So Wii Sports Resort was released a week or two ago, and it made much less of a splash than I was expecting. Honestly, I really haven’t heard anything about it in the media. This is weird for multiple reasons, including the fact that Wii Sports might still be the most popular Wii game, and further, that gamers will now be able to do with the wiimote what everyone sorta thought it’d be able to do in the first place: 1:1 movement. This means that however you move your hand, up and down, left and right, in and out, slow or fast, that’s what your character actually performs on the Wii. So I’m at a bit of a loss as to why there’s been very little talk of Wii Sports Resort.

I headed up to my local Wal-Mart a day or two after the game was released to snatch up a copy. After staring down the Wii game section for a few solid minutes to no avail, I walked around the corner to find WSR (we stuff rate?) in a bin in a conveniently easy-to-steal location, so I threw it into my jacket and took off for the door. Kidding. I have an actual job now, so I make real money. After purchasing the game and making the trip home, I opened that box up like Nintendo64 kid.

The first thing I noticed was the extended wiimote sleeve that came with it, with Wii MotionPlus sitting right in the bottom of it. At first I thought this new peripheral would be too long with the extended 2 inches or so, but after you begin the game, it’s pretty much just like holding a normal wiimote. Unless you’re actively trying to feel the difference, you probably won’t. Nintendo has actually accommodated Wii MotionPlus pretty well into the whole setup. MotionPlus snaps into the bottom of the wiimote where the nunchuk is usually attached, so to ease the unplugging process, Nintendo has added a setup much like Apple’s old iPod chargers – push the buttons on both sides in, and it’ll slide right out. On top of this, they’ve added a nifty little switch on the back of the MotionPlus that allows you to lock it into place, so you never have to worry about it randomly unplugging. The nunchuk will now connect right to the bottom of Wii MotionPlus. Overall, the whole Wii MotionPlus peripheral and experience is incredibly solid, much more so than I was expecting.

When you turn on the game, you’ll find yourself forced to watch a quick little informational video on MotionPlus. If you’re like Matt, this might bother you a bit, but if you’re a normal person, you’ll have no problem sitting through the five minutes or so of footage. From there, you’re thrown right off the edge of a plane. As you speed rapidly toward the ground, you learn how to twist and turn the wiimote to change how you fall – slow yourself down, speed up, change direction, etc. You’ll begin to notice other Sky Divers falling alongside you – what you’ll wanna do is fly over to them and grab onto them. The more people you connect to on the way down, the more rings they can create for you to dive through at the end, which is how you get points. After that brief introduction to Wii MotionPlus, you arrive on Wuhu Island, ready to start the games.

One thing you’ll notice about Wii Sports Resort is that it has significantly more to do than Wii Sports and Wii Play. There are 12 categories, most with their own sub-categories: Swordplay, Wakeboarding, Frisbee, Archery, Basketball, Table Tennis, Golf, Bowling, Power Cruising, Canoeing, Cycling, and Air Sports.

So first off, Swordplay. There are three different Swordplay games: Duel, where you fight an opponent until one of you is knocked off of the platform; Speed Slice, where you and an opponent battle to see who can slice random objects faster than the other; and my favorite, Showdown, which is where you get to run around and slice up as many Miis as you can before getting hit three times. This game is so fun it makes me wish some third party developer would get the hint and make a really cartoony, yet really gory game where you get to mutilate Miis in all sorts of fantastic ways – kinda like a Madworld for Miis. But either way, Swordplay will definitely keep you coming back for more. The controls are near perfect; you can block however you want, you can slice however you want… it’s all really accurate. If you mess up, it’s now on you, not the hardware or software.

Wakeboarding! I’ve never been too interested in it, but this is seriously one of the more fun games in Wii Sports Resort. It’s really simple, too: hold the wiimote sideways (like handlebars), and steer left and right to hit the wake created by the boat pulling you. Once you hit it, pull up on the wiimote, as if you’re doing a jump, but make sure you have the wiimote straightened out by the time you land, or it won’t count. The more air you get, the better the trick you perform, and the more points you get. It’d be even better if there were varied courses and amounts of time.

Frisbee – this is the one that is sorta representative of the whole game, largely because they focused so primarily on it at E3. There are two different games of Frisbee, Frisbee Dog, and Frisbee Golf (FROLF). Tossing the Frisbee to that dog is surprisingly more fun than I was expecting, to be honest. It’s kinda like darts, in that it shows you where to throw it (bullseye), and there are rings around that point. The further you get from the point, the lower your score will be. It’s also a bit more difficult than I’d expected, especially in the second half of the game, where you’re challenged to pop a balloon AND THEN get the Frisbee all the way over to the dog. Not too easy, unless you’re a Frisbee pro. Frisbee Golf is even better than Frisbee Dog. You have three different types of Frisbee to use: the Driver, the Midrange, and the Putter, each of which flies differently. In addition, there are now SIX golf courses – three from Wii Sports, and three new “Resort” courses, which is pretty nice, especially if you’re a pro at all the old courses.

Archery. The most unique, if not the most fun game that Wii Sports Resort has to offer. They actually handled this one really well. You hold the wiimote out vertically, as if you’re holding a bow. Hold down the A button while doing this. With your other hand, hold down the Z button on the nunchuk, and pull the nunchuk away from your “bow hand”, letting go of Z when you want to shoot. The physical actions you have to do to play this game are really accurate and almost make you feel like you’re actually using a real bow. There are three different difficulties, each with 4 different courses. Make sure to account for wind conditions and distance. Incredibly fun.

Here’s one I wasn’t expecting: Basketball. There are two different types of games you can do, a 3-Point Contest, and a “Pickup Game”, which is a 3-on-3 game. The 3-Point Contest has you and friends moving to different points around the 3-Point line on a basketball court, sinking as many of the 25 balls as you can in one minute. The last ball in each row of five is a bonus ball, which counts for two if you make it in. To shoot, you aim down, hold B to pick the ball up, and then basically do a one handed jumpshot action, pulling the wiimote above your shoulder and then “shooting” it by throwing forward and letting go of B. The 3-Point Contest is a really fun game, and it’s easy to get good at it. The “Pickup Game” is kinda strange; it’s a 3-on-3 game for 1 or 2 players. You can press the D-Pad or A to pass to your teammates (which you have to do to start the round), and then at any point after that, you can shoot using the same motion as the 3-Point Contest requires. You can also steal or block an opponent’s shot by shaking the wiimote or doing the same movement that shoots when you’re on defense, respectively. Although to be honest, I don’t really know how you’re supposed to move around in that game. No idea why you couldn’t just control your character with the nunchuk. Oh well, it’s still kinda fun.

Next up is Table Tennis. This is pretty similar to the version in Wii Play, except you get a bit more control over how you hit the ball, allowing you some pretty fantastic spin-shots and whatnot. Not much more to say about this game than that. You also have the option to do a “Return Challenge”, which is where a Mii hits ping pong balls at you until you mess up a return, making for some great practice.

Golf! To be honest, this version of Golf is very similar to the one in Wii Sports, but like Table Tennis, you have a bit more control over the situation. One difference is instead of doing three, six, or nine holes, you can now choose between three, nine, and eighteen holes, which is grand. As I stated before, there are now six course options, nine holes from Wii Sports, and nine more new ones. As well as making the swings a bit more smooth, Wii MotionPlus has made it necessary to keep the club straight as you swing down, lest you slice it quite nastily. Still one of the best included games.

Bowling – there’s another familiar one. This time, you’re allowed to play a standard game, a 100-pin game, or a game called ‘Spin Control’, which is similar to a practice game they had in Wii Sports, where you have to control the ball’s spin to avoid hitting walls on the way to the pins, which is obviously great practice. Aside from a minor visual tweak or two, this game’s basically the same as always. Then again, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Power Cruising? You might be asking yourself what the hell that is, and that’d be fair, because I don’t know why they don’t just call it jet-skiing. It’s pretty hard to control at first, but it gets more fun as you get the hang of it. You hold the nunchuk and the wiimote horizontally, facing each other inward, like the grips of a jet-ski. You rotate your hands to the left or the right to turn sideways, or twist the controllers backwards for a speed boost, like accelerating on a motorcycle. You can either run through a course with rings, or go against a friend.

Canoeing is pretty fun, but one of the more inaccurate ones. Alright, maybe inaccurate isn’t as good of a way to describe it as less accurate is. You hold the wiimote vertically with both hands wrapped around, like you’re holding the oar in a canoe. From there you swing to the left and right like you’re paddling, pretty self-explanatory. The problem is sometimes it registers it as a paddle on the wrong side, thus causing you to go further off-course. You have a decent amount of play in it, you can do long or short strokes, you can do close in or farther out strokes to make you turn faster. You can either do a speed challenge, or you can vs. a friend.

Cycling is another one that requires the nunchuk. To pedal, shake the wiimote and nunchuk up and down alternately. You steer by holding the wiimote and nunchuk to one side or the other, and you can pedal faster for a boost. But be careful, because you can run out of energy if you pedal too much. The system they use is much like riding Epona in a Zelda game; if you use up all (3) of your “carrots”, you have to drift for a while to get them back. You start out in last place, 30th to be exact, which is quite a ways back. This game is actually more nuanced than I thought it was; it takes a good deal of strategizing and timing to get a good rank in a race. Oh, you can draft other bikers like in Mario Kart, too, so that helps.

Lastly, we have Air Sports, which includes Skydiving, Island Flyover, and Dogfight, which has nothing to do with Michael Vick, fortunately. I already detailed Skydiving for you, so Island Flyover is actually a pretty cool little game where you pilot a plane around Wuhu Island, looking for ! points (which are little icons you fly through to get information about that location). You hold the wiimote like a paper airplane and move it around to control it, with A shooting a gun, and B stopping the engine to allow you to float. You can hit things moderately without losing, but if you run into the ground, you’re ejected and you go back to where you hit. It’s actually kinda relaxing, and pretty cool to get an overhead view of the entire gameplay area. Dogfight is similar to Island Flyover in that you control an airplane with the same motions, except go against a friend, trying to pop his/her balloons before they can pop yours, or the time runs out. This one requires two MotionPlus peripherals.

So that’s all the games. There aren’t really any bad ones, but only about half (maybe a bit less) are truly unique and new, while the others are just fun. There are a bunch of little changes that enhance Wii Sports Resort quite a bit, too, though. For example, the layout of the games is more colorful and sleeker than in previous games, telling you which ones have new options or modes, which one is your most popular, stuff like that. If you hover over a game, it shows you whether it requires only the wiimote, or the wiimote and the nunchuk, which is hugely convenient. If you’re that extra bit of lazy, like I am, you’ll be happy to know that if you point the wiimote offscreen, you can use the D-pad to scroll through the options or games or whatever is on the screen, rather than having to bring the wiimote back up and point at what it is you want to click. Another neat little integration is the addition of Stamps – Nintendo’s version of achievements in this game. Before you begin any game, there will be a Stamps button in the top left corner of the screen. If you click it, you can see what Stamps are available for that game, which you’ve gotten, and/or how to get them. Graphically, Wii Sports Resort is much more slick than the previous two offerings, especially if you have the HD cables for the Wii. For new players, if you’re struggling in a game, often times a hint or two will pop up to make it easier on you, which is helpful. Also, if you hover over the sub-games, like Frisbee Golf inside of Frisbee, it will tell you how many players can play that game. Additionally, you don’t have to quit the game entirely to change your Mii anymore; they’ve included that option in the “Play Again?” screen after you complete a game. Obviously Wii Sports had a pretty awesome soundtrack, but Wii Sports Resort trumps it entirely in that department. The songs are more varied, more orchestral and high quality, and even the little interim, in-between music clips sound great. You can also re-calibrate Wii MotionPlus at any time by pausing the game and laying the wiimote down on a flat surface for about three seconds. Lastly, the crowd that watches you in this game is greatly enhanced, at least audibly. You can hear them saying individual phrases now, even if this means once in a while you’ll hear the same ones repeat. Little ideas like this make Wii Sports Resort easier and less cumbersome to interact with than Wii Sports and Wii Play.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t any problems with Wii Sports Resort. For example, there are a few games that will automatically start you in practice mode, no matter how many times you’ve played them. This can get really annoying, because literally, you can finish again and click Play Again, only to be forced to start in practice mode again. Why would you need to practice again after you’ve just finished playing that very game? Though this seems to stop if you turn the game off and come back to it, thankfully. A good way to deal with that would be to give you the option to go into practice mode by pressing minus. Surprisingly, after a day or two of playing this, I don’t have the strongest urge to go back and play more. I think after experiencing all of the games it has to offer, it loses some of the appeal. So you might not be dying to play this game the moment you get home from school or work, but at least you know it’s there for when you do get those urges. Overall, I think it’s fair to say that they’ve taken all of the good things about Wii Sports and amplified them, and for the most part gotten rid the kinks, resulting in a pretty decent step forward for Nintendo. For more detailed videos of the games and how to play them, visit the Wii Sports Resort official website.