Wii Sports Resort
Wish you were here?
As a place the Wii Sports Resort is the Silent Cartographer with the saturation filter turned up, a too-perfect recreation of a holiday destination built from honeymooners' recollections. As you wheel and dive over its waters in the air sports activities, or rip through them on a wakeboard, Mii chums cheering you on from the back of the speedboat, the environment becomes a character in its own right. It's the sort of sunlit paradise that defined the GameCube's Super Mario Sunshine or the Dreamcast's first Sonic Adventure.
The resort offers 12 core activities (swordplay, wakeboarding, archery, basketball, table tennis, golf, bowling power cruising, canoeing, cycling and air sports) all of which are broken down into subset activities. This effort to expand upon the core sports' rulesets, which was touched upon in the original game's training modes, greatly expands the package.
For example, Frisbee offers two ways to play. In the first you throw your disc across a beach towards a transparent bull's-eye target. If your throw lands close enough to the target, your dog will catch the Frisbee and bring it back you, points earned for your proximity to the central target.
Alternatively, you can engage in some Frisbee Golf, which has you choosing between three 'irons' - Frisbees with different distance capabilities - to reach the hole within the shortest number of throws. Bowling, updated from the original offers three modes: Standard, 100 Pin and Spin Control, while Air Sports offers Skydiving, an Island Flyover and Dog fighting.
Control across all of the games we played was tight, responsive and instantly rewarding, offering the kind of precision that, in all honesty, most people had hoped would be present on the console's launch. The Frisbee responds extraordinarily well to the slightest adjustments in throwing angle, changing the height and power as instructed while a slight tilt adds violent spin to the trajectory.
Likewise, the Swordplay Duel mode - which had us battling a opponent in an effort to be the first to push their opponent from the small platform upon which we stood into the water below - had the sword moving in exact accord with our own movements (something no doubt helped by the extra, though unobtrusive, calibration it received before each and every round).
The main menu, laid out like a patchwork quilt of square options, blinked with recommendations of what game to play next, although what this advice was based on was unclear. Most of the more traditional activities such as canoeing and cycling offered both a speed challenge as well as versus competition and almost every mini-game we played was available for up to four players to play either simultaneously or one after the other.
As such, Wii Sports Resort represents an evolution, not revolution of the template laid out by the original. Each event retains the elegant simplicity that made the first game popular with everyone from young children to octogenarians. But with a more rounded, coherent world and the hardware upgrade that the Wii Motion Plus seems to offer in this context, the improvement to the more demanding player is already discernible.
As such we hope that Wii Sports Resort represents Nintendo's renewed vision to continue serving its new customers, providing accessible experiences while extending their appeal to us old faithful.