Friday 12 May 2006
If you're still trying to get your head round just how Wii will work, hopefully theses videos of E3 attendees getting to grips with the remote should help.
Taken on the E3 show floor, we've got footage of gamers tackling the best Wii has to offer by waving the remote around to the following games:
WarioWare: Smooth Moves (AVI, 12.1MB) - right-click to download
Tackling the minigame mayhem by using the remote in a number of different ways. Just before the start of each game
Friday 12 May
Two pictures taken five minutes apart on the last morning of E3 tell some of the story of this year's event.
As soon as the doors opened this morning crowds ran to Nintendos stand to get their hands on Wii. Queues immediately built up with gamers eager to get to grips with Nintendo's new remote and sample the varied delights of WarioWare: Smooth Moves, Metroid Prime 3, Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and Super Mario Galaxy.
This being the first time Wii is playable it's
The basic premise with most Wii games is "simplicity." Thus, a trick-heavy, fully customizable Tony Hawk series may not be the best way to introduce people to the motion-sensing Wii wand. That's where Downhill Jam comes into play - it's a dead-simple, all-downhill racer that's easy enough to pick up, but may be hanging on to too many elements of the regular series.
So you're a punky skater kid rolling down the absurdly hilly streets of San Francisco. To steer, the wand is held sideways like a
Nintendo seems to be getting very forgetful in its old age. For after neglecting to mention to anyone about the existence of its classic version of the Wii controller, this shooter-shaped prototype turned up on the Big N's stand unannounced, unheralded and un-promoted too.
Locked in a case and seemingly fashioned from both the Wii-mote and the nunchaku controller, the device appears to have already been dubbed The Zapper after the old NES lightgun. And while we weren't able to get our hands on
The first Metroid Prime let you climb into Samus Aran's head and see her futuristic world in first-person. With Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, you'll be using both the wand and nunchaku attachment to work the heroine's metal-clad, alien-squashing arms.
The Corruption demo opens with a planet under siege. Once your new ship touches down, you find that this base is falling apart, and your space marine buddies are getting pounded. So it's into the fray you go, using the wand to aim and the
Ever since it first appeared on the GBA, the eclectic Wario Ware series has always made little sense. They're all collections of super-quick minigames that literally take seconds - so fast, in fact, they're called micro minigames. But now you've got the power of the Wii remote to contend with, and the 200 micro games have just become even more fabulously impossible.
The demo of Wario Ware: Smooth Moves strung together a series of events, each more maniacal than the last. What instantly sets
EA is calling their new control scheme for Madden NFL 07 FreeMotion control... but we call it awesome. The Wii's nunchaku controller gets put to heavy use in the newest iteration for the Madden series and it has to be grabbed to be believed.
A number of the movements of real football are aped by the FreeMotion system. When it's time to pass the ball, you have to use your right hand to first hike the ball by snapping your arms back and then throw by arcing your arm forward, mimicking a genuine
If there's one type of gaming that truly benefits from Wii's sensory-overload controller, it's the racing genre. Instead of holding the wand like a pointer, you use both hands to position it horizontally - like a steering wheel. Everyone, in theory, knows how to drive using a wheel. This makes Excite Truck all the easier to play, and its accessibility is only enhanced by its amazing simplicity.
For E3, Nintendo had two levels to try out, one tropical and another an arid desert. Regardless of
As demonstrated by Nintendo main man Shigeru Miyamoto himself on the stage of Nintendo's pre-E3 conference, Wii Sports is the brightly-coloured multiplayer, multi-event title designed to entice lapsed or new gamers into getting to grips with Nintendo's new console.
Incorporating golf, baseball and tennis, the gameplay in Wii Sports has been kept deliberately simple so that players can use just the Wii-mote and not bother with the nunchaku part of the controller. So in the tennis game, for
Wii has barely been fully unveiled and we've already got a brand new Mario game to salivate over. Super Mario Galaxy uses both the pointer and the nunchaku attachment to create a mixture of classic, 3D platforming and brand-new ways to interact with Mario's colorful, outer-space world.
Running, jumping and butt-stomping all handle just like 2002's Super Mario Sunshine - that is to say, the analog control stick and normal buttons are used. The pointer, however, lets you directly affect items
