aerial game Nintendo showed years ago, shortly after the Wii's unveiling). As you glide around, you'll encounter landmarks marked by large icons that, when approached, flash brief snippets of information about the monument onscreen. For instance, approaching the tennis courts informed us that they were no longer in use because "someone stole every tennis ball on the island"--perhaps a sly joke at the game's expense, considering that tennis is one of the few sports not represented here.

After our leisurely flight, we needed something a bit more conventional, so we gave golf a whack. As any Wii owner knows, golf already came packed in with the Wii as part of Wii Sports, but we were eager to see how MotionPlus might enhance some of that version's shortcomings. Right off the bat, we noticed several new "Resort" courses, in addition to the original nine from Wii Sports, which should please those who exhausted the original's small supply. As for the game itself, driving feels very similar to the original, though with a twist--literally. Depending on how you angle the controller, you can apply either draw or fade to your shot as you swing, which is a feature that was lacking in its predecessor. However, we did find it a bit more difficult to hit the ball straight ahead as a result, which actually mirrors this editor's (poor) golfing performance in real life pretty closely. You win this round, MotionPlus. After eventually (if not haphazardly) making it onto the green, we finally got the chance to put the new putting controls to the test--an often-maligned facet of the original. Thankfully, we're happy to report that putting has been greatly improved; no longer did the game mistake our pulling back on the club as a putt, and once we did actually make a proper putting motion, the force was accurately measured, instead of the crap shoot to which we'd grown accustomed.

Finally, we decided to close our session of Wii Sports Resort with a quick round of Frisbee. Like with Air Sports, it actually consists of two discreet gametypes: Frisbee catch and Frisbee golf. Given that we were privy to the former last year, we took Frisbee Golf for a quick spin. The game plays very similarly to actual golf, except instead of selecting clubs, you choose one of three Frisbees, each optimized for certain distances. Oh, and instead of aiming for a cup, you simply try to land the Frisbee somewhere inside a giant marked target on the ground. This sport was perhaps the most impressive display of MotionPlus; no matter where we positioned our hand, our Mii responded onscreen to a tee.

So far, Wii Sports Resort looks set to offer quite a variety of gameplay, with each making intelligent use of the capabilities that the included Wii MotionPlus provides. We look forward to playing more when it's released in the US on July 26th.