Posted on August 5, 2009 - by dirtymitten

Wii Sports: Resort is the bees knees

Last week, for a couple days, it was so amazingly hot that I holed up in my apartment with my lady friend, taking turns playing Wii Sports: Resort’s jet-ski game. While she played, I held a fan on her, and spritzed her with a nozzled water bottle.

It cooled us off right quick.

The game is great, for the most part. Sword-fights are by far my favorite aspect of the game, as wielding a stick in space is one of the best things I know how to do. The controls are smooth, intuitive, and similar to the real-world in many respects.

There are some games that don’t appeal to me – basketball, chiefly, and the lack of balance-board controls are a bummer. Still, the Wii MotionPlus adapter is so sensitive, you can literally tilt it by fractions of degrees and see the effect on-screen.

At first, there was too much sensitivity, but I found a setting in-game that allowed me to remove IR fine-tuning from the control, rendering the controller equally sensitive no matter the direction it is pointed. Great feature.

Row-boating is fun with more than one person, table-tennis is fantastic, but not necessarily as realistic as it could be, and the dog-fights are great. In fact, the flying in this game is a really wonderful alignment of ergonomic flexibility and real-world object oriented controlling. It’d be nice if there was an option, though, to use the remote like a flight stick, instead of holding the remote like a paper plane.

In all, it’s a must-have game, full of surprises and additional games. With a second Wii MotionPlus, the game will run most people about $75, after taxes (Oregonians pay $49.99 for the game and $18.99 for the 2nd MotionPlus).

Go get it, though you may want to wait until you don’t want to go outside, as I’m sure it’s a nice reprieve from the bad-weather blues.