Previewed: April 11, 2008
Previewed by: Brian Wylie

Publisher
Hudson Entertainment

Developer
Hudson Soft

Release Date: Summer, 2008
Genre: Sports
Players: 1-4

Screenshots (Click Image for Gallery)

In the demo you get to impress judges with pirouettes and triple axels, or bump, set, or spike your way to a victory in the sand, you could also slam an overhead shot right past your opponent, and last but not least you can rev up your engines and make your opponents literally eat your dust as you pass them on the mounds.

For all of the winter sport lovers out there you get to experience figure skating for the first time on a game system. You really have to focus and pay attention to all surroundings to truly score well in this event. On the top of the screen you have an indicator bar that lets you know where you are at the present time and also it shows you where you need to be with the music icon.

When you sync these two up and perform many different types of moves depending on the color circle you get, you score much higher on the technical score. Some of the things that bothered me though, were that you only had to lift up on the remote to perform the desired task. It would have been a lot cooler if you had to do some kind of button combination to do a different type of jump move, or when you do spins you can twirl your remote.

Beach Volleyball was the biggest thing I was looking forward to when I saw the package. Unfortunately I was a little disappointed about how they put it together. The first that that bothered me was the camera angle was not the best one you could have picked. You get this angled view that makes it a lot harder to see where the ball is going and where you need to be to try and block an incoming slam.

The next thing was that all you did was lift up the remote to bump or set the ball. You really didn’t have that much control on where it went. I would have liked to have seen you have to do the set motion to make it a little more realistic. When it came to spiking the ball they were almost there. You get a red indicator to let you know when you can really but your weight behind it and you are hardly ever blocked.

There are a few times the computer teammate got blocked and you will never with the point if your super spike is blocked.The problem here was that you had to anticipate the red indicator and even if you whipped your remote forward when the ball was red you didn’t always get the super spike. I would say it really only worked about 30% of the time.

Finally, the motion sensor didn’t always work with the speed you wanted to hit at or the direction. Depending on how fast you swung your remote indicated where on the court it would go. Fast equals deep and slow equals short. Then you also have to swing your remote left or right to get the desired position. Yeah I never got the ball to go left or right on purpose and even when it did go it didn’t go as far as I had exaggerated.

Badminton was the most fun I have had playing a Wii game since Wii Bowling. With a demo you are going to have things you don’t like and there were some in this game as well. The big issue was the camera angle. I think a straight behind look would be much easier on the players and allow them to see where the opposing play and the badminton are going or coming from. The only other problem was the direction in which you wanted to hit the birdie. Like volleyball you have to swing your remote in the direction in which you want the birdie to go. It worked better than volleyball but not anything to really brag about.

Some of the great things were that it was easier to control the super smash. Like volleyball you get a red indicator telling you when to unload a forceful shot. This time it was easier to anticipate but still a little too hard to perform. A great feature is that in true badminton you can still get a good jump on a smash and it isn’t always an automatic point and in this game it still isn’t.

The final demo game you get to try out is Supercross. I have to admit this was not my favorite. There were a lot of things wrong with this one. First, you have to touch controls. You make drastic sharp turns by just barely tilting the controller that you turn sideways. Next, you can never go out of bounds on the course. So you hit this invisible wall and you keep going.

There are no rewards to be daring by cutting a corner on a jump to try and get ahead of your opponent, or on the other hand no penalty for not being able to stay on the course. Finally, there is the fact that you can’t do anything off a jump other than lift the nose of your bike up or down. This is important though because you can lose some ground if you don’t land right. Even in races motor cross riders do some kinds of wheel turns for the crowd. It just gets boring going through the small course over and over again.

All in all this entire demo sounds bad but it really wasn’t. This was a test format to see what people think and overall I think Hudson is going to come out with a great final product. You can play alone or with up to four people. Then you get to choose from eight different teams to play as. And after all that you get to pick from eight different games to play like the four I talked about as well as snowboarding, curling, archery, soccer, basketball, and go kart racing. I am really looking forward to see how Deca Sports turns out as Hudson takes on Wii Play and Wii Sports with some games of their own.