If there’s one genre that the Wii is tailor-made for, it’s sports games. If there’s a second, it’s fighting games. We’ve seen a lot of the first, but very few of the second.
One of my favorite modern arcade games is a boxing simulator, in which you take hold of boxing gloves with electronics in them, and cameras let you duck and dodge in a somewhat realistic manner while you punch out your virtual opponent. If one of the big goals of gaming is fantasy realization, than this is one of the big fantasies that most young men have: fighting and defeating a comparable opponent. But many of us are out of shape, or just don’t want to have black eyes from stepping into a real ring. Meanwhile, more dangerous fantasies involving swordplay are just out of the question outside of joining the SCA.
The Wii, with its motion sensitive controls, should be the perfect console to take these fantasies and let people experience them…except that so far, it really hasn’t. The Wii only has 2 games which feature any form of boxing: Wii Sports, which, while it has a boxing game, it isn’t very deep or playable, and Bully, which sort of has a boxing/pugilist minigame, but it’s not a fully fleshed out boxing experience. Nintendo’s biggest fighting game, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, has no significant motion controls whatsoever. There is apparently one action game that has realistic swordfighting, “No More Heroes”, and I plan on getting that today and reviewing it shortly.
But in the meantime, I have to wonder if Nintendo really gets what it has in its hands with the Wii. Sure, they have this amazing and affordable VR-ish system that every consumer can buy, but they seem to be actively discouraging games that make use of it for realizing fantasies much more controversial than cooking pancakes (see Cooking Mama.) Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, apparently won’t have realistic lightsaber combat, apparently because Nintendo didn’t want kids to be engaging in realistic swordplay. This design decision eliminated the only reason I would have bought the game for the Wii rather than the XBox 360, so nice going, Nintendo.
The point is, the Wii’s big comparative advantage over its competitors is the motion controls, and where the motion controls are used correctly, it’s a lot more fun to, say, punch the air rather than flicking up on a joystick. That’s why I bought Bully: SE for Wii rather than for XBox 360. It’s not going to compete in the graphics or computational depth front any time soon, so if it wants to fight for multiplatform games, Nintendo has to let its developers make their games as close to a form of cheap virtual reality gaming as they can. Otherwise, everyone will go to the XBox 360 for the better graphics–or worse, when the XBox 360 motion control remote comes out this December, they’ll just switch to the 360 for everything.
