After a very successful year’s blogging here, it’s time to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year. I’ll try to remember to post a quick retrospective before the year’s out, but until then here’s a few highlights off the top of my head:

• Getting a job I adore;
• All the time I spent with my family, particularly my beautiful nephew and niece;
• The success of the site, of course;
• Writing my first complete soundtrack for Tanner;
• Nintendo Wii - great fun!

There’s more but they’re the best ones that spring to mind right now. I hope you enjoy yourself until you pop by again.

Cheers!

Wii Play is the second-highest selling Wii game in Europe, and I think I’m right in saying it’s almost entirely due to the bundled Wii Remote. Why pay £32.99 for a controller from unscrupulous retailers when for £34.99 you get the remote and a game? Does that mean the game is only worth two quid, though? Let’s take a look.

Although my time with Wii Play has only been very brief so far, I’ve played each of the nine minigames enough to be able to tell which are decent and which aren’t. My favourite so far by a country mile is cow-racing game “Charge“.

Spinning the controller onto its side, you tilt it forward to accelerate, steer it left and right and lift it to jump. It’s an incredibly simple system that actually feels remarkably comfortable and satisfying, and although the main crux of this game simply involves bashing into scarecrows and avoiding hurdles, you can still see the huge potential for the control system. In fact, it’s so good that I’m now convinced Sonic and the Secret Rings, which uses a very similar if not identical control system, will be a very good game. I hope so, anyway.

Next up in my Wii Play top tips is Billiards. Although it lacks any form of tournament or ladder play options, the mechanics are pleasing enough to convince you to have another go. You use the Remote to point at the part of the ball you want to hit - top for top spin etc. - then hold B to cue, pull back the Remote, push forward and make contact with the ball to send it spinning away, hopefully knocking another ball into a pocket. It’s a simple but effective system that eschews the traditional console snooker setup of power bars and timing, instead going for actual physical movement, and although it’s not wholly authentic - you can’t screw off to one side during cueing, for example - it is enough to leave you inspired by how well a full recreation of snooker or pool would play.

Shooting Range is an homage to probably the most famous light gun game ever, Duck Hunt on the NES. Various kinds of targets appear - bullseyes, clay pigeons and even ducks - and you shoot as many as possible, or compete against another player to get them first. It gets pretty fast but, to be honest, there doesn’t seem much fun to be had here; although the obvious comparisons to Flash games have been made, you’re effectively just clicking on targets, so it feels a little less than engaging.

The next game - Tanks - is a great idea unfortunately wasted. Using the D-pad or nunchuk to drive a tank around a battlefield, you have to destroy the enemy’s tanks with mines or shells. It works fine, but the main problem is that, in two player mode, you have to co-operate - you’re not supposed to blow each other up. This sort of game is perfect for multiplayer competition, yet there’s no support for it at all. When Playing Tanks made me want to play the similar yet infinitely superior DeathTank on the Saturn, and if a game makes you want to play something similar that’s ten years old it’s not doing its job properly. With some proper multiplayer support, extra weapons and varied terrain, this would be an absolute cracker of a game. As it is, as with many of the Wii Sports and Wii Play games, it’s a missed opportunity.

Two of the games - Pose Mii and Find Mii - are so simple as to make them more or less pointless, to be honest. Pose Mii teaches you how to twist and tilt the Remote to rotate characters, but there are a hundred other ways players could have learnt that mechanic. Why not go for a “steady hands” type game? This mechanic has so many uses - imagine twisting the Remote to crack a safe, waiting for the click from the controller’s mini-speaker - that it’s a real shame they chose to place this game in.

Find Mii is practically “Where’s Wally?” (or “Where’s Waldo?”), with you trying to spot a particular character in a group of others. The levels vary from having to spot a character who’s fast asleep to matching twins or triplets, but there’s precious little fun here, sadly. In essence it’s similar to the Super Mario DS minigame “Wanted”, but for some reason it never feels as frantic a search, and so much of the enjoyment is drained from it.

Fishing is pretty good, and in two-player mode when one of you gets a bite the other player can steal it from you, if their reactions are quicker. I’m not sure how I feel about this part of the gameplay - on the one hand it keeps things fair by not favouring one player’s rod with all the fish, but on the other hand it seems wrong for reasons I can’t quite place.

The two remaining games - Laser Hockey and Table Tennis - are both largely based on Pong. Table Tennis just requires you to move the bat from side-to-side, but in Laser Hockey you can rotate the bat as well as move it around the table. It’s a limited idea that has instant playability, but you’ve seen it all before a thousand times.

You’ve probably got a complete picture of Wii Play by now. The games are instant but limited, and many of them lack a sense of fun or play, instead simply being uninspired ideas to teach you a controller movement. Only Charge feels like a completely thought-through game, and although you could ask for more courses and so on the game stands well on its own, which is more than can be said for most of the other games here.

Despite the overall negative tone of this review, it’s still worth buying Wii Play for the Remote, and Charge should give you at least a fiver’s worth of entertainment. Unfortunately the game on its own is largely worthless; everyone at Nintendo must be chortling on this fact as they see the game riding high in the sales charts.

I’m listening to Keep on Running, from Music of My Mind by Stevie Wonder

As long-time readers will be aware, I’m a fan of the hugely talented developers Ubisoft who, with great games like XIII and Beyond Good and Evil, were probably my favourite software house of the last generation, even above Sega and Nintendo. Now, with Wii all over us, how does their first major original IP since BG&E stack up?

Hold my hand(le)

Using your Wii Remote as both your gun and sword, the game takes you through all the controls in its first level. Far from being the safe start many would expect, it’s actually quite a dangerous level for the novice; I’ve seen many deaths due to the on-screen tips obscuring the level, and the pointer waving everywhere.

Having played my fair share of first-person shooters, I found the controls pretty intuitive to start with, and they definitely got me more excited in the game. Swinging your nunchuk to pump the shotgun or knock over a table for cover brings an extra element of involvement to the game, but the mixture of presentation styles did alienate me a little. Combining in-game animation and voice overs with some freeze-frame montage/collage shots is an odd choice, and doesn’t work anywhere near as well as in Ubisoft’s previous and similar FPS title, XIII, which was adapted from a comic in the first place. The art style in-game doesn’t transfer well to a comic style, and although the voiceover is consistent throughout - unlike BG&E - the whole visual presentation is a bit of a mish-mash. Whether this was a conscious decision designed to mimic the mixture of Eastern and Western styles - a consistent theme throughout the game - is open for debate, but personally it doesn’t work.

On that topic, actually, the menu screens are absolutely abominable. You use the cursor to drag icons over a display panel, which is hardly intuitive, especially when the icons are gaudy neon with Japanese subtitles. I can read them anyway, but it still seems counter-intuitive. Again, whether this is intentionally to draw the gamer into a bewildering culture is up for debate, but at this stage of the game, is it really a good idea anyway?

Take aim…

Once you get into the game, the controls are much more intuitive than the ones that got you there. Once locked onto any enemy with A, you push the remote forward to zoom in, which seems pretty gimmicky, even by current Wii standards. One worry I had about the Wii, and shooting games in particular, was that the sights and reticules would be very twitchy, fidgeting all over the screen, but in fact they’re very docile things, sticking in one place even if you’ve a shaky hand.

The sword fighting doesn’t offer quite the same level of precision, although I doubt I’d notice if it did. That’s not to say it’s boring - it’s very exciting, the music lifting up and drawing you to the edge of your seat to weave around your opponent and slash at their exposed areas. At the battle’s end you can show mercy or deliver a final blood-letting blow, and those who know me will be absolutely baffled, I’m sure, to know that I choose the merciful option every time. I can’t explain it.

Is it any good?

I’ll hold my hands up at this point and say that, yes, Red Steel has come in for quite a lot of criticism already. To be fair, with the exception of Nintendo’s Wii Sports and Wii Play it’s the only launch game created just for Wii, so of course there are going to be problems. The graphics aren’t stunning, the art direction is a bit of a mish-mash and there are some sizeable obstacles to be overcome early on for new players.

As an Ubisoft fan I recognise quite a few elements from their very impressive FPS XIII, such as the action icons and some level and weapon designs. I wouldn’t say it lived up to XIII or Beyond Good and Evil yet, but as the first third-party IP developed and released exclusively on Wii it’s an interesting start.

It’s not an absolute must-have, and the confirmed sequel will improve on its flaws I’m sure, but it happily sits alongside Zelda in my fledgling collection.

I’m listening to Let’s Get It On [*], from Let’s Get It On [Bonus Tracks] by Marvin Gaye