Swords, skis, horses: are Wii having fun yet?

The Nintendo Wii continues to be the world’s best-selling video-game console, with market-research firm NPD Group putting the number sold in Canada at 813,000. As game developers and publishers rush to get in on the action, a host of concepts have been adapted for the innovative Wii remote and Nunchuk controllers—to varying degrees of success.

Because you can wield the remote like a sword, it’s no surprise that slashing games have been released for the Wii. Koei’s Samurai Warriors: Katana (rated teen) is a first-person experience in which you take on roles—soldier, swordsman, ninja—in feudal Japan. It’s a middling effort, unfortunately: it gives you the chance to slice the air with the remote as if you were swinging a sword, but doesn’t provide any other gameplay. Even the minor strategic element is slight.

Ninja Reflex, from Electronic Arts (rated everyone 10+), makes better use of the Asian martial-arts theme. It’s essentially a collection of mini games that test how well players can throw shuriken at invading ninjas or catch fish swimming through a lily-pad-covered pond, or snatch flies from the air using a pair of chopsticks. The latter task only serves to bring back memories of The Karate Kid, which isn’t a good thing. While Ninja Reflex tries to provide a story of sorts to frame the mini games, there really isn’t one. They probably shouldn’t have bothered.

Another common genre of game that developers have seized upon is sports games, inspired to a large degree by the success of Nintendo’s own Wii Sports, which helped the console establish itself. Winter Sports: The Ultimate Challenge (Conspiracy Entertainment, rated everyone) packages a host of activities, from ski jump and cross-country skiing to figure skating and curling, none of them very compelling. You can also curl and figure skate in Hudson’s Deca Sports (rated everyone), which mixes winter sports with summer ones such as badminton and beach volleyball. The problem is that the movements expected of players are at best repetitive and boring, and at worst clumsy and ineffective. Waving the Wii remote back and forth in a bizarre simulation of sweeping, for example, isn’t fun at all.

Sega’s take on sports with Mario & Sonic at the Olympic Games (rated everyone) is a little more interesting. You don’t get to run Mario and Sonic through all the Summer Olympic sports, but you can compete—against the computer or friends—in a variety of events. While these Wii Olympics are more fun than the experiences provided by Winter Sports or Deca Sports, they are also very difficult. The triple jump, for example, requires split-second timing in moving the Wii remote up and down, and is not very forgiving. Neither is skeet shooting, which is maddeningly difficult. So much for the Wii being a console for the whole family.

If I was going to come up with a category for Atari’s My Horse & Me (rated everyone), it would have to be bizarre. I don’t know who came up with the idea of a Wii game in which you canter around on a horse, progressing to show jumping with your favourite equine, but I wouldn’t even get this for a seven-year-old girl who was obsessed with horses. The controls are uninspired, the gameplay is ridiculous, and the graphics are comical.

The best of the recent Wii bunch is Fishing Master (Hudson, rated everyone). As a novice fisher, you visit a variety of environments in Japan and try to hook a number of species of fish. The movements required are intuitive: you cast using the Wii remote, and when you’ve hooked a fish you reel it in by jigging the Nunchuk. The experience is not unlike being on a river at dawn.

While the Wii is in more households than any other latest-generation gaming system, Wii games aren’t selling nearly as well as those made for competing systems. Nintendo seems to be the only publisher selling lots of Wii games, and that could be because it has such valuable brands in Zelda and Mario, and the newly released Wii Fit (more on that in an upcoming column). Most of the games being developed by other publishers simply aren’t providing consumers with enough reasons to play.