Among my holiday haul is a title I've meant to try out for a good part of 2008: Dragon Quest Swords. My ever-resourceful mother-in-law found it for me this Christmas, and so in-between continuing to chip away at Rune Factory 2's insane continual-play value and trying to finally complete Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World (which my wife and I are playing together, so snagging large-enough blocks of time can be a problem), I gave the highly motion-sensitive title a spin.
One thing that Swords does pretty well is expose the Remote's limitations. Its first-person action battle system has you slashing away with the Remote; it detects whether you are slashing horizontally, vertically, or somewhere in-between and centers your slash either on the center of the screen (default) or on a point you've selected by clicking somewhere with the Remote's pointer, which becomes important for slashing lines of enemies at once at various points on the screen. Holding B will throw up a pointer-based shield for defending against incoming attacks. It all seemed a bit awkward at first, and it definitely reminds me that the Remote is limited in its motion-sensing capabilities, but once I got over the initial curve I found it was pretty fun.
I last played last night, going through the second area. At the end of the road was a golem throwing punches that I was supposed to deflect with my shield, though I failed to do so effectively enough to stay alive that first time 'round. I couldn't help but smile even in my failure; here was another example of a game that you could really only get on Wii, making me do something I'd never really done before, and steadily building on its simple mechanics in novel and eventually challenging ways like any good game should. (I should add, though, that nasty rumors you've heard about navigating around town—done in first person with the d-pad on the Remote—being horrible are absolutely true.)
I don't yet know if the whole package is going to keep me smiling, but this first hour or so with the game has been fun. For the $20 clearance-rack price it was acquired for, I think Swords'll be a net win.
I last played last night, going through the second area. At the end of the road was a golem throwing punches that I was supposed to deflect with my shield, though I failed to do so effectively enough to stay alive that first time 'round. I couldn't help but smile even in my failure; here was another example of a game that you could really only get on Wii, making me do something I'd never really done before, and steadily building on its simple mechanics in novel and eventually challenging ways like any good game should. (I should add, though, that nasty rumors you've heard about navigating around town—done in first person with the d-pad on the Remote—being horrible are absolutely true.)
I don't yet know if the whole package is going to keep me smiling, but this first hour or so with the game has been fun. For the $20 clearance-rack price it was acquired for, I think Swords'll be a net win.