Search This Blog

Monday, January 29, 2007

"Star Trek: Legacy" boldly goes ... eh, whatever

Proof positive that Nintendo has a lock on heavy-duty whimsy, "WarioWare: Smooth Moves" for Wii pretty much exemplifies what Wii is all about. Like "WarioWare" titles before it, "Smooth Moves" is a collection of "microgames," some 200 of them, actually, each using the system's crafty Wii-mote in totally exclusive ways: tilting, swinging, stabbing, swatting, balancing, mashing and manhandling the thing like no other controller ought to be handled. With it, you invoke in-game activities like sawing logs, thumb wrestling, picking noses (seriously), pumping iron, shaving and cranking.



It's a testament to the Wii-mote's wide-ranging motion-sensitive sensibilities, if nothing else -- also a fine example of its minute-motion precision, with most activities easily actuated within a forearm's radius of your starting position. If you ever snap your wriststrap and send the Wii-mote flying off to shatter the chandelier, that pretty much makes you a clumsy oaf and has nothing to do with the hardware. You probably shouldn't be handling power tools or small children, either.

In spite of the game's obvious content abundance, on the whole, it's too short because each game, delivered in thematic clusters, lasts but a couple of seconds. That doesn't exactly add up to hours of fresh gameplay.

Similarly, "Smooth Moves" sports only a token two-player mode (played from a single Wii-mote plus the nunchuk attachment for the second player, or by passing the Wii-mote around like a hot potato), which is short-lived, anticlimactic, offline only and feels completely like an ad hoc afterthought, though the game clearly begs for more "Wii Sports" -- or "Mario Party"-like interactivity with at least two players, ideally more, right out of the box.