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Sliced Gaming Feature: Wii Sports Resort Launch Party

Writer: Nick Schaedel
Posted: 26th June 2009, 3:07am

I was lucky enough to be invited to at Sydney’s ‘The Ivy’ bar/function centre for Nintendo’s Wii Sports Resort launch party. I flew over for the day to attend, and spent over an hour testing out the game and the new Wii MotionPlus attachment. There were nibbles, drinks, and, from TV’s ‘Getaway’ and the film ‘Fool’s Gold’ with Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson, Cleo’s Bachelor of the Year 2008, Jason Dundas!

If you haven’t heard, MotionPlus provides true one to one correlation between your real life flailings and on screen representation. Now you really can just twist the remote to curve your toss in bowling, and you’d better make sure you keep your wrist straight in golf, because any deviation will see your shot flying off the fairway. You can pick up one MotionPlus adapter for thirty bucks a pop, but a few games will be packing the adapter in, including Red Steel 2, and, of course, Wii Sports Resort.

So how does it work? Perfectly. It’s exactly as you expect. Every single twist, judder and turn of your hand is represented on screen. It feels natural, and besides the extra length, feels the same as the regular Wii remote (there’s no noticeable change in weight). It just works. The unfortunate side effect of the new size is that if you need to play a game with the remote on its side, you’ll have to disconnect the MotionPlus so that your thumb can reach the ‘1’ button. However, I imagine most users won’t have the rubber jackets on anyway, so it’s not too much of a hassle. If for some reason the remote gets confused, you can reset it – or, as the attendant at one stall persistently offered, ‘recaliberate’ it – by laying it flat upside for a few seconds.

Well, what about the game then? Wii Sports Resort will be Nintendo’s big push through the end of this year, and you can bet it’ll sell like crazy. The launch party was not just for games journalists – there were attendees from wider publications, like Women’s Day, which gives you an idea of the sort of audience that the marketing department is targeting.

The good news is that Wii Sports Resort is more of the same. The bad news is that Wii Sports Resort is more of the same. This time around there are twelve activities instead of the original game’s five, but some of them are rehashes of the original games. Golf and Bowling are back, and will clearly benefit from the added accuracy with detecting wrist movements. Table Tennis is also back, though it has evolved from its Wii Play origins, becoming more of a miniature Wii Sports Tennis than the original Pong-esque version. You now perform forehands and backhands, but don’t move your bat to the ball, which is basically the opposite of how the Wii Play version worked.

Let’s talk about the new games. We’ll start with Swordplay. Two players are positioned on a ‘Gladiators’-like podium in the sea. You ...

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