Post by Leroy on Oct 24, 2006 12:01:21 GMT -5
I know it seems most of the members here are the typical anime/RPG-only gamers but in case anyone was interested, I got a preview of the Nintendo Wii over the weekend and wrote a little review of it.
So the Nintendo Fusion Tour is a yearly concert Nintendo holds showcasing a bunch of pre-teen era "rock" bands (think the Hot Topic crowd). This year's tour was special in that they were previewing the Wii during the event, sans during the headlining band in which they'd have to turn all the demo units off (contract reasons).
As I mentioned, we got in as press. My friend writes reviews for a web site (I've also written one review for them) that has a good reputation with Nintendo. So we meet up with one of the Nintendo guys there and are offered our choice of previews. They had ten units running. Two for Zelda Extreme, two for Excite Truck, one for Wii Play, one for Wario Ware and four for Wii Sports (one each for baseball, tennis, boxing and bowling). The first thing I asked was "WHERE'S METROID YOU SCUM?!" to which I was told that it was taken off the tour as they thought having both Zelda and Metroid running would distract from the bands (what bands?!). Deflated, I suggested we try one of everything in no particular order.
We were first directed towards Wario Ware Smooth Moves. If you didn't know already you are prompted before each mini-game with how to hold the controller.. based on the icons where these prompts came from, it looks like there were about twenty different ways to hold the controller. The first thing I noticed is how easy it was to do everything and how accurate the controller was. I was swatting flies, pumping air balloons, pushing people over and giving paw to Nintendogs with ease. The boss game was a driving game and you held the controller horizontally and turned it like a steering wheel. Very cool. It went by quick but my very first impression was quite positive. It works and it works well.
Next up was Excite Truck. Much like the Wario Ware boss game, you hold the controller horizontally and use it as a steering wheel. Since this was a full-out driving game the controls were a bit looser than the Wario game but ultimately that meant more control over things. The first thing I noted as I watched my friend play was that this was very similar to the SSX games.. the goal is not so much to win the race but to rack up a high score doing jumps and stuff. From watching it.. it went from my " Excite What?" list to my "Might Buy" list. So the controller is passed on to me, I get to pick a truck and color (a speed buggy colored in glorious pink) and I'm off. The controls, as I said before, were basically like the Wario Ware mini-game except a little more advanced, but it felt that after a game or two you should be rocking with much more control over your vehicle than with the mini-game. Unfortunately I only got one game so I did a lot of crashing! The A and B buttons were for accelerate and brake and the D-Pad was for boost, no issues with that control setup at all, simple and quite manageable. Oh, not only could you steer with the controller but tilting it up and down during jumps.. well, I'll let you use your imagination on that one. This game was a LOT of fun, it's a definite candidate for my second launch title.
Now, we headed towards Zelda Extreme. Let me preface this by saying that the line for this was HUGE (duh) and it seemed like they were letting people play out the demo.. as we got to skip the line we felt it wouldn't be fair to run the whole thing and spent about five minutes each on it. While I was quite positive on the controls for Wario Ware and Excite Truck.. it was apparent with Zelda that for more "standard" games, it was going to take a little bit getting used to. That's not a pejorative at all, it's just that it wasn't INSTANT like with Wario Ware and (from what I saw) Wii Sports. Moving seemed fairly natural though.. it was, after all, a standard analog controller. Aiming, on the other hand (with the bow and boomerang), seemed a litter harder to get used to (my main issue was figuring out to aim with the remote and move my field of vision with the controller, doh) but it was easy to see that once you get used to it, it was going to be a hell of a lot more accurate (and cooler) than with a controller. Now, the fun part: sword play. Like the previous 3D Zelda games, you have a lock-on button except now, to attack you wave the controller like a sword. This gave me quite a tingle in the pants. IT WAS AWESOME! I felt a little giddy cutting up the few goblins I managed to find! But, as I said before, we felt bad for jumping in front of such a long line so I shot a few goblins with arrows, cut a couple with my sword, solved a boomerang puzzle and passed it on the guy behind me that had probably been there for two hours.
At this point we had spent a good amount of the rep's time so we let him go to see the rest on our own. They had a line of DSes with some recently released games playing on them and a booth on the other end of the room giving away Wii and Nintendo guitar picks, stickers, Zelda pins and keychain CD cleaners. We pocketed a bunch of this stuff! Next to this was a DS display with some high quality headphones playing Elite Beat Agents, the American version of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Since I had enjoyed the import I gave it a try and it's every bit as good, obviously with American music and situations, the humor and wackiness kept much intact. I was given a pair of Elite Beat Agent headphones for trying the game out, very cool, they retract, making them very portable.
So we had Wii Play and Wii Sports left unplayed. My friend had already played Wii Sports at E3 so we decided to check out Wii Play and leave. Sorry, but I was dead tired, it was an hour (at least) drive to take my friend home and get back to my place and I figured Wario Ware and Wii Play was enough to see the ease of Wii's "pick-up-and-play" antics. Plus, watching a father and his little daughter play Wii Baseball together was good enough proof for me on Nintendo accomplishing their goal with this one.
They had the shooting game from Wii Play playing.. and again it was so easy and natural to play and very accurate. Right away I was shooting.. no adjustment period. I thought that a light-gun was still better as you could hold it like a gun and have a sight and all.. but for all intents and purposes this worked VERY well as a replacement. The game itself is NOT simply Duck Hunt.. but more a variety shooting game like Namco's Point Blank series. The demo had various stages to it.. the first being a balloon shooting game, the second being disc shooting, third was can shooting/juggling (like Hogan's Alley!) and finally a game where you had to shoot UFOs before they ran off with little people running around the bottom. There were some Duck Hunt ducks that would fly by during the games that were worth big points if shot though! I already wish that THIS was the pack-in instead of Wii Sports.. but I guess it just wasn't ready for prime-time (and I have no clue what else is supposed to be on the disc!).
Basically I can sum this up shortly: Wii is awesome. The final question mark being how it holds up to adding a new element to standard gaming (Zelda, Mario, etc.). I think that's really going to be up to the developers though.. as we've pretty much assumed all along. But, I feel confident that the developers that do good with it are going to do great with it from the little I played of Zelda. It WILL take a bit of adjustment for those kind of games though (but we've been playing them for the same way for twenty years now, right?). I can rest easy now knowing the $320 I've already spent is going towards something that works extremely well. My nervousness is MOSTLY at ease. It's hard to give a rock solid opinion on maybe 30 minutes of gaming and like the DS, it may take a year for everyone to really start knowing what works the best with the system.. but I'm quite happy that I'll be playing on the 19th.
Any specific questions? I'll try to answer some.
So the Nintendo Fusion Tour is a yearly concert Nintendo holds showcasing a bunch of pre-teen era "rock" bands (think the Hot Topic crowd). This year's tour was special in that they were previewing the Wii during the event, sans during the headlining band in which they'd have to turn all the demo units off (contract reasons).
As I mentioned, we got in as press. My friend writes reviews for a web site (I've also written one review for them) that has a good reputation with Nintendo. So we meet up with one of the Nintendo guys there and are offered our choice of previews. They had ten units running. Two for Zelda Extreme, two for Excite Truck, one for Wii Play, one for Wario Ware and four for Wii Sports (one each for baseball, tennis, boxing and bowling). The first thing I asked was "WHERE'S METROID YOU SCUM?!" to which I was told that it was taken off the tour as they thought having both Zelda and Metroid running would distract from the bands (what bands?!). Deflated, I suggested we try one of everything in no particular order.
We were first directed towards Wario Ware Smooth Moves. If you didn't know already you are prompted before each mini-game with how to hold the controller.. based on the icons where these prompts came from, it looks like there were about twenty different ways to hold the controller. The first thing I noticed is how easy it was to do everything and how accurate the controller was. I was swatting flies, pumping air balloons, pushing people over and giving paw to Nintendogs with ease. The boss game was a driving game and you held the controller horizontally and turned it like a steering wheel. Very cool. It went by quick but my very first impression was quite positive. It works and it works well.
Next up was Excite Truck. Much like the Wario Ware boss game, you hold the controller horizontally and use it as a steering wheel. Since this was a full-out driving game the controls were a bit looser than the Wario game but ultimately that meant more control over things. The first thing I noted as I watched my friend play was that this was very similar to the SSX games.. the goal is not so much to win the race but to rack up a high score doing jumps and stuff. From watching it.. it went from my " Excite What?" list to my "Might Buy" list. So the controller is passed on to me, I get to pick a truck and color (a speed buggy colored in glorious pink) and I'm off. The controls, as I said before, were basically like the Wario Ware mini-game except a little more advanced, but it felt that after a game or two you should be rocking with much more control over your vehicle than with the mini-game. Unfortunately I only got one game so I did a lot of crashing! The A and B buttons were for accelerate and brake and the D-Pad was for boost, no issues with that control setup at all, simple and quite manageable. Oh, not only could you steer with the controller but tilting it up and down during jumps.. well, I'll let you use your imagination on that one. This game was a LOT of fun, it's a definite candidate for my second launch title.
Now, we headed towards Zelda Extreme. Let me preface this by saying that the line for this was HUGE (duh) and it seemed like they were letting people play out the demo.. as we got to skip the line we felt it wouldn't be fair to run the whole thing and spent about five minutes each on it. While I was quite positive on the controls for Wario Ware and Excite Truck.. it was apparent with Zelda that for more "standard" games, it was going to take a little bit getting used to. That's not a pejorative at all, it's just that it wasn't INSTANT like with Wario Ware and (from what I saw) Wii Sports. Moving seemed fairly natural though.. it was, after all, a standard analog controller. Aiming, on the other hand (with the bow and boomerang), seemed a litter harder to get used to (my main issue was figuring out to aim with the remote and move my field of vision with the controller, doh) but it was easy to see that once you get used to it, it was going to be a hell of a lot more accurate (and cooler) than with a controller. Now, the fun part: sword play. Like the previous 3D Zelda games, you have a lock-on button except now, to attack you wave the controller like a sword. This gave me quite a tingle in the pants. IT WAS AWESOME! I felt a little giddy cutting up the few goblins I managed to find! But, as I said before, we felt bad for jumping in front of such a long line so I shot a few goblins with arrows, cut a couple with my sword, solved a boomerang puzzle and passed it on the guy behind me that had probably been there for two hours.
At this point we had spent a good amount of the rep's time so we let him go to see the rest on our own. They had a line of DSes with some recently released games playing on them and a booth on the other end of the room giving away Wii and Nintendo guitar picks, stickers, Zelda pins and keychain CD cleaners. We pocketed a bunch of this stuff! Next to this was a DS display with some high quality headphones playing Elite Beat Agents, the American version of Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan! Since I had enjoyed the import I gave it a try and it's every bit as good, obviously with American music and situations, the humor and wackiness kept much intact. I was given a pair of Elite Beat Agent headphones for trying the game out, very cool, they retract, making them very portable.
So we had Wii Play and Wii Sports left unplayed. My friend had already played Wii Sports at E3 so we decided to check out Wii Play and leave. Sorry, but I was dead tired, it was an hour (at least) drive to take my friend home and get back to my place and I figured Wario Ware and Wii Play was enough to see the ease of Wii's "pick-up-and-play" antics. Plus, watching a father and his little daughter play Wii Baseball together was good enough proof for me on Nintendo accomplishing their goal with this one.
They had the shooting game from Wii Play playing.. and again it was so easy and natural to play and very accurate. Right away I was shooting.. no adjustment period. I thought that a light-gun was still better as you could hold it like a gun and have a sight and all.. but for all intents and purposes this worked VERY well as a replacement. The game itself is NOT simply Duck Hunt.. but more a variety shooting game like Namco's Point Blank series. The demo had various stages to it.. the first being a balloon shooting game, the second being disc shooting, third was can shooting/juggling (like Hogan's Alley!) and finally a game where you had to shoot UFOs before they ran off with little people running around the bottom. There were some Duck Hunt ducks that would fly by during the games that were worth big points if shot though! I already wish that THIS was the pack-in instead of Wii Sports.. but I guess it just wasn't ready for prime-time (and I have no clue what else is supposed to be on the disc!).
Basically I can sum this up shortly: Wii is awesome. The final question mark being how it holds up to adding a new element to standard gaming (Zelda, Mario, etc.). I think that's really going to be up to the developers though.. as we've pretty much assumed all along. But, I feel confident that the developers that do good with it are going to do great with it from the little I played of Zelda. It WILL take a bit of adjustment for those kind of games though (but we've been playing them for the same way for twenty years now, right?). I can rest easy now knowing the $320 I've already spent is going towards something that works extremely well. My nervousness is MOSTLY at ease. It's hard to give a rock solid opinion on maybe 30 minutes of gaming and like the DS, it may take a year for everyone to really start knowing what works the best with the system.. but I'm quite happy that I'll be playing on the 19th.
Any specific questions? I'll try to answer some.
I'm just not all that interested in new series. That's not to say there aren't any that are interesting, but, I'm tired, & money IS an object, & time is fleeing from my life. So, I pretty much keep it to what I know, like Ys, Suikoden, Castlevania, Mario(though, not everyone of the new ones impresses me), etc.
