Here are two Wii games, both by Activision, who get Wii controls perfectly right and perfectly wrong. This can even occur in the same game. It’s fascinating to look at this in what is the Wii’s formative period, as developers that are not Nintendo, and even Nintendo itself, figure out how to wring the best performance out of the little console’s scary new controls. (The same thing happened with the DS.)

The two games, “Marvel: Ultimate Alliance” and “Call of Duty 3″ are both essentially their Gamecube versions with Wii controls strapped to the top, like many Wii games today.

“Marvel” is a top-down Gauntlet-esque game that continues the “X-men Legends” line of games, only now with all kinds of Marvel characters. The standard controls are nothing special, but they get the job done and don’t get in the way. Let me make this clear – this game is all about pushing buttons. Pushing buttons a lot. This is, spiritually, Diablo with superheroes and on a console. It’s great fun with a couple friends – a spiritual successor to old school co-op arcade beat-’em-ups.

On the Wii, though, the controls are all motion-based. So, every time you need to do a basic punch, you have to move your wrist. Anything. This game is far too combat-intensive for this. Your arm is tired in five minutes. Additionally, ridiculously precise motions are required to do special moves.

This is an example of why Wii controls cannot be adapted to certain game designs created with standard controllers in mind. Developers and publishers of certain titles will need to realize that they pretty much cannot be adapted to motion control. The Gamecube controller and the classic controller exist, and developers will need to learn to require them, or at the least, allow their use so Wii owners who encounter terrible motion controls can at least run back to what they know works.

Not all games have terrible controls, however. Activision’s own Call of Duty 3 is slightly flawed due to its relatively uninspired single player and lack of multiplayer. It’s a decent game, don’t get me wrong, but it’s nothing special, aside from the controls, which adapt extremely well.

Obviously, the Wii’s remote is used to aim by pointing at the screen. Various other motions are mapped to the remote and the nunchuck. My favorite would have to be tilting the remote to lean around corners. It feels so right.

I have a few issues with the controls. One is the silly motion scripted fights that have me pumping the remote and nunchuck asynchronously to fight off a Nazi. They’re just tiring and don’t really work. Essentially, the motion control equivalent of button mashing. The driving controls also leave a bit to be desired, but they’re a rather tiny portion of the whole game.

Overall, though, these are two examples that should caution developers. You don’t have to make everything in the game motion based, and if the motion controls you develop suck, don’t be afraid to ditch them. We’ll all thank you in the end.

Wii Sports was, at least for me, unexpectedly great. I was expecting a cool tech demo, and that’s what some of it was (boxing), but tennis and bowling are really great, and golf is good, but needs more holes.

Nintendo has followed Wii Sports with another Wii remote-focused anthology, this time under the moniker Wii Play. It is a collection of 12 minigames. I’ll review them individually. Many of them suck. All of them are utterly simplistic, but on a better note, all of them are two-player enabled. It is worth noting that Wii Play comes with a Wii remote for its $50 price. This is important, because the game could not stand alone. It hardly even stands for $10.

Ping Pong. Wii Sports Tennis, only somehow more simplistic. It’s like Pong– essentially pointing your remote to move a paddle in the way of an incoming ball. No swinging motion required. Verdict: Crap.

Billiards. This is probably the highlight of the package for me. Though it is restricted to only a game of nine ball, it uses the Wii remote well and is pretty deep. Unfortunately, the scoring system is not the standard nine ball, but one where you get points based on the number of the ball you sink. You still have to sink them in order. Sinking the nine ball through a combination off of another ball does not end the game, so a lot of the strategy of nine ball is lost. Still, pretty fun. Verdict: Nice, but I want a real pool game.

Tanks! A clone of the Atari game Combat with the Wii remote. It’s simplistic, but any game where I get to attempt to blow up my friends is okay by me. Verdict: Fun.

Charge! Inexplicably pilot a cow using the Wii remote. Simple, stupid, but hilarious. Verdict: Amusing.

Fishing. An overgrown Mario Party minigame. Use the Wii remote in three dimensional space to catch fish for points. Verdict: Bleh.

Shooting Range. A gun based minigame that is sadly not Duck Hunt. Shoot at targets, ducks and UFOs for a high score. Fun reflex-based game that works well with the Wii remote, but not as much fun as the Wario Ware equivalent, which gets points for insanity. Verdict: Awesome, but not as awesome as Duck Hunt on the Virtual Console will be.

Laser Hockey. Another game kinda like Pong, but it’s drawn like psychedelic air hockey and the paddles twist with the remote as you point it. Better than ping pong. Verdict: Passably fun.

Find Mii. A game of differentiation. You have to find the odd Mii out in various ways. A nice diversion. It’s nice to see my Mii in more games, though. Verdict: Okay.

Pose Mii. Pose a Mii by pressing buttons and twisting and turning the remote. It’s amusing, but there’s no strategy at all. Verdict: Okay.

Overall, Wii Play is merely okay. It seems like these minigames could have been included in Wario Ware: Smooth Moves to strengthen that package, as has happened in past Wario Ware games. It’s alone, though, but bundled with a Wii remote, it becomes palatable.

Wii Play seems like a cheap attempt to fill in the game drought that follows every console launch. The Wii’s isn’t as bad as the PS3′s currently is or the DS’s was, but there’s not much to buy, just lots of pretty fun games you just want to rent. You might as well get Wii Play if you’re going to buy another remote anyway, but don’t expect anything deep.

This game – EA’s SSX Blur – confounds me. It’s not just the controls. I’ll freely admit right now that I don’t feel like I’ve mastered the controls. I’ve almost completed every event on the first section of the game, but I continue to improve in my handling of them. They are really complicated, but, for the most part, feel more and more natural the more you use them. However, I just feel like I personally suck at them.

SSX Blur uses a nunchuck attachment. To steer, you use the analog stick, and to make sharp turns you tilt the nunchuck while using the stick. This is called “carving” and it feels very nice once you get the hang of it. Jumping is accomplished by moving the nunchuck up quickly, and spins and grabs are then accomplished by spinning and tilting either the nunchuck or main remote. There’s also ubertricks, but I’ll do that later.

Here lies one of the primary advantages in control in comparison to the traditional older games. It is also one of the more confounding parts, at least for me. You see, all this motion, well, it just confuses me. I don’t have the coordination to spin two different things in different directions while still using buttons. This is probably bad for a Wii owner. I can just randomly spin and grab, but doing anything specific is now impossible, at least for me.

I don’t really feel like I can rate these controls, though. Some people I’ve had play the game seem to pick up on them naturally, and do pretty well on their first few races. Some people are just utterly confused like myself and put down the controller after a few minutes. The opinion on the Internet is a wider range than this. All I can tell you is rent it and reiterate that Nintendo needs to put up demos on the Wii Shop Channel.

But, back to the controls themselves. Ubertricks are accomplished by drawing a shape on the screen. This is so cumbersome there is actually a training mode so you can practice it, and I cannot do it regularly even in the training screen. This strikes me as an order of magnitude worse than the regular controls, which really feel like they should work if I wasn’t such an uncoordinated clumsy geek.

This still leaves us with the actual game, which unfortunately, is merely good at best. SSX3′s wonderful artwork, course design, characters, and advancement system add up so that it remains the pinnacle of the series. SSX On Tour threw most of that out the window, and SSX Blur, which is actually a sort of mash-up of those two titles, comes out appropriately between them.

Unlike SSX On Tour’s generic dudes, you get to play as a classic SSX cast member. Unfortunately, there is zero customizability, unlike SSX3. Also, there characters really end up being flat skins with no personality, as there is no voice acting. No insane British accent screams from Moby or quickly dispensed Japanese from Kaori. They’re just kinda there. In the end, they might as well be Miis or other user-created characters, as they really have no personality at all.

The courses are a mix of retooled SSX3 and On Tour courses. Unfortunately, they lack the solid art direction of the courses in 3, which had a certain je ne sais quoi in their design that isn’t replicated here. (Yes, I just used a French phrase to describe a racing game.) They look OK, but not as good as 3. This is a common theme in the game.

I don’t know if I can recommend SSX Blur. Maybe you will get the controls. Maybe you will not be a pretentious and picky gamer like myself. Maybe you won’t. I do know that you should rent it if you’re a fan of the series; otherwise, it’s not the next great Wii game we’re all waiting for, but it still might be worth a try.

The Wii’s next big game has arrived, in the form of “Wario Ware: Smooth Moves,” a new entry in the recently born but prolific series marked by players completing a series of minigames afflicted with attention deficit disorder – they’re usually about three seconds long.
“Wario Ware: Touched!” for the Nintendo DS was one of the first AAA titles to come out for the fledgling handheld after its less-than-spectacular launch. The DS iteration was really the first game to show us what’s possible with the system’s touch screen interface. Does the Wii version to the same?
First off, the Wii is different – it had excellent titles like “Wii Sports” and “The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess” at its launch, as well as a wide array of pretty good third party titles, like “Rayman’s Raving Rabbids,” “Trauma Center: Second Opinion,” and an excellent port of “Call of Duty 3.”
Still, “Wario Ware” showcases the Wii remote’s capabilities like nothing else before it. The game introduces the player to various “stances” throughout the single player, like “The Umbrella,” wherein the player holds the Wii remote straight up “channeling the quiet dignity of a circus clown in a thunderstorm.” These just tell you how to hold the Wii remote during the crazy array of minigames that I won’t spoil here. It’s inspired, manic insanity – while it lasts.
This is the only problem with Wario Ware games. They really don’t have much in the way of replay value. You can go for high scores, or try to unlock every last minigame, but this is tedious, because the only way is to hope they randomly come up while playing. To be fair, there are about 200 of them in each title, and they’re all pretty awesome.
The problem is exacerbated by what I can only refer to as half-assedness of the multiplayer game here. The Gamecube port of Wario Ware had some of the most interesting multiplayer modes on the system. One mode had players completing a minigame while obeying the orders of a scary paper doctor. The hilarity resulting from, say, playing while making a duck face, or looking at another player, or any number of insane diagnoses, is immesurable and only made the minigames that much more fun. There were about 10 modes, and they ranged from “damn fun” to “fantastic.”
The Wii version is really disappointing here. Its multiplayer modes lack the creativity and variety present in the Gamecube version. You can’t even play simultaneously on all the ones based on the main minigames! You basically get survival and a few variants on it. None of the crazy ones from the Gamecube one make it over. Admittedly, it is cool you can play up to 12 people in the pass-the-remote survival mode, but come on! Make me regret that I can’t afford to drop $80 on two more Wii remotes. It really reeks of “better version with more minigames and multiplayer modes coming out in a year but we also wanted your money now.” (The preceding sentence was entirely cynical speculation.)
Another problem I had with the title was with a few of the stances. They tell you to hold the Wii remote in a crazy way, but it is not readily apparent that you need to keep it pointed at the television. This results in confusion when trying to pretend you’re an elephant and move apples around.
Overall, though, “Wario Ware: Smooth Moves” is the Wii’s third truly AAA title. Despite the lack of multiplayer options and expected short length, it’s a great deal of fun, even when you can only pass the remote around and can’t play together. Just be sure to rent it first.