N-Philes

Page 4

Danny: Yay, the first Wii game I played! I got my hands on this game in the private booth and played against my friend, and thankfully the wait wasn't too bad. The screen was split vertically for two-player and the Wii Sports graphics were simple yet somehow pleasing.

To serve, I pressed the A button and made a natural serving motion. The successive hits were easy to execute, but I was never able to add topspin to my ball as promised. Automatic character movement was a little disappointing, but I guess obligatory due to booth size constraints. Overall Wii Sports: Tennis is a fun game and with some depth added to the final cut I could see myself playing it for hours with friends.

 

Jared: When a few members of the N-Philes staff and I crashed a Microsoft party on Tuesday night, we happened upon a befuddled supermodel (no jive) struggling with the mechanics of the Xbox Live Arcade game set before her on a stunning HDTV.

"Whatcha got there?"
"It sucks."
".... Frogger? Frogger sucks?"
"Well I keep dying, and I don't like things I'm not good at it."

Rather than wiggling my eyebrows and asking what she was good at (and thus banking myself some serious makeouts, probably), I simply reflected that her feelings towards Frogger echoed fairly well mine towards Wii Sports: Tennis. I was pretty terrible at it (and typically it takes a lot more than Frogger for me to flub), and so I didn't particularly like it. I didn't really notice much of a correlation between what actions I made with the controller and those my character executed online, and I still haven't figured out if it's because the Wiimote is far more or far less articulated than I was taking into account when I played. So that's my take.

Of course, there's the issue of Scott Dier being almost suspiciously good at Wii Tennis when he played a round with Iwata, Miyamoto, and Reggie at the Nintendo press conference. So it could just be that the space in which we were all playing Tennis was too cramped to really get into it, and there's also the slight (but un-heard of, really) possibility that N-Philes staff are just really bad at video games. Anyway, check for yourself:

 

Desiré: Looks a lot easier than in actuality. Control is slightly off, so if you've played tennis before you might get frustrated at the timing being off. Non-gamers seemed to pick this one up instantly whereas anyone who's played more than a few hours had some difficulty.

 

Jordan If I said that after day one of E3 I was surprised to hear people talking about how intuitive the controls were for this game, would that be enough for my impression?

After being the third N-Philes staffer in a row to fail miserably at this game's demo, I couldn't understand where all the positive press was coming from. It's not even just that I'm bad at it (though I‘m sure that‘s part of it); only two of the four players ever moved and it never seemed like you were even in control of your own character. He'd just casually make his way to the ball, leaving you only with the task of hitting it back. Needless to say, it all felt very stripped down, and even if I did figure out how to return the ball well enough, I don't think it would've been too great.

Continued on page 5Previous Page

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20