DL'06 - MADDEN NFL'07 & ELEBITS ON THE NINTENDO WII
The way I see it, the Nintendo Wii versions of Madden NFL '07 and Elebits are really the only games left that I haven't talked about that should be of huge interest to anyone that aren't on the market as of yet, so I'll wrap up my oft-delayed coverage of Digital Life '06 with my impressions of both titles. Before I get to talking about the games themselves, I feel that I need to talk about the Wii and it's set up at the show.
In attending Digital Life, one of the things I hoped to do was to see if many of the reservations I had about the Wii were valid, or if I was just being my usual overly pessimistic self. Let's take a look at exactly what those concerns are;
- I worry that the system is not designed to be used in the real world. By this I mean that while everything seems to work well when Nintendo can set up the test environment just right, but how well will the system work when confronted with the infinite variations of gamers homes - what happens when everything is not optimal?
- With the controller essentially being 2 separate pieces, how would the controller feel and work when there wasn't something centering and steadying the controls? On any other system, you hold the controller in both hands and the center of the controller essentially stabilizes it in your hands. What happens when you take that away?
- With all the talk about how the system handles in sunlight, how would the pointer perform? Would it be easy to use at any range?
- With the odd shape of the Wiimote, will some games just feel "wrong" when played with it.
- While the Wii controls may work wonderfully for games that were designed with them in mind, how will games that are ports of existing console games hold up?
Now that we've gotten that aside, let me say this - my experiences with the Wii at Digital Life did not get rid of any of those fears - and in the case of the pointer, served to only make my fears worse. Simply put, in both Madden and Elebits, the pointer simply did not work. I don't know if it was the way the floor was set up, the fact that there were quite a few units in close proximity to one another or a calibration problem, but you simply could not get the pointer to remain still or point where you wanted it to half of the time - and by remain still, I don't just mean minor shaking - the thing was bouncing all over the screen.
It's this very problem that made Elebits completely unplayable on the day I attended the show. The game requires you to point the controller at objects on screen, and when even something as simple as that becomes overly frustrating, it's just not worth it. On thursday, there were two Elebits stations, and they were empty just about every time I walked by. The only thing I can say that's positive about the game was that in talking with a few people who attended the last day of the show, I was told that there were huge lined to try Elebits, so obviously the problem must have been fixed in some form.
Madden didn't make as much use of the pointer, so I was able to actually give the game a pretty solid run through. The first thing that strikes you about the Wii version of Madden NFL'07 is the fact that it basically looks exactly like the "current-gen" football games, but without many of the bells and whistles we've come to expect from the series - more than one person commented that there really wasn't much next-gen about the experience other than the control scheme. This is where the problem came in.
If the entire idea behind the Wii is to make games more accessible and simple to pick up, then Madden '07 is a prime example of a developer not "getting it" - the controls not only feel awkward, but actually require more coordination and special attention than other versions of the game, and the shape of the Wiimote certainly doesn't help the matter any. Simply put, you spend more time fighting the control scheme than you do actually paying attention to what's happening on the screen. While the gameplay mechanics may become second nature as time goes on, I get the feeling most gamers will just decide to stick with a different version of the game. In short, It felt as if Electronic Arts took the Gamecube version of Madden and tried to add some Wii specific features to it - something that will probably be commonplace at least early in the Wii's lifespan.
It really is a shame that Nintendo chose to not make an appearance at the show as the third party publishers really didn't do much to give attendees a positive first experience with the Wii - if anything, they made it feel more like the gimmick many of the systems critics make it out to be.
Posted by nylatenite
at 9:37 PM EST
