feels like a technical demo.
an addition to wii sports, wii sports resort is a holiday-themed pack of sports games.
these sports include bowling and golf from the original, in addition to a variety of air and water sports, and then archery, stick-fighting, and basketball.
resort was supposed to demonstrate more accurate motions with an add-on to the wii remote. the original wii remote just responded to acceleration. the new add-on closely mirrors off-screen gesture with on-screen gesture.
the thought is that a game can be more challenging and realistic if the remote can do 1:1 motions. a lot of wii games were accused of 'waggle'; this is when a player just shakes a remote arbitrarily because the game experience can't offer clear, tangible actions that have different results in-game.
resort definately succeeds at offering this precise control, but it has changed the overall experience in other ways too.
the original game was a free pack-in game, and this was a full retail price game. the original was fun to mess about with for a few weeks and it was like an experiment; it was fresh.
the second one feels quite a lot like the first one, so some of the freshness is gone and immediately you focus on the controls. this is what is new, and you explore that.
so a lot of the experience of resort is more about validating the control system, which in itself isn't really enjoyable on a long-term basis. getting a bullseye in archery is a fantastic feeling the first few times, but after that the mind wanders. play sessions for me were small; around 10-20 mins, and got smaller the more i played.
some of the sports are also dissapointing; especially the water sports. they feel like experiments that are cool to try out a few times, but have little depth.
in the end, i only ended up playing archery, single-player basketball and stick-fighting.
i feel like they could have done more. they could have made the sports have a lot more depth and the overall game have a lot more longevity and challenge. nintendo did add stamps that you can earn, but it's not much of a motivation for me.
from a sober, single-player perspective, resort is an expensive purchase for simple fun. i no longer think i can justify such an expense.
the wii in general has dissapointed me with this kind of software being its prime focus. this will probably be my last purchase of these kinds of experiments.
why do nintendo want you to play for small sessions? why take a break every 10mins? they've made a game that isn't too deep or too shallow, and i feel i can't get into it too much because it's not meant for that, but then the seriousnes of the accuracy of the motion plus makes it feel like there is a lot of depth...but there isn't because the actual game is so similar to the original wii sports.
i would love to believe that this was a classic, fun game but i don't think it was targeted at me.
give me some blazblue on my wii!