I can play through a good sixty-dollar game in a couple of weeks (or even a couple of days), never play it again and be content because it offered a satisfying experience. I can also play a game with good online multiplayer for months and feel that it was time and money well spent. Unfortunately, there are the occasional good games that I can say were disappointing because they didn’t offer an actual experience or last very long. Wii Sports Resort, one such game, is Nintendo trying to make good on a nearly three year-old promise with underwhelming results.
Don’t take that to mean Resort wasn’t a fun game. It offered a fun distraction for my friends and I for about a month, but in the end, it’s just a collection of mini-games made to demonstrate the Wii MotionPlus. The device was designed to finally show off what the Wii can really do, but instead, it highlights what the Wii hasn’t done and how it will most likely struggle to remedy that.
Nintendo spent the last three years manipulating us with exaggerated and misleading demonstrations of what the Wii is capable of, but when they finally have that capability in the hands of consumers, they fail to deliver. Resort is the only game requiring the use of MotionPlus and, while it does an adequate job of demonstrating various applicable motions, we haven’t seen any significant use of the device since, with only Red Steel 2 earning the slightest bit of interest as a future release.
To further sour the situation, MotionPlus is yet another peripheral, so even if quality games were developed around the device, there would always be the issue of getting the device to the consumer. Do you bundle it with future games, hope they’ve already gotten one, or require them to spend the twenty-five bucks on one individually? If the latter becomes the case, a fully-functional Wii remote with Nunchuk and MotionPlus would cost eighty-dollars.
It’s a shame a genuinely fun, but shallow, game like Wii Sports Resort had to get caught up in illustrating Nintendo’s failed promise, but it was inevitable from the moment the company decided a collection of mini-games was all it needed to convince people it was telling the truth.
