“Sports Champions” is a great missed opportunity for Sony. Bundled with the new PlayStation Move controller, like “Wii Sports” with the Wii, “Sports Champions” could have been the perfect showcase to demonstrate the Move’s technical superiority over the Wii Remote. Instead, the game seems determined to ignore its considerable hardware advantages and focus on retreading “Wii Sports.” It’s like driving a Ferrari with a speed governor. What’s the point?
Too bad, because the Move is a really neat pice of technology. Combining the Wii Remote’s internal accelerometers with a camera in front of your TV to track the Move controller’s movement through 3-D space, this system can measure not only that you’re moving left or right, but exactly how far. So the “Sports Champions” version of ping-pong, which was fun but stilted in “Wii Sports Resort,” should be a completely freeform experience, just like playing the real game, right? “Sports Champions’ ” table tennis at least gives you the freedom to choose forehand or backhand, but still relies on arcadey shortcuts, like on-screen indicators of when you can slam an “on fire” shot. Shouldn’t we be able to hit the ball hard when we think it makes sense?
Or take swordfighting, a blast in “Wii Sports Resort” apart from the jarring fact that you had to press a button to let the game know you were using your sword to block. No different in “Sports Champions’ ” Gladiator game, a sword-and-shield fighting mode that requires you to hold down a button and then thrust your arm forward if you want to slam your opponent with your shield. With technology like the Move’s, these Wii-riffic workarounds should be a thing of the past.
“Sports Champions” offers credible knockoffs of “Wii Sports Resort’s” archery and Frisbee modes that will be fun if you’ve never played them on Nintendo’s ubiquitous white machine, and, in one area, at least, the game does Nintendo one better. That area would be bocce, also known as That Game Old Men in the Park Play. I don’t know why the makers of “Sports Champions” chose bocce to give the video game treatment to, but it’s an inspired choice. Like a plein-air shuffleboard, the game has you toss a ball on the ground, and then take turns with an opponent trying to get your colored bocce balls closest to the first ball, knocking your opponent’s balls out of the way if you have the skill. There’s nothing to suggest this slow-burn delight couldn’t have been accomplished on the Wii, but it goes to prove the adage that hardware is only as good as the software it runs.
