Wii Sports had to serve as both demo and tutorial - showing audiences what Nintendo's new console could do, while perhaps also giving developers a few hints for working around all the things it couldn't. And it's a skilful sketch, really: bold, self-contained, and occasionally careless, a game drawn in broad, perhaps hurried strokes, and only fitfully coloured in. So while quite a lot of time has already been spent picking apart the knockabout delights of the game that comes bundled with Nintendo's latest console, it's only with the arrival of Resort that you can truly see the original for what it is.
#Wii sports resort bowling building series
Traditionally, the second outing for a series is where strengths are refined and enlarged, and weaknesses are either carefully eradicated or accidentally blown up into grotesque caricatures. Like a lot of games, the most insightful review the original Wii Sports will ever receive has come in the form of its sequel. Importing background characters from the Contest Channel is a nice touch, but if you turn the option on, you may find yourself bowling alongside Hitler a few more times that you'd like. Will I still be doing it a month from now? Sadly I suspect that I won't, and that's where the Nintendo Effect meets the Wii Sports Effect. Jump from a plane, reach out to grab onto other free-fallers, pose for a camera, and score points with every smile captured: Skydiving's mechanics are so anaemic they hardly exist - as challenges go, it's barely interactive - and yet I've been doing it all weekend, over and over and over again, just to enjoy the clouds, the sense of wind and speed, and the chance to high-five Marty McFly at 20,000 feet. Right there, in that simple, two-minute plummet is the whole deal: a control system so simple that most designers would either ignore it or over-complicate it with gauges and triggers, a range of goals that scale from charming pushovers to genuine one-more-go struggles with no apparent signs of stress, and presentation that manages to be both modest and quietly brilliant at the same time. I guess you could call it the Nintendo Effect. Skydiving in Wii Sports Resort captures just about everything that fans of its developer often struggle to put into words, and crams it all into the same period of time it takes to wash your hair. Actually, I threw myself out of about 50 planes, spiralling down through the clear blue sky again and again, whizzing past Bruce Springsteen, Dan Aykroyd, and my stepmother, gurning warmly for a few photographs each time, before the parachute opened with a cheery pop and I drifted towards the bright green grass below. How was your weekend? I threw myself out of a plane. For a breakdown of exactly how Wii MotionPlus works with each event, check out our extra feature on the subject.