Wii Play

 

    Wii Sports pretty much cemented its legacy from the moment it came out, being the pack-in for the console and being instantly understandable to everyone that played it. Naturally, people wanted more of it, and Nintendo immediately followed up on it, kind of. Another launch title for the Wii in everywhere but the US, Wii Play was another simple minigame collection, albeit with a different focus. While Wii Sports obviously focused on sports, something that people that didn't play video games would more or less know how to jump into, Wii Play feels like it was a way to ease that same audience into more typical video game design language, with slightly more abstract games that mostly focused on the Wii Remote's pointing functionality. To sweeten the deal, it came bundled with a Wii Remote, which was normally forty dollars by itself, leaving the de facto price of Wii Play to be ten bucks. The difference is, I think most of Wii Play isn't anywhere near as substantial as Wii Sports.
    Keyword being most of, and I'll describe the exceptions in deal when I get to them, but I'll quickly summarize the games I don't have much to say about. Shooting Range is a short throwback to NES Zapper games like Duck Hunt and Hogan's Alley, containing five short waves where you shoot down balloons, targets, clay pigeons, cans and UFOs, with some ducks in there as an optional target. It's fine enough, but it's over very quickly and doesn't have any sort of variance with repeated visits. Find Mii simply tasks you with finding certain Miis amidst a crowd, using the Miis you created to populate every level; it's longer and more varied than Shooting Range, but it's also nothing special in the slightest. Table Tennis is a simple rally back and forth across a ping-pong table, and it makes me wonder how many people swung the Wii Remote at this point, confused that it didn't work like Tennis in Wii Sports.
    Pose Mii is the first game to shake things up in any significant way, being that on top of using the A and B buttons to switch between poses, you also have to twist the Wii Remote to fit your Mii into the right angle of the bubbles falling. It can get pretty hectic as it goes on, but is overall just okay. Laser Hockey is the point where a lot of people reviewing this game would say it's just Pong, but that's where they're wrong, because I'm enough of a game history nut to know it's actually just Hockey for the Fairchild Channel F. Unlike Pong, you can rotate the paddle and move it in all four directions, but it doesn't change the fact that I've had to talk about two different games in here that are some variant of tennis. Billiards is the first sort of in-depth game in the collection, being that it's a straightforward game of pool, and works about as well as you'd expect it to. You angle the shot, line up the cue stick, pull back and watch it go; it controls really well, especially considering a lot of Wii games surprisingly had trouble with any forward and back motion.
    Fishing isn't gonna win any prizes among the storied history of fishing minigames, but it's executed decently enough. You sit by a lake and catch paper fish within a time limit, each type of fish being worth a different point value, with bonus points awarded for catching specific fish the game tells you to. It's alright, but it's worth noting that the small fry fish are the most entitled jerks in the history of gaming, constantly gravitating to your hook even though catching one makes you lose fifty points. Charge is the most out of place game in the entire collection, being that it doesn't use the pointing functionality at all, but rather you have to tilt the Wii Remote forward, left and right to steer a knitted cow headlong into scarecrows. It's the most throwaway game out of the bunch, being that there's only one stage, and the only replay value comes from trying to get a better time.
    So far, while most of these games play alright, most of them wouldn't warrant spending more than a few minutes on them. Then all of the sudden, Tanks appears, far and away the most in-depth and challenging game of the bunch. It's the only game to use the Nunchuk, and it's a methodical top-down shooter that takes inspiration from Combat on the Atari 2600, having you control a toy tank shooting at other toy tanks. Considering Wii Play's casual focus, Tanks is surprisingly pretty murderously difficult, with one hundred stages to complete and it only giving you so many lives, and if you lose all of them, you get sent back to the beginning. It makes for a pretty awesome challenge, especially with how the tanks you face off against all having unique properties, and the movement of the tanks being slow and methodical. It's easy to understand why this is the most beloved game of the bunch, even getting an indie spiritual successor in the form of Wee Tanks (ha), and I agree wholeheartedly that this is the game with the most value.
    That, however, is about it for Wii Play. There's not really much else to it aside from the multiplayer, where you compete against a friend to get a higher score with some changes to the game rules to accommodate, but it's a bit perplexing that it only allows for two players. It was never intended to be more than a simple demonstration of the Wii Remote, much like Wii Sports, but I think the fact that it wasn't bundled in with the console resulted in it being held to far more scrutiny back in the day. Personally, all of it functions as intended and has that Nintendo level of polish you'd expect, but the simplicity is a bit of a detriment, with a lot of the games not having much going on. That being said, Tanks alone makes it worth trying out if you somehow haven't already, and you can find the game for dirt cheap most places, so there's no harm in trying it if you want.