If you’re buying a Wii MotionPlus controller anyway, you might as well spend the extra $10 to get “Wii Play: Motion.” That’s really the nicest thing that can be said about “Wii Play: Motion,” easily the weakest of Nintendo’s otherwise impressive lineup of Wii minigame collections. Though it is bundled with a MotionPlus controller ($40 on its own), which is capable of more exact motion tracking than the regular Wii Remote, the game rarely puts that technology to interesting use, and before long you will move on to employing your additional controller in the superior multiplayer action of MotionPlus games like “Wii Sports Resort.”
The stated goal of the Wii (other than to sell lots of them) was to get you off your couch, move the action into real space, and blur the line between what’s happening on-screen and in your living room. The game that comes closest, after all these years, to meeting this goal, is “Spooky Search,” in which characters on your TV point at ghosts in your room and you “search” around you with the Wii Remote, which emits different tones to let you know how hot or cold you are. The Wii Remote beeps when pointed directly at the ghost, and you wrangle it back to a holding tank on your TV. Some ghosts take multiple people to find and wrangle back, and it’s easy to imagine kids having a blast imagining the room is filled with invisible ghosts.
Another winner is a rock-skipping minigame, a sort of inversion of “Wii Sports Resort’s” excellent Frisbee golf. It may sound boring, but novelty “stones” like a lightning bolt and boomerang, along with detailed analysis of your throwing form, keep things interesting.
| ‘Wii Play: Motion’ |
| » System: Wii |
| » Price: $49.99 |
| » Rating: 2 out of 5 stars |
Also fun is a manic trampoline game in which you and a friend are attached to each other and turn your controllers to guide your bounces toward all manner of ridiculous power-ups.
Most of the rest of the minigames feel an awful lot like rejects from “Wii Party” and the first “Wii Play.” Bizarre controls hinder a racing game, a “Duck Hunt” homage induces motion sickness, and a Whac-A-Mole rip-off is done in by unbalanced scoring, so people can perform equally well but end up with way different scores.
One would hope that in the leadup to company’s next console, the Wii U, Nintendo would release a sort of multiplayer greatest-hits package taking the best from “Wii Sports,” “Wii Play,” etc. Instead we get a mostly shallow cash-in, with only one game that would make a greatest-hits cut.
